Stop Land Grab at Beit Sahour

I just received word from Playgrounds for Palestine about an Israeli attempt to confiscate private and community land in Beit Sahour in the West Bank, including a park where one of their next playgrounds is to be built. I've whittled the information down to fall well within the green zone on congress.org's "impact meter," as follows:

As a supporter of Playgrounds for Palestine, I am disturbed by news of an Israeli land grab against the community of Beit Sahour in the West Bank. As described by town residents, Ha'aretz, Ma'an News, and other sources in recent days, Israeli soldiers and bulldozers arrived on February 10 at a family recreation park in Beit Sahour and declared it a closed military zone, for the stated purpose of building a watchtower. Included in this swath of land is the treasured Oush Grab Peace Park, which serves as a community space, park, and recreational facility where Palestinian families gather daily and was to be the site of one of PfP's next playgrounds. I urge you to call and write to Israeli officials to protest this action, call upon them to stop the construction of the watchtower, stop settler attacks on the park, and cease any idea of building a settlement on the site.

I've already sent this to Senator Specter and will shortly send it to my other representatives. The full text of the message from PfP is copied below. Although the original call to action comes from a Christian group, it should resonate with any humanist. 

From: Playgrounds for Palestine <contact@playgroundsforpalestine.org> Subject: CALL TO ACTION Date: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 5:19 PM. . . helping children reclaim their childhoods February 27, 2010 We are sending out this CALL TO ACTION to alert our supporters about a troubling development in the Oush Grab Peace Park, the site designated for a 2010 PfP playground installation. The Israeli military is trying to implement a decision to confiscate community and privately held property belonging to the community and families in the Palestinian Christian town of Beit Sahour. Included in this swath of land is the treasured Peace Park, which serves as a community space, park and recreational facility where Palestinian families gather daily and was to be the site of one of PfP's next playgrounds. We ask you to call and write to Israeli officials in order to protest this action, call upon them to stop the construction of the watchtower, prevent settlers from attacking the park, and cease any idea of building a settlement in the site. Follow the link and enter zip for to contact local congressmen - http://www.congress.org/communicate Call the Israeli ambassador 202 364 5500 or email info@washington.mfa.gov.il Email the Consulate General of the US, Jerusalem - uscongenjerusalem@state.gov Call the Israeli consulate in Philly 215 977 7600 Contact the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Near East Affairs - Jeffrey D Feltman 202 647 7209 Injustice in Beit SahourA Statement by Kairos Palestine (Jerusalem 20.03.2010) As described by town residents, Ha'aretz,Ma'an News, and other sources in recent days, Israeli soldiers and bulldozers arrived on February 10 at a family recreation park in Beit Sahour – a town slightly east of Bethlehem in the West Bank, and the site of the former army base Osh Grab, which was abandoned by the IDF in 2006 – and declared it a closed military zone. KAIROS Palestine condemns this action and calls upon churches worldwide to advocate for the Christians and all residents of Beit Sahour and intervene in the damage, present and projected, wrought upon their home. Since 1967, Beit Sahour, one of the last Christian majority towns in the West Bank, has repeatedly lost land to the Jerusalem municipality and to the nearby settlement of Har Homa. Much of the remaining land was occupied by an Israeli military base, Osh Grab. After the army evacuated the base in 2006, the Beit Sahour municipality regained control of the land – largely private plots and some public ones. (That said, all of the land remained part of what Israel calls Area C, keeping it under harsh regulation by the Israeli State.) The municipality renovated the public land, built a recreational park and playground – the "Peace Park" – and was planning to build a hospital as well. Over time, fanatical Jewish settler groups have often threatened to take over the site, protested there as part of their aggressive claim as its "true" owners, and even physically vandalized the park, as they did last month. As it stands, Israel's stated intention is to build a new watchtower: a troubling reassertion of a military presence in Beit Sahour. The other worry is that this could pave the way for a new settlement, which nearby settlers have been demanding for years. As Amira Hass writes in Ha'aretz, "The Beit Sahour residents have no reason to doubt either the settlers or the Har Homa neighborhood committee chairman, who declared that 'This could become a reality, just as Har Homa spilled beyond what was planned and expected.'" Either way, this new display of control on the part of the State – arriving with bulldozers, excavating the site around the park, prohibiting the entry of the Beit Sahour residents and various internationals who came to protest, declaring the land a closed military zone – is a grave affront. It is painful and unjust for some reasons of specific import to Christians (who form 80% of Beit Sahour); others are simply questions of humanity and legality, crucial for both Christians and Muslims. First, the park area lies between two sacred sites: "Shepherds Field" and the place, as told in the Bible, where Boaz fell in love with Ruth. These are places of immense spiritual significance, and the State's commandeering of the land is profoundly distressing. (As we wrote in the Kairos Document, "freedom of access to the holy places is denied under the pretext of security.") Second, the takeover is yet another example of the way Israeli occupation displaces us, divorces us from our basic rights of mobility and autonomy, and enforces a divisive view of human interaction that perverts the Word of God and the love and compassion it calls us to. We request the solidarity of churches in the international community: to support us, to intervene in this latest encroachment on Beit Sahour and prevent it from continuing, and to speak out against the occupation in all such instances. We ask individuals and communities worldwide to contact Israeli officials and condemn their actions, to write the mayor of Beit Sahour and express support, and engage in other such forms of outreach and network-building. As we make these requests, we quote again from the KAIROS Document itself to remind ourselves and each other of what is at stake and what we must call for: "Our connectedness to this land is a natural right. It is not an ideological or theological question only…[w]e suffer from the occupation of our land because we are Palestinians." And finally: "We also declare that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is a sin against God and humanity because it deprives the Palestinians of their basic human rights, bestowed by God…and distort [s] the divine image in the human beings living under both political and theological injustice." Please join KAIROS Palestine in condemning these oppressive actions in Beit Sahour and working to restore the justice that is both our calling and our right. We ask you to call and write to Israeli officials in order to protest this action, call upon them to stop the construction of the watchtower, prevent settlers from attacking the park, and cease any idea of building a settlement in the site. Please make appeals to: [Ehud Barak] Minister of Defense, Ministry of Defense, 37 Kaplan Street, Hakirya, Tel Aviv 61909, Israel Fax: +972 3 691 6940 Email: minister@mod.gov.il Salutation: Dear Minister Israeli Ambassador in your respective country Copy to: the Mayor of Beit SahourEmail: bsmuni@p-ol.com Kairos Palestine: http://www.kairospalestine.ps/ Email: Kalimatuna@gmail.com KAIROS Palestine is a group of Palestinian Christians who authored "A Moment of Truth" – Christian Palestinian's word to the world about the occupation of Palestine, an expression of hope and faith in God, and a call for solidarity in ending over six decades of oppression – and published it in 2009. From our board member, Nathan Dannison, more information – Here is a great background video re: the site:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ZaFwi6WBo&feature=player_embeddedand more background information from decolonizing architecture:http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/?page_id=428 Here are two articles regarding my non-violent protest and its result:http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=204315http://www.imemc.org/index.php?obj_id=53&story_id=56403 Here are some photographs of the event:http://picasaweb.google.com/dannison/BethlehemPart2#5233543371141960338 (scroll forward to see more) Here are my relevant blog entries:http://michigantopalestine.blogspot.com/2008/08/praying-for-childrens-hospital.htmlhttp://michigantopalestine.blogspot.com/2008/08/ush-ghrab-is-safe-again.html Here is some troubling information regarding the current state of affairs:http://michigantopalestine.blogspot.com/2008/08/ush-ghrab-is-safe-again.html Also – Photos of popular resistance including tearing down the apartheid fences in Bilinhttp://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//100219/ids_photos_wl/r1248158112.jpg/#photoViewer=/100219/481/4865168bfb7a4784947f920bbbd07b13 Beit Sahour: a new struggle by Ben White - 21 February 2010 11:49, The Newstatesmanhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/02/palestinian-israeli-settlers This message was sent from Playgrounds for Palestine, 132 Pennsylvania Ave, Yardley, pa 19067.

Review: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Today I finished reading this book by Robert Jay Lifton, originally published in 1961 and sometimes called the "bible" of the cult awareness movement.

By comparing the accounts of a number of people of varying backgrounds who were subjected to Maoist "thought reform" in the early Fifties, Lifton develops much insight into the processes and mechanisms by which coercive persuasion is attempted and sometimes accomplished, as well as some ideas about the possible motives of the reformers (including non-rational motives) and the kind of historical context that can give rise to such practices.

It was interesting to read about the personal backgrounds of some of the subjects and recognize similarities to elements of my own early life. This provided some insight into why I have had some susceptibility to totalism, as well as successful resistance to its most destructive potentialities. And I became quite engaged by the concluding discussion outlining his idea of "open personal change," as contrasted with the totalistic sort. This seemed very relevant to my own current struggle to find a comfortable balance between engagement and autonomy. I wish Lifton could have gone into greater detail on this topic; perhaps he's done so in subsequent writings.

I was also challenged by the fact that one of his Chinese subjects had come to the conclusion that the methods of thought reform were compatible with and rooted in Leninism, not a deviation from it as he'd assumed before studying Lenin. Although I'm no longer calling myself a Leninist, I'm still resistant to the notion that there's a continuity between Leninism and Stalinism. I'll have to look up the writing cited in the book so that I can make my own judgment.

Update 11 March: I skimmed through the book but couldn't find the citation from Lenin I'd thought I remembered — just an epigram attributed to him at the opening of the section on thought reform of Chinese intellectuals: "We must become engineers of the human soul." But when I try GoodSearching the Web for the source of this quote, I can't find it. Instead, I find the source for a similar statement by Stalin, in which he called writers "engineers of the human soul." On at least one occasion a representative of Stalin also used this expression at a conference, reportedly in reference to all cultural workers. So it appears the phrase is misattributed in Lifton's book.

Of course this doesn't explain why one of his subjects came to the conclusion he did, but it doesn't leave me much to go on; he may have simply been making an incorrect conflation of ideas that really are different.

It did occur to me a few years ago that the tension between the two sides of the democratic centralist formula — "freedom of discussion, unity in action" — would tend to create cognitive dissonance issues for any member of a Leninist group who finds timself in the minority; and I was forced to acknowledge the implications of this when I saw it discussed in Dennis Tourish's paper "Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism, and Cultism." In brief, even relatively loose versions of DC will put such people in the position of appearing to assent, if only by their silence, to positions they don't really hold, and this will produce in them a feeling of insincerity that will bother their conscience. There are two ways of resolving this: adapting to the majority's position inwardly (which may become an automatic habit if done repeatedly), or else leaving the group so as no longer to be bound by its discipline. This rather neatly explains why the one thing Leninist groups are derided for more often than cultism, is serial splintering.

But with all that said, this cognitive dissonance problem alone falls far short of being all the essential elements of thought reform. The other element treated as centrally important in Tourish's paper, ideological intransigence, he sees as more essential to Trotskyism than to Leninism. In fact a quote from Lenin that is sourced — and with which I happen to be acquainted because it appeared for years on the inside front cover of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, journal of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency to which I belonged 1986-92 — suggests a spirit quite contrary to that of thought reform:

All members of the party must begin to study, completely dispassionately and with utmost honesty, first the essence of the differences and second the course of the dispute in the party.... It is necessary to study both the one and the other, unfailingly demanding the most exact, printed documents, open to verification by all sides. Whoever believes things simply on someone else's say-so is a hopeless idiot, to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. -- "The Party Crisis," 19 January 1921.

The objection may be made that this quote refers to an inner-party struggle and doesn't necessarily apply to non-members. But if internal differences are regarded as legitimate and not necessarily the expression of "the bourgeoisie inside the party" as Maoist doctrine would have it, it's difficult to see how the same allowance would not be made for the views of non-members which may, after all, echo those that some members also hold.

Economics and Ideology — Redux

I have to wonder: do the commentaries on Marketplace have such a predominantly neoliberal tilt because of the producers' own bias? Or does it just reflect what they think their listeners want to hear? The latest is by one Susan Lee, who recently shared a stage with the Archbishop of Canterbury. She says this is because she has a degree in theology as well as one in economics, but she sounds indistinguishable from any capitalist apologist. On one side, she says Canterbury's (admittedly fuzzy) definition of an ethical economy is met by "capitalism in the U.S." Although she only speaks of capitalism in general subsequently, she thereby creates the impression that her arguments justify the particular choices made in this country, ignoring the evidence that different choices — choices not reflecting the priorities she argues for — actually produce better results in human terms. On the other side, she doesn't offer any coherent description of what Canterbury stands for, defining his position only by the assumptions of hers that he doesn't share. This results in what looks like a cartoonish caricature of whatever his real position might be. This is what I wrote in response on their comments page:

Mind-boggling. Lee speaks as if the United States had the world's only functioning economy. Can she really be unaware that most developed countries actually function better by human criteria — average longevity, infant mortality, illiteracy? And that these better-performing economies are based on different social choices, with less inequality of wealth and income? This is only logical since, as any economist should know, the more equally income is distributed the larger the proportion that will be invested in necessities rather than luxuries, with beneficial consequences for the species. And as any biologist knows, what nature ultimately cares about is not accumulation but reproduction. So if an economic system is based on democracy and transparency, the most productive individuals will be correctly identified and rewarded with greater reproductive opportunities, which is all the incentive anyone needs. For further discussion of these concepts, see the essay "Making the Right to a Job More Than a Slogan" on my blog Gondwanaland.

The last paragraph is responding in particular to the most overtly neoliberal part of Lee's commentary, where she accuses Canterbury of believing in "work without incentives, enterprise without income inequality, investment without market-rates of return." Where, in other words, she assumes implicitly that the only kinds of incentives possible are the kinds that exist under capitalism.

The Hunger Project Gets Free Ride on The World

PRI's The World had a story today about a family that sold their home and gave half the proceeds to The Hunger Project. THP got a lot of good press without any mention of its controversial nature. I sent The World this letter:

Ironic that in the same program in which you reported in such detail on the cultlike practices of the Pakistani Taliban, you also gave free, unrebutted advertising for another cult-related group, The Hunger Project. THP was founded by Werner Erhard of Erhard Seminars Training (est) and several of his followers, and did not end (formal) ties to that group 'til 1991. It has quite recently been accused of trying to suppress critical information about itself. See, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Project#Public_criticism. I also find it objectionable that those you interviewed, in praising THP's stated emphasis on helping people sustainably overcome hunger, spoke as if it were unique in this respect. Even if it is true that this is really their practice now (and they've been accused of misrepresenting their activities in the past), they are hardly alone in this. To name just one example, Oxfam is also known for emphasizing development aid over handouts.

You can write them at theworld@pri.org.

Quote of the Week

"In the bible God kills every species on Earth except for the creatures in Noah's ark because he was angry with man. That's a god that needs a hug." — Erik Buchanan on the Philadelphia-area Atheist Meetup Message Board

From Slate: Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?

Forwarded from Slate to the Philly Socialists list:

Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians?
Here are two possibilities, neither of them flattering.
By Ben Ehrenreich
Posted Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010, at 1:39 PM ET

By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti, something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I'm not talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called "looting," which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I'm talking about the U.S. relief effort.

For two days after the quake, despite almost unimaginable destruction, there were reasons to be optimistic. With a few notable exceptions — Pat Robertson and David Brooks among them — Americans reacted with extraordinary and unhesitating generosity of spirit and of purse. Port-au-Prince is not much farther from Washington, D.C., than, say, New Orleans, and the current president of the United States, unlike his predecessor, was quick to react to catastrophe. Taking advantage of "our unique capacity to project power around the world," President Barack Obama pledged abundant aid and 10,000 troops.

Troops? Port-au-Prince had been leveled by an earthquake, not a barbarian invasion, but, OK, troops. Maybe they could put down their rifles and, you know, carry stuff, make themselves useful. At least they could get there soon: The naval base at Guantanamo was barely 200 miles away.

The Cubans, at least, would show up quickly. It wasn't until Friday, three days after the quake, that the "supercarrier" USS Carl Vinson, arrived — and promptly ran out of supplies. "We have communications, we have some command and control, but we don't have much relief supplies to offer," admitted Rear Adm. Ted Branch. So what were they doing there?

"Command and control" turned out to be the key words. The U.S. military did what the U.S. military does. Like a slow-witted, fearful giant, it built a wall around itself, commandeering the Port-au-Prince airport and constructing a mini-Green Zone. As thousands of tons of desperately needed food, water, and medical supplies piled up behind the airport fences — and thousands of corpses piled up outside them — Defense Secretary Robert Gates ruled out the possibility of using American aircraft to airdrop supplies: "An airdrop is simply going to lead to riots," he said. The military's first priority was to build a "structure for distribution" and "to provide security." (Four days and many deaths later, the United States began airdropping aid.)

The TV networks and major papers gamely played along. Forget hunger, dehydration, gangrene, septicemia — the real concern was "the security situation," the possibility of chaos, violence, looting. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of on-the-ground accounts from people who did not have to answer to editors described Haitians taking care of one another, digging through rubble with their bare hands, caring for injured loved ones — and strangers — in the absence of outside help. Even the evidence of "looting" documented something that looked more like mutual aid: The photograph that accompanied a Sunday New York Times article reporting "pockets of violence and anarchy" showed men standing atop the ruins of a store, tossing supplies to the gathered crowd.

The guiding assumption, though, was that Haitian society was on the very edge of dissolving into savagery. Suffering from "progress-resistant cultural influences" (that's David Brooks finding a polite way to call black people primitive), Haitians were expected to devour one another and, like wounded dogs, to snap at the hands that fed them. As much as any logistical bottleneck, the mania for security slowed the distribution of aid.

Air traffic control in the Haitian capital was outsourced to an Air Force base in Florida, which, not surprisingly, gave priority to its own pilots. While the military flew in troops and equipment, planes bearing supplies for the Red Cross, the World Food Program, and Doctors Without Borders were rerouted to Santo Domingo in neighboring Dominican Republic. Aid flights from Mexico, Russia, and France were refused permission to land. On Monday, the British Daily Telegraph reported, the French minister in charge of humanitarian aid admitted he had been involved in a "scuffle" with a U.S. commander in the airport's control tower. According to the Telegraph, it took the intervention of the United Nations for the United States to agree to prioritize humanitarian flights over military deliveries.

Meanwhile, much of the aid that was arriving remained at the airport. Haitians watched American helicopters fly over the capital, commanding and controlling, but no aid at all was being distributed in most of the city. On Tuesday, a doctor at a field hospital within site of the runways complained that five to 10 patients were dying each day for lack of the most basic medical necessities. "We can look at the supplies sitting there," Alphonse Edward told Britain's Channel 4 News.

The much-feared descent into anarchy stubbornly refused to materialize. "It is calm at this time," Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, admitted to the AP on Monday. "Those who live and work here tell me that the level of violence that we see right now is below pre-earthquake levels." He announced that four — four, in a city of more than 2 million — aid distribution points had been set up on the sixth day of the crisis.

So what happened? Why the mad rush to command and control, with all its ultimately murderous consequences? Why the paranoid focus on security above saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can't solve a humanitarian problem by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that "my national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses," Haiti's fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with keeping Haitian citizens alive.

This leaves the more disturbing question of why the Obama administration chose to respond as if they were there to confront an insurgency, rather than to clear rubble and distribute antibiotics and MREs. The beginning of an answer can be found in what Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell, calls "elite panic" — the conviction of the powerful that their own Hobbesian corporate ethic is innate in all of us, that in the absence of centralized authority, only cannibalism can reign.

But the danger of hunger-crazed mobs never came up after the 2004 Pacific tsunami, and no one mentions security when tornados and floods wipe out swaths of the American Midwest. This suggests two possibilities, neither of them flattering. The first is that the administration had strategic reasons for sending 10,000 troops that had little to do with disaster relief. This is the explanation favored by the Latin American left and, given the United States' history of invasion and occupation in Haiti (and in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and Nicaragua and Grenada and Panama), it is difficult to dismiss. Only time will tell what "reconstruction" means.

Another answer lies closer to home. New Orleans and Port-au-Prince have one obvious thing in common: The majority of both cities' residents are black and poor. White people who are not poor have been known, when confronted with black people who are, to start locking their car doors and muttering about their security. It doesn't matter what color our president is. Even when it is ostensibly doing good, the U.S. government can be racist, and, in an entirely civil and bureaucratic fashion, savagely cruel.

Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist and novelist based in Los Angeles, is the author of The Suitors. He reported from Haiti in 2006 for L.A. Weekly.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2242078/

Don't Think of an Elephant!

The guest at this month's PhACT meeting was Kenneth Biddle of the Paranormal Investigators and Research Association, who spoke on the topic ""Orbs or Dust? A Practical Guide to False Positives." When the role of expectations in alleged "electronic voice phenomena" came up, I was reminded of what I thought I heard in a news segment years ago, and led to wonder if I'd heard the same thing others had. So I GoodSearched for "Mr. Ed" plus "satanic message," and what I saw on the TV Acres site led me to write them the following:

On your page about Mr. Ed you write, "It's not true that if you play the MISTER ED theme song backwards you will hear a satanic message." This is actually a rather nonsensical statement on your part. The only reason you're mentioning it is that some people have heard a satanic message there. I'm one of those people, so I know your statement is untrue as applied to myself. It was probably twenty years ago, and I heard it in a TV news segment about a couple of Christian radio DJs who said they'd discovered it unexpectedly while playing various TV themes backward. When they played it for the news show, it sounded to me like, "Someone sung this song for Satan." Now, I'll certainly allow that I may have heard this only because I'd been "primed" for it by the news story (as the DJs may have been primed by stories about "backward masking" in heavy metal). Nonetheless, I did hear it — and presumably would hear it again, given the opportunity — so your statement is false. Perhaps I'm meant to take your statement only as meaning that, if I do hear such a message, it's my own imagination. This seems highly likely, but I wouldn't need you to tell me that — and if I were the kind of person who would, I probably wouldn't believe you anyway. In fact, by mentioning this rumor without explaining how such priming works, you are likely causing more people, rather than fewer, to believe it. The people disinclined to believe would already disbelieve, while those inclined to believe might be hearing this story for the first time, and ask themselves how you can be so sure that it isn't true. (After all, how can you?) Some may even go to the trouble of finding such a backward recording or making their own and, having had the idea put in their heads by you, hear exactly that. Telling people who've given credence to such rumors to "grow up" will not impress them. They'll probably think you're naive (even a "dupe of Satan") in dismissing something like this as ridiculous. If you really want to promote critical thinking, you'll have to get a better handle on the psychology of belief than you seem to have at present.

Funds Sought for Progressive Relief Team to Haiti

This message just received from the Philly Socialists list:

Folk, we need your help in raising funds for the Progressive Relief team. Please
ask any and everyone to assist with donations sent via mail to IFCO/GHT 418
145th Street, New York, New York 10031. The Interreligious Foundation of
Community Organizations is tax exempt 501c3. The organization is best known for
one of its groups- Pastors for Peace.

I tried to set up a pay pal
account but have been unsuccessful with getting it to function. I will ask IFCO
for help on Monday. If we can get it functioning I will send information.

One of our Progressive Medical Relief Teams is entering Haiti now. The
others are soon off. The group from Boston, New York and Philadelphia take off
this coming week with 12 medical personnel (doctors, herbalist, nurses). The
group is accompanied by a 3 member New York radio team for immedate news from
the ground.

We need approximately $25,000 for the team, medical
suppplies and survival kits. If you have medical supplies or can help secure
survivl kits call Pierre Leroy at 845-679-7320 or email:
pierre_leroy2003@yahoo.com or pierre@hatiansupportproject.org.

Colia L.
Clark
Alan Benjamin
Co-Coordinators
Guadeloupe Haiti Tour USA
International Commission of Inquiry On Haiti 2009

Romanticism Cuts Across Ideologies

While GoodSearching for "African People's Socialist party" plus "cult" (the group is attempting to organize in my neighborhood), I encountered a post titled "Godard's Judgment" on David R. Adler's blog. In the course of reviewing the Godard film Weekend, he quotes another blogger about what he calls

...the extraordinary romantic hostility to 'bourgeois' society that Marxism projects. Hatred of 'bourgeois' rights, 'bourgeois' democracy, 'bourgeois' morality, 'bourgeois' art, the 'bourgeois' family (and on and on), has fuelled hatred toward decent if prosaic societies and institutions and indulgence or worse toward appalling societies and institutions. And all in the name and the spirit of being 'anti-capitalist' or 'anti-bourgeois'.

I responded with this comment:

I haven't seen the film, but I think the quote from "Why I Am Not a Marxist" makes an incorrect imputation. Marx himself never advocated totalitarianism, while many non-Marxists (e.g., some liberals and anarchists) have apologized for it. Some professed Marxists have also done so, but others have unambiguously denounced it. The real problem here is not Marxism but romanticism, fueled by a longing for something in the real world that one can support uncritically. Unfortunately many people are socialized with this desire, starting with religious indoctrination about an all-powerful, all-loving being. When such people rebel against a conservative upbringing, without having received any training in critical thinking, they are likely to fall into this trap. (The Sixties counterculture was replete with examples, not only romanticizing Maoism but also psychedelics and gurus.) And of course, in many cases it's mainly about wanting to shock society, starting with one's parents.

You can read the original post at http://lerterland.blogspot.com/2008/05/godards-judgment.html 

How Not to Respond to Provocateurs

It was reported on today's Morning Edition that a group called Islam for UK is planning a march in an Enlish town that is known for its ceremonies honoring British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. The stated purpose of the march is to remember Afghan civilians killed in the conflict, but the choice of venue clearly reflects a choice to use sensationalism with a view to recruiting people to political Islam. Understandably, some British Muslims aren't happy about this. Their group, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, has announced a counterprotest. While I sympathize with their anger at the attempt to foment polarization, I fear their chosen response will play into the Islamists' hands. It will let them pose as the only ones concerned about civilian deaths, while possibly creating the impression that all secularists are prowar. Instead of a protest focused on opposing the Islamists, it might make more sense for secularists to demonstrate against the war as secularists. In this way they could undercut the Islamists' frame rather than reinforce it. 

Gaza Freedom March: Here's why I'm joining

By Bill Perry

Bucks County Courier Times
(I'd provide a link, but currently it points to the wrong column — Eric)

I am a disabled Vietnam paratrooper-combat veteran whose main occupation is helping World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans get the evaluations, treatment and compensation for post traumatic stress disorder they deserve.

One thousand other Americans, in addition to me, will be participating in the Gaza Freedom March on Dec. 31 in occupied Palestine. My main motivation for participating in the Gaza Freedom March is that the one common thread in the narratives of most of our combat veterans, from World War II through Afghanistan and Iraq, is the terrible tragedies that the children victims of war are forced to endure.

Dec. 27 is the first anniversary of the brutal 23-day Israeli assault on Gaza, an area the size of Philadelphia, with roughly the same population. The Dec. 31 Gaza Freedom March is important to me in that it will help focus the world's attention on the ongoing Israeli siege on Gaza, and the Israeli sanctions that force thousands of women and children to either live in pup tents, or in hollowed out areas in the rubble of their former homes.

During the Israeli assault this time, last year, they used Apache helicopters with Hell Fire missiles, unmanned aircraft known as drones (armed with missiles), F-16 jets with 500-pound bombs, and white phosphorous artillery munitions in civilian areas, which burn victims to death and are illegal under international humanitarian law. The body count was over 1,400 Palestinians (including over 400 children) and 13 Israelis (all but three were combatants). Israel trumpeted their 100-to-1 "kill ratio," without mentioning that half their 10 KIA were from their own "friendly fire," which would, in effect, make their "kill ratio" more than 200 to 1.

A year later, the cruel, collective punishment and humiliation of Palestinian women and children continues. Israel not only continues to block shipments of cement, mortar, bricks, lumber, window glass and other materials needed for rebuilding Gaza homes and schools, but also school supplies, pencils, pens, sanitary napkins and tampons.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the folks, whose history includes imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto, a mere 70 years ago, continue to jail the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip, in the world's largest open air prison (56 percent of the 1.5 million open air prisoners are children).

Why would the ruling party of Israel continually cry "victim," referring to their former status as the oppressed peoples of 65 to 70 years ago, then turn around and inflict so much death and destruction upon Palestinian civilians?

I'm proud to be marching in Gaza with a modern-day hero and role model, Hedy Epstein, 85, a Holocaust survivor who remembers events such as Hitler coming to power, Kristallnacht, the burning of synagogues, and the loss of both her parents in Auschwitz 1942.

Hedy Epstein is especially outraged that Israel won't allow materials to rebuild the mosques, four hospitals, three clinics, numerous schools and the well-marked ambulances that were destroyed by Israel in the 23-day siege of Gaza last year. Epstein is a true example of what it really means to be a part of Judaism.

Although the mainstream media have no interest in covering Gaza Freedom Marchers like Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, or me, a Bucks County veterans advocate, or any of the 1,000 North American marchers calling for Israel to lift their sanctions, I would hope Courier Times readers would take the time to read the Tel Aviv daily newspaper Ha'aretz' columnists like Amira Haas ( www.Haaretz.com) and their opinions of what their government is doing to the Palestinian people.

Nearly 190 countries, worldwide, have expressed outrage, yet three billion of our American tax dollars per year help Israel enforce this ongoing human tragedy.

Is our $3 billion per year foreign aid to Israel creating future terrorists? We are paying for 20-foot-high concrete barriers in the West Bank, and 50-foot, pile-driven steel walls in Gaza. Who are the real victims? Why do we never hear balanced reports of the apartheid horrors in Palestine?

Exactly where and how does the rational and sane world begin the therapy programs for all these traumatized children?

Economics and ideology

I just sent the following note to NPR:

After the segment of "The Best of Public Radio" concerning laboratory research on the psychology of money, the host said that economists talk about "how prices efficiently direct the allocation of resources." The word "efficiently" does not belong there, as it expresses ideology rather than science. While prices do direct the allocation of resources, there's no unanimity among economists about how efficiently they do so, nor even about how "efficiency" should be defined in the context of an entire economy. Efficiency is meaningful only in relation to a specific objective. What is the specific objective of an entire economy, comprising a variety of individuals and institutions with varying objectives?

I could have added that such an objective can be defined only insofar as some sort of collective subjectivity, a public will, has actually been constituted. Yet the doctrine that prices "efficiently" direct the allocation of resources assumes that any expression of a public will can only "interfere" with the market's "efficiency." In this way, an ostensibly scientific statement serves to disguise a mere tautology, "proving" the market's efficiency by simply defining the efficient allocation of resources as whatever the market produces. 

Quote of the Month

"I find this notion that we need to pacify Afghanistan, because that's where the 9/11 attacks were planned, to be absurd. It's really the equivalent of saying that if we want to prevent the assassination of any future presidents, we need to station Secret Service agents in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas because that's where an assassination happened."
— Andrew Bacevich, historian and Vietnam vet, being interviewed on NPR recently.

With the significant difference that the Secret Service could probably avoid killing any civilians.

Help Mexican Electrical Workers Under Attack

http://www.labornotes.org/2009/12/mexican-electrical-workers-hold-out-against-government-raid

Obama Jumps the Gun on Ft. Hood

I was disappointed this morning to hear a portion of President Obama's speech at Ft. Hood, in which he condemned the "twisted motive" behind the mass murder there. He made very clear that he assumed this motive was religious. This was extremely premature in my view. The only evidence I've seen for this assumption is that the alleged shooter was in contact with a fundamentalist cleric, but authorities who looked at this earlier were satisfied that it was consistent with his official functions. Just on its face, it's perfectly comprehensible that someone charged with treating the victims of violence carried out in the name of a religious ideology would seek to understand the perpetrators' possible motivation -- especially if he's a psychiatrist. One might consider his actions fully explicable in terms of the "pincer action" of two factors not normally found together: on the one hand, he was repeatedly exposed to the psychic pain of those who'd seen combat in the especially stressful context of occupations resisted by largely native insurgencies. On the other, he couldn't share this burden with fellow soldiers, because of the perception that they saw him only as a Muslim and not as a comrade. This may have led to unbearable feelings of isolation and frustration, and ultimately resentment and anger toward a community whose emotional burden he was obliged to share, but to whom he couldn't himself turn to help him bear it. Given his reported dread of pending deployment, it may also be that in the back of his head was the thought that acting out his rage would prevent that deployment, and that court-martial here was preferable to combat there. Of course this is speculation -- and I've appropriately labeled it as such. What is not appropriate is to assume that we can do any more than speculate about the motivation at this point. Unfortunately, that is what President Obama did in his speech. 

Savage Gets Too Savage

I know better than to expect Dan Savage to be consistently bland and uncontroversial. Nonetheless, his response last week to A Caring Loving Uncle went decidedly overboard. Given my own past experience with sexual intimidation, I had to respond:

Dan, I must strongly object to part of your advice to ACLU. I don't think it is ever beneficial to threaten physical violence other than as self-defense against same. Further, such a threat will surely make it less likely that the 14-year-old will trust ACLU, regardless of any promise of confidentiality he may have made. The most important form of instruction from adults to the young is always modeling — demonstrating by example how a caring, responsible person acts. If you are trying to offer a queer role model to someone who hasn't yet had one, setting the right example becomes even more important. There is also every reason to believe that this will be sufficient. On the other hand, threatening physical violence to someone who isn't yet comfortable with his sexuality can have devastating effects. I was injured, in terms of great anxiety around the opposite sex, merely by being ostracized for expressing my sexual feelings at age 17 (I was in a cult at the time). How much worse for a 14-year-old to be threatened physically? Especially for a kid who's probably not the least bit macho, and quite possibly is a "boyfriend" only because the girl went after him. I must also take issue with the way you characterize "teen pregnancy." It is true that, at present, our social arrangements are not very supportive of girls who become pregnant in their early reproductive years. But it is actually the most natural thing in the world and, until the past couple centuries, most societies throughout history — patriarchal and matriarchal alike — have accepted it as such. Many of the problems currently attributed to it are properly ascribed to the effects of the stigma and lack of social support for those involved. The most familiar aspect of this is the shaming of the girls but, as your response to ACLU illustrates, another is emotional abuse of the boys. Even so, insofar as current conditions argue for delaying pregnancy, modeling responsibility and not propensities to violence is the way to encourage that. Not to mention emphasizing that sex can be fun in more than one way: pointing out how using a condom can actually be turned into a shared erotic act, for instance, is a more reliable way of encouraging it than making pregnancy prevention a subject he doesn't even want to think about because of scary associations. That only increases the risk of hasty, furtive, ill-thought-out coupling. Sincerely, (48yo bisexual man)

I've passed a tipping point.

Starting a few months ago, with the prodding of a therapist, I've been struggling to make a regular habit of going out to clubs and trying to meet people. It was a struggle chiefly because of the social anxiety disorder I've been coping with since early adolescence. I was extremely apprehensive about approaching strangers and trying to start conversations, especially with a sexual object in mind. A few years ago I did discover a technique for temporarily abolishing this approach anxiety, a sort of self-hypnosis, but I employed artificial-feeling conversation starters like, "Hi! My name is Eric. What's yours?" which were chosen not for their likelihood of leading anywhere, but simply to provide an immediate objective the achievement of which proved to me that I was capable of making approaches. They accomplished that, but didn't motivate me to turn this into a regular habit, and I only tried it on a few occasions.

While seeing Dr. Ross I came to appreciate the importance of being comfortable with small talk, which I'd long thought of as "stupid," and I started practicing it in casual situations such as elevators and subway stops. But it was still a struggle to get myself to a club and, when I got there, to talk to anyone; precisely because it seemed like a more "serious" setting for sexual possibilities, it was more intimidating. I'd managed to do it a couple times when my covered number of therapy visits ran out about a month ago.

For the next couple weeks I seemed to be backsliding, finding ways to avoid going out. But week before last I managed to do it again. Unfortunately the bands never showed up, possibly because it was the night of the game that put the Phillies in the World Series. But I did manage to make a little conversation, including with an attractive woman who turned out to be an office employee of the club. (I also got my cover charge back before leaving.) So it wasn't a total waste.

For a few days it looked like I was procrastinating again, but toward the end of last week my self-confidence revived. I think I can at least partially credit this to a song. I'd heard it before but only really noticed the lyrics a couple weeks ago, and found them very relevant to what I was struggling with. The song is "Somebody's Baby," recorded by Jackson Browne. If you listen closely you realize that the object of the narrator's desire is definitely not somebody's baby, because he, along with all "the guys on the corner," is intimidated by her beauty. They rationalize their approach anxiety by telling themselves that she must already be taken. But he overhears her saying something that demonstrates that this isn't the case; what the song seems to be suggesting is that she's alone precisely because her great beauty intimidates those who desire her.

From what I understand, this isn't a particularly common scenario. Most beautiful women get plenty of approaches; the problem is that the quality of those approaches rarely suggests that they have anything to gain by encouraging them. But leaving this quibble aside, the point for me was that the song casts the situation in a decidedly moral framework, where the narrator is in a sense failing both of them until he develops the understanding that the situation calls for his initiative, and the resolve to act on it. There have been a couple earlier instances in which a song somehow captured a similar sense of moral mission that briefly motivated me to do something courageous. Perhaps I just wasn't sufficiently prepared to make intelligent use of it then, but perhaps it also makes a difference that in this case the lyrics were very specifically relevant, unlike in the previous cases. (I've posted comments on them at both SongMeanings and SongFacts.)

In any case, by Friday I was eager to get out again, and went to a Halloween-themed "karaoke gong show." I'd been to one karaoke event before, last New Year's Eve. This time I wanted to sing "Somebody's Baby," but since it wasn't in the book, I fell back on "Imagine," written by John Lennon, which I'd sung the previous time. I think I'd gotten through the second verse before I was gonged. I stayed maybe another 45 minutes, having made conversation with several people of both sexes before and after my performance. I had a pretty good time.

Although I might have considered myself to have "filled my quota" for the week, I decided to go out again last night, partly because I wanted to do a more regular club scene. This was a hard rock show, but before it started and made conversation difficult, I made quite a lot with several women and men, including a good deal of playful repartee. Most of them also called my Halloween costume "awesome," but I think I'll keep it a trade secret.

The most remarkable part of the whole weekend was that, as I was going home last night, I realized that, after going out two nights in a row and coming home late, I wanted to do it again! Bare months since I could barely drag myself to -- er, "make time for" -- a night out, now I wished I could do it every night! What a change -- and a much happier kind of problem to have!

For most of my life I've called myself an introvert. Early last year, when I went off Paxil after taking it for 23 months and experienced no backsliding, I felt a surge of confidence at this proof that the improvement it had enabled had "taken" and become permanent. I started to suspect that I'm not naturally an introvert at all, even that I'm an extrovert whose natural propensity has merely been masked by my disorder. After all, I recalled, I had casually initiated many conversations with strangers as late as age ten. (In fact this had been the inspiration for my self-hypnosis technique, which used certain behavioral tricks to put myself in a "little kid" state of mind.)

That surge of euphoria after going off Paxil only lasted a few weeks, but I was reminded of those thoughts a couple months ago by a conversation with an old friend and fellow member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. She'd previously mentioned that she isn't really the extrovert she might seem; as a child she'd had great trouble socializing, and had to learn to do it by a lot of practice. But she went further into it this time, explaining that even today, after a lot of socializing she's worn out and needs a couple days to herself. A light went on in my head: that wasn't me at all! I've never needed to be away from people; I've never wanted to be. I learned to get on OK without other people because I had to -- I felt intimidated by social situations. But I didn't want to be alone; I wanted to be comfortable with people.

So that's what a real introvert is like, I thought -- and it's not what I am! What I'd started to suspect last year was now confirmed. And what's happened this weekend has finally brought that inner extrovert out again, eclipsing the anxiety that had kept him hidden so long, even from me.

Just Say No to South Carolina AG's Shamelessly Punitive Prudery

The recent multiple scandals exposing sexual hypocrisy on the part of South Carolina's politicians seem to have done nothing to diminish their repressive impulses. The latest example involves an assistant deputy attorney general named Roland Corning who was found by a police officer spending his lunch break in his car with a stripper. The officer himself acknowledged that no illegal activity was occurring; as far as I can tell from the news story, the man isn't married, so it's not even a case of infidelity. Nor is it hypocrisy on Corning's part, at least in his present life as a prosecutor (he was previously a state legislator), since he worked on securities cases. Nonetheless, he was fired the same day by Attorney General Henry McMaster. The AP story willingly repeats a number of details that may have added fuel to the puritanical fires, and which you can read there if you're so inclined. The bottom line, however, is that nothing illegal, non-consensual, or even unsafe appears to have been going on, yet Corning has lost his job over it. I've sent McMaster an email expressing my disgust at his action, and also written him a letter. The contact information as it appears on his website is: The Honorable [sic] Henry McMaster P.O. Box 11549 Columbia, SC 29211 Email: info@scattorneygeneral.com My thanks to my friend John Kirkland for forwarding the link to this story to his facebook page. 

Part of a Large Number for a Lower Number

I took part today in the International Day of Climate Action organized by 350.org. This is a campaign to get the world's governments to agree on strong measures to bring the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration down to 350 parts per million, believed by environmental scientists to be the maximum level consistent with climate stability (the current level is 390 ppm). The Philadelphia action consisted of a couple hundred people gathering in the rain on Independence Mall to form the numeral "350," and having our picture taken by people standing on top of the Bourse building across the street (I think it's something like ten stories). Our photos don't seem to be available yet, but you can see those from dozens of other locations by going to their website. The weather always seems to be raw when I come to the Mall below Market Street for a demonstration. It was also raining during the National Equality Rally back in June. 

A Question for Noam Chomsky

I've received an email from Cindy Sheehan, informing me that she will have Professor Noam Chomsky on her radio show shortly and inviting listeners to submit questions for him. I've submitted this one:

"Hi! Here's what I'd like to ask Professor Chomsky: "'In light of Hustler magazine's long history of offering both editorial and financial support to antiwar causes; in light of the fact that most of their readers, like those of other mass publications, need more not less education about the true US role in the world; and in light of the fact that women have made the most economic, legal, and political progress, as measured by the Gender Equality Index, precisely in those states where publications like Hustler are most widely available* — in light of all this, how can you justify your repudiation of the interview you gave them? How can you put your personal prejudices ahead of both scientific fact and the needs of the antiwar movement?' "* The following can be read at http://libertus.net/censor/rdocs/candle2.html:

"'In 1990, findings of more recent research by Dr Larry Baron were published. He examined "the relationship between the circulation rates of soft-core pornographic magazines and gender equality in the 50 American states. Gender equality is measured with the Gender Equality Index (GEX) which combines 24 indicators of the status of women relative to men in the three institutional domains of politics, economics, and legal rights. Multiple regression analysis is used to test the hypothesis that the higher the circulation rate of soft-core pornographic magazines [such as Hustler], the lower the level of gender equality. Several additional variables are included in the analysis to control for spurious relationships. Contrary to the hypothesis, the results show that gender equality is higher [my emphasis] in states characterized by higher circulation rates of pornography. This relationship is interpreted as suggesting that pornography and gender equality both flourish in politically tolerant societies."' And:

"'Also, in 1991 Cynthia Gentry found no relationship between rape rates and circulation of sexually oriented magazines across metropolitan areas in the USA.'"

My interest in confronting Dr. Chomsky about this arises from an email exchange I had with him -- itself triggered by learning about his repudiation of the interview from a reference on Nina Hartley's discussion board (not safe for some workplaces!). Amazingly, he refused any responsibility to define the terms he used, such as "degrading," in justifying his decision. He also repeatedly misrepresented my plainly expressed positions -- something that particularly tends to drive me up the wall. I can provide a full transcript of our exchange to anyone who's interested. The interview will air Sunday, October 25 [postponed to November], 2PM Pacific at www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com or 3PM Central at 1360am Rational Radio, Dallas, TX). You can submit your own question for Professor Chomsky by writing Sheehan at cindy@cindysheehanssoapbox.com.

Protest Rape at Movie Theaters Tomorrow

Actions are being organized nationwide for Saturday, 10 October 2009 to protest the denial and belittlement of sexual violence that has been exhibited by many in connection with the Roman Polanski case. They are taking place at movie theaters and you can get information for your area at http://promotingawarenessvictimempowerment.wordpress.com/nationwide-cities/ The information is presented in a confusing fashion and I initially had the false impression that nothing was planned for Philadelphia. I recommend using your browser's search function to find all occurrences of your city's name, so as to be sure you don't miss anything. 

Review: The Trickster and the Paranormal (plus some loosely connected recollections)

Having recently had occasion here to mention George Hansen's book The Trickster and the Paranormal, I've written a comment on it for Powell's Books:

    This book was sometimes fascinating, frequently maddening. On the up side, the author proposes a number of correlations to exist between paranormal beliefs and experiences on one hand, and seemingly unrelated cultural factors on the other. Some of these have also been posited by more skeptical writers. On the down side, he never proves rigorously that these purported correlations actually exist.
    Hansen assumes that they can only be understood in terms of an acausal "Trickster constellation," but ignores the fact that more down-to-earth social and cognitive psychology can often be invoked to explain them. He takes for granted that the paranormal is real, rather than actually trying to prove it.
    In fact, Hansen actually asserts that the paranormal by its nature can't be scientifically proven, and the book sometimes comes off as one long apologia for this fact. Particularly frustrating is the way he periodically cites some confusing or elusive quality of paranormal claims as "hinting" at something about "the nature of the paranormal," yet never comes out and says what he thinks that is.
    Some of the most interesting material in the book for me was unrelated to alleged paranormal phenomena, such as the section concerning the socially provocative origins of the school of research called ethnomethodology.

Now for a few remarks of a more personal nature. A few weeks before I read this book, I got to attend a talk by someone cited in it, Linda Moulton Howe. She was the final speaker in an event held at the Free Library of Philadelphia's central branch, billed as "Real Life X-Files," in early June 2002. I probably wouldn't have shown for this if not for the fact that Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics Society, was scheduled to speak there a couple weeks later. Figuring I might be able to interest some of those attending one event in the other, I made a flier for Shermer's talk using an image of his latest book's cover from the Web. I passed it out to people on their way in; then, not wanting to support the stereotype of skeptics as closed-minded, I went in to listen myself.

None of the speakers provided evidence for as much as they claimed, but Howe definitely represented the epitome of credulousness that afternoon. She spent much of her presentation talking about "crop circles" and "mystery lights," which she believed were intended as messages from more advanced beings about how we're destroying our environment. (Why such highly advanced beings couldn't find a less cryptic way of communicating this idea, she didn't explain.) Here are a couple "lowlights" of her logic-leaping abilities:

1) She complained that "we all heard much more than we wanted to know" about "Chuck and Dave," or whatever their names were — the men who owned up to having created many of the English crop circles. But she insisted that their confession was irrelevant, because those two men couldn't be responsible for circles seen on several different continents.
Talk about missing the point! The relevance of their confession was simply that they showed that the circles could be made by human beings without any advanced technology. If these two could do it in England, then others could have done it elsewhere. But Howe refused to understand this.

2) She showed some video of purported "mystery lights," which are held to be associated often with crop circles. Some of her remarks in this connection were truly comical to a critical-minded viewer. The video was shot in a grassy area, although since there were some people visible I imagine it was probably a park or common area rather than a crop field. Some blobs of light were also seen, which she said were the "mystery lights." She commented, "Notice how the people present seem not to notice the lights." (!) And a moment later, "Observe how the lights appear to shrink in size as they approach the camera." Indeed, very interesting — especially considering the remarkable coincidence that the lights appeared to be "shrinking" in direct proportion to their proximity to the camera! What was really happening, in fact, was that the spots of light seen in the video weren't changing at all in the amount of space they took up on the screen; as they shifted to a background of objects that were closer to the camera, that simply made them seem — to a human brain interpreting them as objects moving among other objects — to be growing smaller.
These two "observations, " taken together, plainly indicated that these "lights" were not objects at all, but an artifact of some kind of camera defect. That is why they didn't change in the size they took up on the screen regardless of how near or far the background objects were, and it's also the reason no one in the field saw them: they weren't there! But the blindingly obvious was, again, not apparent to Linda Moulton Howe.

(In the darkened auditorium, by the way, I was struggling mightily to remain awake. If I had actually believed what Howe was saying, I suppose I'd have been so excited as not to be sleepy at all; but since I couldn't take her seriously in the least, I was glad to have an excuse for leaving early: a lunch date with a friend.)

So it was with some amusement that, while reading Hansen's book the following month, I saw that he cited Howe as a source. Hansen's chief credential for writing the book was that he'd spent eight years working in a parapsychology lab. But if he could take Howe seriously — writing just a year before I heard her speak (the book was published in 2001) — then, rather than his lengthy affiliation with the lab proving his qualifications as a scientist, I'd say it indicates the low standards of that laboratory — and by extension, perhaps, of the parapsychology profession of which it might be assumed to be representative.

I had bought the book several months earlier. I read it when I did because I'd decided to volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine, and figured that if I brought any books or periodicals of a political nature with me, I might not be let into the country by Israeli authorities. I figured Trickster plus another, more skeptical book on the same subject, The Psychology of the Psychic, 2nd edition by David Marks, would last me for the two and a half weeks I'd be in the country. When I told my landlord at the time, Dan McShane, about this, he suggested I could go as a "total space cadet." I liked this idea — it was so much more interesting than merely claiming to be a tourist, as the materials I'd received from ISM recommended.

So I decided my "cover story" would be that I was a paranormal investigator. I figured this would actually make dissimulating about my purpose easier, since I could "play the part" better; such investigating (albeit more skeptically than I let on), unlike tourism, was something I actually might want to do.

I was interviewed by two police at the Tel Aviv airport for what seemed like five or ten minutes. I guess it was probably toward the low end of that range, but seemed longer because of the tension I felt. I had made sure to be carrying the book in my hand as I was led into the police office, and to set it binding out on a filing cabinet, so that the title was visible while I was interviewed. I enjoyed the irony that it was actually I who was playing the Trickster in this scenario! Toward the end, as it became apparent they believed me, one of them jokingly asked me if I could bend spoons. I answered, "No, I thought that was one of your people!" and we all laughed. (Uri Geller was, by the way, one of the purported psychics whose dishonesty was demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt in Marks's book, which I read during the last few days of the trip.)

One of the highlights of my experience in the country came the night of 16 July, when my affinity group stayed with a family in Rafah. The head of the household told how, several months earlier, he'd had to get his family out of their home in only five minutes when he saw that a tank was heading straight toward them to demolish it. Since then hadn't had a full night's sleep, since he was staying up 'til the period tanks came through the neighborhood, about 4:15-30 am IIRC, had passed without incident.

So our group decided we should do something to help him out: we offered to stay over and keep watch in shifts, so we could warn him if we heard any tanks coming. At first he was resistant because two of our group were women, but they wouldn't hear of being excluded. Eventually we persuaded him that we willingly were taking all the risk on ourselves, and he accepted our offer. (I should perhaps mention that we were really close to the Egyptian border — just a couple doors from the "no man's land." Our host had urged us to use extreme caution even in looking around the corner of a building toward the Israeli guard tower, for fear we'd be shot at. So he doubtless felt it was riskier for us to stay here than just about any other place in town.)

The first four hours' watch was taken by the three Brits in the group, who were students at the University of Sussex. The second shift — including the usual period for tank activity — went to me and the other American, Joe Bailey from Arkansas. I didn't have much to converse about with him, and after a while I noticed he'd dozed off. (Sorry if you're reading this, Joe!) Although I had been reading, I now felt obliged to focus more fully on my surroundings; I worried that I might not notice the sound of a tank soon enough if I were too immersed in the book. This fear was likely exaggerated, as I already knew the sound of a tank — high-pitched, whining, decidedly unsettling — would not easily be missed. Nonetheless, I didn't want to take any chances when AFAIK I was the only person up.

So I started looking up at the sky and sort of meditating on it — the sort of non-purposive thing I'm not in the habit of doing; normally I'd feel anxious about "wasting time." But in this situation, it was the most apt behavior to my purpose, which was itself quite serious. So I gazed at one star, which was not close to any others in the sky, nor was it close to any borders (i.e., roof edges of the courtyard I was in) within my field of view.

Something started to happen, of which I had heard, known as autokinesis. Small, involuntary movements of my eyes, in the absence of anything visually close to the star I was watching, made it look as if the star was moving. I had read about this in skeptical literature, where it was held responsible for some UFO reports. And I had experimented with it once, but stopped at the first sign of it; it seems the disturbingly "paradoxical" quality of intentionally giving myself an illusory experience had combined with anxiety about "wasting time" to scare me off.

But now the experience resulted from something with a very serious purpose, which seemed to make the "paradoxical" aspect no longer threatening. In fact, before long I felt almost giddy; I imagined to myself, "Gee, this is like a trip without the drugs!" That star seemed to be moving all over the place!

An irony of this experience that just recently occurred (or perhaps re-occurred) to me is that the chapter of Hansen's book I had been reading just before this, titled "Government Disinformation," is largely concerned with UFOs — and here I was experiencing one of the kinds of illusion that generate UFO reports. Another interesting aspect is that some of the kinds of disinformation Hansen alleges resemble the conspiracy theories of my old friend John Judge, who likes to call them "unidentified fascist observatories" (he thinks they're military surveillance craft).

Well, this post has turned out to be a lot more than a book review; that simply provided the occasion to write about some things I'd thought about for a long time. But I think that will it be it for now.

Addendum 7/21/21: another example of the weak logic in Hansen's book is where he says skeptics keep claiming most professional magicians don't believe in the paranormal, and then purports to prove otherwise. In fact he doesn't prove otherwise, since he doesn't explain how he gathered his examples of magicians who apparently did believe. For all I could tell, the dozen or so he lists may be the only ones, as against thousands of nonbelievers.

But the other half of it is that he never proves skeptics actually claim that most magicians don't believe in the paranormal; he simply asserts it. I personally don't recall ever seeing this. What I have seen is skeptics saying magicians are less easily fooled by people who fake paranormal phenomena. But this implies nothing about how many magicians disbelieve in the paranormal altogether. So, not only does he not prove the claim is false, he never proves it's a claim skeptics 

Se additional follow-up comments on the book appear at https://stripey7.blogspot.com/2011/02/missing-forest-for-mystery-lights.html

are actually making in the first place.

It seems the mass media's Polanski coverage has been rather biased.

Most inexcusably for NPR, their news briefs have often mentioned that he claims the incident was consensual, yet don't mention that the victim told a grand jury just the opposite. Since he's described as having pled guilty only to "having sex with a 13-year-old girl," this leaves the listener (including me, until I saw Deb's link about it on facebook) with the false impression that this case arose solely because of the girl's age. Whatever you think about age-of-consent laws, presumably everyone agrees that this makes a big difference. I posted a comment on their website a few days ago. I also called their Ombudsman's office Thursday, and was informed that they'd received many complaints along the same lines and were looking into it. Good! But I haven't heard any correction yet. Thanks to my friend Deborah Seeley for bringing this to my attention.

This Movie Is for the Birds

This evening I saw an advance screening for a film, thanks to a text message from some promotional firm. It was called Bird's Eye View and it promoted the most far-fetched theories about crashed saucers and aliens among us, combining documentary-style interviews with a fictional storyline that bore a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files. In this case, the character played by the filmmaker had lost not her sister, but a pet bird to the alien abductors when she was a child, and later had it "replaced" by her father (who turns out to have really been her stepfather) with a bird she suspected was actually the same one. This bird was played by the filmmaker's actual pet bird, which she had brought with her to the screening. It was a big tropical parrot or parakeet or something of the sort. I got a sense early on of the level of credulity involved when the "MJ-12" were mentioned without any acknowledgment that they had been revealed as a hoax a long time ago. We were also treated to the story that special "analysis" of a document relating to Roswell showed that it contained instructions for disinformation, even though what we saw on the screen showed no such thing. And someone told the camera that he'd found miniature stone "spacecraft" in a cave, complete with tiny "windows," proving that an advanced race had been here millions of years ago — yet what he actually held in his hand was a fairly crude ridged disk with no windows that I could discern. In short, there was much in this film that was hilarious, but unfortunately in most cases the humor was unintentional. Oh, and it appears to have all been shot on video. You can see a trailer, reviews, etc. at birdseyeviewthemovie.com. P.S. Like some others (e.g. Linda Moulton Howe, who I saw give an amazingly credulous presentation at the central library in 2002, shortly before seeing her cited as a serious source in George Hansen's book The Trickster and the Paranormal), the filmmaker links the UFO stuff to concerns about the environment and animal welfare. I have to wonder whether some of the groups thanked in the credits (such as PETA) realized what kookiness their material was being associated with. If I were they, I'd be afraid that such association would undermine the credibility of my message. After posting the above, I was informed that a parakeet is quite small, totally unlike a parrot. Shows how much I know about birds.

How Will You Survive?

That's the question on some billboards I started seeing this week for a movie evidently called simply 2012. Others say, "We were warned." I believe a frightening prospect does confront us in the very near future. I predict that soon the Earth will be engulfed in an enormous tidal wave of pseudoscience. The only way to escape this tsunami will be to avoid cineplexes at all cost! I further predict that, in 2013, we will be engulfed in yet another tidal wave -- this one of really, really cheap DVDs of 2012, which will somehow no longer seem as timely. You have been warned!

A New Twist in NPR's Lie of Omission About Afghanistan, 1979

Today's Morning Edition had an interview about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Like previous discussions of this event on NPR (and other major media), and despite my having written them more than once on the matter, they once again accepted the myth that US aid to the fundamentalist/feudalist/tribalist reactionaries known as the mujahedin began in response to the invasion, when in reality it preceded that invasion by five months. As I've noted previously, President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted as much in an interview he gave Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. He admitted as well that he knew a Soviet invasion was likely to occur in response, advised the President of this, and was not troubled by the prospect. He still professed no regrets at the time of the interview, notwithstanding the enormous harm done to Afghan women in particular by this policy. Whether he still has no regrets, post-9/11, one can only wonder. What's new is that, in this interview, we can hear NPR's Steve Inskeep mentioning that the invasion came in response to a request for help from Afghanistan's president. Yet we don't hear what the reason for this request was. Clearly something has been edited out -- either that the US was already aiding the reactionary rebels, or at least that they were already rebelling prior to the invasion. In either case, it's a serious omission, for no apparent purpose except to maintain the myth of US innocence and beneficence in this matter. I've written NPR's Ombudsman about this, and will report here if I receive any response. 

An Exercise in Fuzzy Thinking

A friend, Dr. Robert Kay, recently passed out a flier at a meeting of my atheist Meetup group, headed, "Jane -- Recant!" You can see an image of it here. I found it pretty disappointing, especially considering it's issued in the name of "The Committee for Clear Thinking." Addressed to Dr. Jane Goodall, it says she "appear[s] to have made a major error when you assumed that there exists, in both primate and human, some sort of id/evil/aggressive side or instinct which needs to be controlled.... instead of considering the possibility that all successful animals are FUNDAMENTALLY/INNATELY/BORN-TO-BECOME/INEVITABLY social and cooperative." There seem to be a lot of weasel words here. Clearly, if all people were inevitably cooperative, all people would be cooperative; that's what inevitably means. The catch is the presence of that word "successful," which isn't defined. By inserting that, the authors have covertly rendered the statement untestable, and therefore meaningless. In fact, by any ordinary criterion, lots of highly "successful" humans have gotten that way by being anything but cooperative, except maybe within a narrow circle of their own class. The wealthy maintain their great material comfort (and with it, enormous opportunities for reproductive success) on the basis of coercive control over others' access to productive resources and, thereby, over the fruits of their labor. In many cases this wealth can be traced back to flagrant forms of aggressive violence such as enclosures and slave-making. The committee suggests that Goodall made "invidious generalizations" based on chimpanzee reactions to human interference with their societies. But they give no concrete examples of these alleged generalizations -- not even a single direct quotation. In fact, the flier acknowledges that, "fortunately," people can "become angry." Yet, if we had no aggressive "side" or "instinct," how would this be possible? It wouldn't be. This instinct is available because we sometimes need it. Now we get to the real point of the flier, which is the committee's support for "invitational learning" in place of "Prussian-derived and factory-oriented school." They clearly believe that this is a "manifestation" of our "mistrust" of human nature. Yet they've glossed over the real reason after stating it themselves. The present system is factory-oriented because it's designed to serve the owners of factories -- the capitalist class. By treating workers' children as identical, interchangeable cogs in a machine, it prepares them to be treated exactly the same way as adult workers. This has to do not with a belief about human nature, but the actual nature of capitalist social relations, which are authoritarian because workers' interests are different from those of capitalists. Capitalists fear workers' potential for collective aggression against their control of the workplace and of the state, yet can benefit from channeling that same aggressiveness against rival capitalists and their workers. So they support an educational system that discourages (horizontal) cooperation, while promoting aggression only along "authorized" lines. This is key to understanding the real significance of the statement attributed in the flier to Hermann Goering, that "it's impossible to get the Germans to fight unless you first fill them full of lies." German soldiers, overwhelmingly children of the working class, were being asked to fight not truly on their own behalf, but on that of the German capitalists and their Nazi enforcers. Lies were needed, then, not to get them to fight, but to get them to fight against their own interests. False enemies were invented, like "Jewish conspirators," to turn their aggressive energies toward other workers rather than their own exploiters. The problem, then, is that our society is controlled by people who are undersocialized -- people who've been conditioned to feel entitled to live off of others' labor, and to use force (both privately and through the agency of the state) to maintain their position. They've been conditioned this way because the present social system rewards them for assuming this entitlement; they receive positive reinforcement for the behavior. And they seek to control the children of the majority, not because they falsely imagine them to have an aggressive side, but because they know all too well that that side is real -- it's gotten them where they are -- and are afraid of its being turned against them. There's not much left in the flier on which to comment. The committee say, "We are disappointed that you've failed to reply and speak to our concerns, and therefore do not know where you stand today on this issue," and follow this with a recommendation that readers look into the works of a number of authors. Indeed, it appears that they initially meant to suggest that Goodall read these works, but thought better of it. This was certainly a wise revision, since it seems pretty likely that she would have already acquainted herself with such material. Given the conceptual confusion permeating the flier, I think it's safe to assume the reason Goodall hasn't responded, at least directly or personally, is that she's seen nothing to respond to. 

To Defend Evolution, One Must Understand It

In the Radiolab show just broadcast, I heard them make a rather common error in describing the idea of evolution. I wrote them this letter to point out the error, and why it matters:   Your program on laughter described chimps as "our ancestors." Similarly, it spoke of our having "inherited" something from them.   Chimps are not our ancestors; they're our cousins, with whom we share a common ancestor which was neither human nor chimp. This is more than a technical distinction, because this sort of confusion contributes significantly to scientific illiteracy. More than once someone has objected to the idea of evolution by asking me, "Why haven't other animals evolved?"   This question assumes the conception of evolution as a ladder with the different species as rungs -- rather than a tree the tips of whose branches are extant species, and whose lower levels are extinct ones. If one assumes this incorrect conception of evolution, there indeed is no good answer to the question. With the correct understanding, one can answer, "They have evolved. Their ancestors were different from them, and from anything existing today."

Entrapment: Government as Mind Manipulator

The latest edition of This American Life told the story of a man who was railroaded for an alleged terrorist conspiracy that was completely a creation of the Federal government. The program unfortunately made it sound as if this kind of tactic had only started after 9/11. I wrote them to correct this false impression, and also point out some implications that are often overlooked: The policy of entrapment-by-informant didn't start after 9/11. Two earlier cases spring to mind. In 1998 Theresa Squillacote and Kurt Stand, who had leftist sympathies and worked with the State Department, were led through an extended process of emotional manipulation to agree to pass classified information to a purported agent of post-apartheid South Africa. In the process, therapist/patient confidentiality was also violated. The very fact that the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit supervised this operation is indicative of how much this "crime" was of their own making. A few years earlier, a man was pressured, cajoled, and ultimately even coerced (by an informant pretending to have Mob connections) to agree to a plan to murder a couple boys for a "snuff" film (which films have never actually existed, by the way). This setup is described in harrowing detail in Laura Kipnis' book Bound and Gagged. This policy looks even darker when you consider its conscious use of psychological science for manipulative purposes. After all, what is the function of government supposed to be? It's supposed to help socialize us -- to condition us to internalize inhibitions against destructive behavior. Here, instead, we find government intentionally desocializing someone, destroying their inhibitions, trying to "unmake" them as a social being. If you respond that the targeted individuals couldn't do these things if they hadn't the predisposition, you're overlooking one of the major findings of social psychology, which is that people can often be induced to do things outside their normal behavioral range by various high-pressure tactics, and then to rationalize them by changing the way they see themselves, altering their moral self-definition. In fact, such covert manipulation of cognitive dissonance is one of the chief techniques of cult brainwashing. And it appears to be just what's being done in some of these entrapment cases, especially where the Behavioral Sciences Unit is involved.

Madam Secretary, Ideas Know No Borders

The other day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a statement about her visit to Somalia. In it she expressed her concern that the al-Shabab group was not only importing foreign weapons to the country, but also "foreign ideas." This is appalling. Since when do ideas have a nationality? If I condemn the ideology of al-Qaeda, it's because their beliefs are inhuman, not "un-Somali" or "un-American." Secretary Clinton's rhetoric harkens back to the worst traditions of American nativism and xenophobia. It's not what one might have expected from an administration that's supposed to represent a more enlightened element of this country's rulers. 

Quote of the Month

The only principle on which liberalism is fixed is moderation: believing in compromise and the middle road, it makes a virtue of falling between two stools. In actual fact, an extreme position may be nearer to truth than a middle position, and more close to effective practice than one that stops half way. -- Lewis Mumford, "A Preface to Action"

The Limits of Ethics

The latest Speaking of Faith featured another discussion of values in relation to the economic crisis, this time with Quaker intellectual Parker Palmer. I was moved to submit the following comment: I just read Sidney Hook's book Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation, and it's got me fired up about reasserting certain truths. And this applies very much to today's show. An executive may come away from a retreat feeling transformed, but he then goes back to the need to function in the capitalist marketplace. A passion to be more ethical can't erase the insecurity built into this system and, unless one is altruistic to a suicidal degree, there's often little one can do without changing the property relations that are responsible for this insecurity. This relates to what Palmer said about the different forms of violence. The central violence in our society is the systematic denial, with the state's backing, of people's access to the means of production, so that those who monopolize that access -- the "owners" -- are empowered, and in a competitive market therefore compelled, to set extortive terms for that access (whence profits come). Changing the economy does in fact depend on changing social relations in the workplace, as Palmer suggests. But this requires more than good will. It necessitates changing the power structure at the point of production. Some businesspeople may be in a position to start this process unilaterally and outside of "politics," by legally creating a workers' collective and then handing title to their business over to it. Mostly this will apply only to those who hold a business privately. Even in those cases, however, it may be difficult for such enterprises to survive in competition with capitalist business, as long as the legal system is set up in the latter's favor. Meanwhile, for workers it's the rule, not the exception, that ethical action is also self-interested. Collective action by workers, both through union activity and labor-led politics, advances democracy in the workplace and equity in income distribution, increasing the rationality with which resources are allocated by prioritizing investment in necessities over luxuries. Thus society as a whole benefits from workers' acting collectively in our self-interest. Probably the main thing that most businesspeople can do to take ethical responsibility is to support the labor movement in its industrial and political struggles, up to and including the seizure of state power which alone will enable the final eradication of capitalist insecurity and irrationality. 

Quote of the Month

Whatever the drives and impulses which constitute his animal nature, man's human nature is revealed only in a socially determined context, in which the biological pattern functions as only one constituent element of the whole .... [S]elfishness is selfishness, and power is power; but a selfishness and power that assert themselves in a system ... in which the legal right to prevent others from using land and machines means the material power to condemn them to poverty and death, are different kinds of selfishness and power from those which express themselves within a socialized economy, guaranteeing to all who are capable and willing to work, the right to life and subsistence. -- Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation.

Browne-d Out

Friday night I took part in an effort to alert people to the hazards of taking advice from "psychic" Sylvia Browne or believing in her purported powers. Here's a report by the organizer: On Jun 12th, Sylvia Browne came to Philadelphia as part of a "Farewell Tour" (which could not have come soon enough) and a promotion of her latest book. A group of concerned individuals, inspired by similar events in Halifax, Canada, decided to stand outside the venue and distribute envelopes stuffed with information about cold reading, Sylvia Browne, and why people should not take medical advice from her. The outside of the envelope had instructions not to open it until the holder was in his/her seat. This way, people would accept the envelope and be seated before realizing what it was; the hope was that they'd have time to digest the info before throwing it out. It was quite the experience. We met an hour and a half before the show, divided up the envelopes, and used a printed floor plan of the Convention Center to split ourselves up among the entrances. Having scoped out the inside earlier, I had discovered the closest we could get to the ballroom where the performance was held was the bottom of the escalators downstairs, as Sylvia Browne's people were taking tickets next to the ballroom entrance. Two of us, including myself, stood at the escalators and four others took back and side doors. Everything went well for a few minutes. Sylvia's was easy to spot demographically, for the most part consisting of Caucasian women from their mid-20's and up, especially middle-aged ladies in groups of two or more. Many also sported wristbands (blue for the $50 seats and green for the premium $100 ones) so they were easily identifiable. People were friendly as we began passing out the envelopes, assuming we were part of her crew. A few were curious as to the contents, but nobody refused the envelope. It hadn't even been ten minutes when a young woman riding up the escalator decided that the instruction "Please do not open until you have reached your seat" contained too many ambiguities to be complied with, and ripped it open immediately. "Get a real job!" she shouted down at us. I gazed blithely back at her, not wanting to point out that the two of us worked in an Alzheimer's clinic and a nonprofit animal shelter, respectively. I soon realized that other people were tearing open the envelopes immediately so we began verbally reinforcing the directions "Don't open it 'til you reach your seat. Thank you!" Soon, the original screamer came back down again and told a couple of women taking the envelopes from us "Don't open it! It's bashing Sylvia." They rolled their eyes at us, but took them anyway when I said "It's just information." One of our group was taking pictures, acting as lookout, and sending surreptitious text messages. Through her I found out that security had been notified. Some of us were asked to leave, and others did preemptively. We stationed ourselves outside the entrance and continued the flyering. One security guard told one of our guys that the police would be notified unless he got off of the premises and stood across the street. Standing outside, it was harder to differentiate the Sylvia people from the other passersby, and we looked less legitimate than we had inside. Some audience members were milling around smoking instead of going straight in, making the situation a bit tense. We got some hostile looks and one of Browne's people sweetly warned me that security was going to ask us to leave. I thanked her for her courtesy. The crowd seemed to thin out well before 7:00, when the show was scheduled to start. Although the ballroom held over 3,000 people, I only saw a couple hundred who were going to see her. Perhaps this was due to my limited vantage point, or (hopefully) she doesn't draw nearly as big of a crowd as we were afraid of. We put some of the extra envelopes under the windshield wipers of parked cars near the Center, and met up again to discuss and go to dinner. One of us was able to chat up a Sylvia Browne attendee before the show and somehow managed to briefly venture into the heart of darkness without a ticket. He learned that a warning announcement had been made about us, and that the Sylvia people were taking the envelopes from the audience members and tearing them up before they could enter the hall and read them. On the whole, we distributed maybe 1/3 of the 500 envelopes, although Sylvia Browne's people made sure that fewer of them than that actually were read. Hopefully, some of the audience members has their curiosity piqued by what could have possibly been so bad in those envelopes that they needed to have been confiscated and destroyed. A couple crucial differences made this effort a bit more chaotic than I understand the Canadian initiative to be. First of all, the Philly venue was set up so attendees could trickle in person-by-person hours before the show; there was no large group of people waiting for the doors to be opened as there had been in Halifax. Also, there may be cultural differences in politeness and courtesy between Americans and Canadians; many people acted with hostility, mistrust, or impulsiveness, opening the envelopes immediately. At the very least, we made our presence known and accomplished something gratifying, which was to rattle Sylvia Browne's team a little bit. At best, some people got the information and read it and it made them think. If, as a result of our effort, even one person at that show decided "You know, I really shouldn't be taking medical advice from this woman," and maybe will even be spared illness or death in the future as a consequence, this entire thing would have been worth it to me. 

My own experience was less dramatic. I was distributing at the entrance to the Marriott, which connects to the Convention Center. I didn't try to guess who was coming to see Browne; I just asked everyone coming in, "Are you coming to see Sylvia?" If they answered, "Yes," I gave them an envelope while smiling sweetly. I didn't see anyone opening them prematurely, but after a while I realized some people were declining them because they'd received a packet from her in the the same size envelope, so they thought I was offering something they already had. At this point I started making sure they saw the seal as I held it out to them, so they'd know this was something different. It's possible some of these envelopes were confiscated when they got to the Convention Center; it's also possible that by then they'd put them in their bags so that security didn't see them. I doubt the Marriott security connected me to what was happening at the Convention Center, if they were even told about that. One of them came out about 6:45 and remained there for several minutes, but he didn't approach or say anything to me. Not a whole lot of people came in that way to see her, however. I don't think I distributed more than ten envelopes. 

I am now recorded.

This past Friday I took part in an open-mike event at Voltaradio in Center City Philadelphia. It was organized by The Philadelphian Project, a Meetup group that aims to help local performing artists get seen and heard. I sang Phil Ochs' song "What's That I Hear?" A little later another great local singer named Joe Mack also performed. I'm told they have a tape of my performance and I plan to get that turned into a sound file to which I could link from this blog. Next month the Project will have its grand opening on 3 July. I look forward to getting to sing more then. 

Ecumenical Idiocy -- an atheist view

I just heard something on PRI's The World that got my goat. I wrote: In your discussion of President Obama's Cairo speech, it was stated that he showed "respect" for Muslims by referring to the Middle East as where Islam was "revealed," rather than where it was "born." This was said to be respectful because it seemed to imply that he accepts Islam as having come from a divine source. To me, it is an example of the sort of idiotic relativism that is sometimes practiced in the name of ecumenism. We know that Obama is not a Muslim; while his Christianity may be liberal, it is hard to imagine that he actually believes Islam was divinely revealed. Some New Agers or Baha'is may believe in both Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammed, but no Christian in the usual sense does. Perhaps some Muslims actually would take this as a sign of respect, but I find that hard to fathom. I'm an atheist, but I wouldn't think it "respectful" were Obama to speak to me as if he believed in atheism, when I know that he doesn't. I would think he was humoring me, which isn't respectful at all.

This isn't the first time I've encountered such nonsense. Some years ago a mailing from the University Museum referred to the "discovery" of a Tibetan lama. When I wrote to suggest it made no sense for them to use language implying a belief in Tibetan Buddhism that they don't actually hold, they responded that it wasn't their purpose to promulgate an "atheist or agnostic position." I gave up at that point; it seemed clear they were unwilling to apply any kind of epistemological rigor to the question. For one thing, they were conflating, for no apparent reason, atheism and agnosticism. Surely they didn't think they're the same thing; if they knew they're different, surely they knew which, if either, I was expressing. And I wasn't really expressing a position at all; I was only requesting they not express a position either. You could call this an "agnostic" way of speaking, but it's actually consistent with any belief or non-belief, which is precisely why I was recommending it. But evidently the Museum staff was too deeply immersed in relativism to comprehend this.