Photoshopped by Trixie
I hope all my readers have a good Christmas day, whether you celebrate or not.
For much of this blog’s tenure it existed only because I knew there were people who still wanted me to write, so y’all are why this blog is around.
In the New Year I’ll be picking up the pace. That will include some theoretical pieces on technology, and probably some articles on rituals, social selection and so on.
Until then, enjoy your Christmas holidays. If you don’t get them, I hope you earn plenty of overtime.
And we’ve documented that torture creates more terrorists. Indeed, Salon notes:
Among the most notable victims of torture was Sayeed Qutb, the founding father of modern political jihadism. His 1964 book, “Milestones,” describes a journey towards radicalization that included rape and torture, sometimes with dogs, in an Egyptian prison. He left jail burning with the determination to wage transnational jihad to destroy these regimes and their backers, calling for war against all those who used these methods against Muslims
***
“Milestones” remains one of the Arab world’s most influential books. Indeed, it was the lodestar of Al Qaeda leaders like Ayman Al-Zawahiri (who was also tortured in Egyptian jails) and the late Osama Bin Laden.
In other words, it was torture which drove the founder of modern jihad to terrorism in the first place.
The article goes on to list a variety of other, very important people, radicalized by torture.
I mean, if I were thrown in prison, tortured and raped, and got out, you can damn well bet when I got out I’d want the order that did that to me destroyed.
I will note also that drone warfare/assassination warfare does the same thing. It is very rare that assassination programs do anything but bring more radical leaders to the fore. The only prominent exception I can think of is the probable assassination of Arafat.
at least ostensibly for the police murders of Garner and Brown has ignited a frenzy. The murderer, Brinsley, was a violent man who had committed other crimes.
I will simply note that such tragic events are the inevitable result of systemic injustice. Those who wish less murders, should work for justice.
That includes police.
I don’t know. But Pinochet did the same (plus rats), it’s not without precedent.
The war veteran, who loathed manipulating Western politicians even as he defended tactics of collective punishment, continued his account: Afghan prisoners were tied face down on small chairs, Jack said. Then fighting dogs entered the torture chamber.
“If the prisoners did not say anything useful, each dog got to take a turn on them,” Jack told Todenhoefer. “After procedure like these, they confessed everything. They would have even said that they killed Kennedy without even knowing who he was.”
What should be done is to find out.
If true, everyone involved, from the President on down, and everyone who covered for them should be tried and locked up. (I’d say hanged high, and would be willing to be hang man, but prison is a worse fate.)
That won’t happen, and we know it won’t happen.
In light of the collapse of the Ruble I think it’s worth revisiting what controls exchange rates.
Supply and Demand.
Yeah, if you know something about the subject you’re probably shaking your head.
Supply and Demand doesn’t set prices in many cases in the way that an Economics 101 course tells you.
Such texts will say that the exchange rate is based on exports and imports.
For many countries, that isn’t true; or not all the time. The US dollar can move up even when the trade balance is south (as it has been for decades now.) The same is true of many other economies.
Britain hardly exports anything any more. But people want to live in London. Or they want the city to invest their money, or they want to buy art at Sothebys, or they just want a relatively safe place they can run to if the politics in their country go south.
People likewise want Manhattan real-estate; a US passport, and so on. A vacation or home in Paris or the South of France.
They want to buy stocks in important companies which are defining the future, like Apple, or Tesla, or Google, even if those companies manufacture overseas.
They want money in China to take advantage of China’s high growth rate and returns, while Chinese want money out for diversification and to have a safe place to go if the politics turn against them.
People don’t want vacation homes in Russia, by and large. They may want to take advantage of growth opportunities (which exist in certain sectors), but before the sanctions they were scared of corruption (with good reason) and post sanctions they are worried about getting returns out. Since most of Russia’s exports are of hydrocarbons, and since people don’t want to move money into Rubles otherwise, the value of the Ruble in terms of other currencies moves up and down with the price of hydrocarbons.
There are other factors, for example if you offer high returns, that can matter (raising returns didn’t matter to Russia, because the potential value was swamped by fears of further ruble and oil devaluation.) Speculation of future gain or loss in the futures and options markets can raise or lower the value of your currency as well. You can fix your currency and you can make it stick if your economy is strong enough in specific ways (mostly having to do with producing what you need). China did this for years, and so have many other countries. This can lead to black market currency markets and problems, but that can be better than the alternatives (as Russia may now be finding out.)
But if you float your currency, the bottom line is that excahnge rates (with a few exceptions) to rise and fall based on how much people want from your country which they have to buy with your currency.
These are the same thing. Russia sells oil to the world, and their currency is based on the price of oil. (It is for this same reason that the Canadian dollar has been sliding.)
Putin has been a competent leader for Russia in many ways, but the failure to diversify the economy from oil is his primary failure. You might say “corruption”, but resource economies are almost always corrupt. The only way to (somewhat) avoid it is to put the money away in a sovereign fund or the equivalent.
It is also important to not allow the currency to become a resource currency, because that crushes all other export businesses.
Why did the price of oil drop? There are a lot of theories, from screw-ups in the futures market, to increased supply and reduced demand, to intent to destroy Russia.
What is interesting is that OPEC (meaning, in this case, Saudi Arabia) has refused to do anything to stabilize oil prices and prevent the collapse.
Saudi Arabia needs higher oil prices, they have no economy other than oil of significance, but they also have more ability to handle oil price collapses. Saudi crude is cheap to produce, under $10/barrel. The profit may be less, but they are making a profit. A lot of Russian, American, Canadian and other oil is not profitable at low prices. Letting oil prices be low for a year or two will probably help Saudia Arabia more in the long run. Certainly it hurts their competitors more than it hurts them.
Many also believe that the US and Saudi Arabia are doing this deliberately to hurt Russia.
Of more fundamental interest is that China has been buying less and less commodities (not just oil, but metals like copper). China is the most important economy in the world now for hard commodity prices.
The Ruble collapse is going to hurt a lot of people, most especially the Europeans. Europe sells a lot of goods and services to Russia, and Russia is no longer going to be able to afford them.
For now, low oil prices will be good for the US, but the general commodity price drops are hammering many other countries, and that will lead to reduced demand globally. This isn’t a good thing, however much many Americans are enjoying Russia (and Putin”s woes.)
I will note also that Russians seem to be blaming the West for the collapse of the Ruble. That’s a good thing if they decide going supine will help them.
It’s not a good thing if they get angry about it and decide the West (meaning the US) is deliberately trying to destroy them.
According to the American people, torture is justified, and it works.
Every demographic has at least a plurality for torture: men and women, young and old, white and non-white.
The only good finding is that a plurality of Democrats believe torture was not justified, though, within the margin of error, they do believe it was helpful.
Before Bush, most Americans were against torture. The endless drumbeat of propaganda and the need to justify what America does (America is good, therefore America does not do evil), has had its effect.
I will make an ethical judgment: people think torture is justified are bad people. Depraved people. A society where a majority thinks it is justified is a depraved culture. (And remember, 51% think it was justified, but 20% don’t have an opinion. Only about a third of Americans are opposed.)
There are two arguments against torture.
The first is ethical: torture is evil and should not be engaged in. (This is, for the record, my personal view.)
The second is pragmatic: torture doesn’t work, or does more harm than good.
These are separate arguments: you may believe that torture works, but is too evil to use. You may believe that it’s not evil, but ineffective.
Contrariwise, you may believe that torture is bad, but that the potential good outweighs the potential bad. You may even, as many people do, believe that torture is something some people deserve (just as rape, according to Clarence Thomas, is part of the punishment of prison.)
Ethical arguments are rarely conclusive: they must start from unprovable axioms. If someone disagrees with the axioms, it does not matter how tight the logic is, you cannot come to agreement. It is for this reason that some argue the need for a God—an ultimate authority who lays down axioms.
I am of the school which believes that there are certain things we should never do to other people. Death, to me, is not the worst thing that can happen to someone—go into a burn ward and ask the people with large body burns if they want to live or die, and understand that odds are you’d be no different.
Torture does horrible things not just to those who are tortured, but to those who torture. There is often a pleasure in hurting or humiliating other people. Those who pretend otherwise are deluding themselves, most likely because they don’t want to admit that such evil lurks in their psyche.
If you torture, you become a torturer. This is also why I do not laugh at rapists being raped: whoever did it is now a rapist too.
The counter-argument is simple enough: we do bad things all the time if we think the good outweighs the bad. If a few people’s suffering creates more good (for other people) than their suffering, we should allow it.
This is the dark side of utilitarianism: the greater good can lead to horrible actions. Yet our entire society is based around such compromises: from industrial agriculture, the use of plastic, widespread automobile adoption; CO2 emissions and pollution caused by activities we value more highly than the widespread harm they cause.
So why make torture different?
If you don’t make torture different: if you don’t red line it, then you are reduced to the pragmatic arguments: does it work, what is the ratio of good to harm, and so on.
The world is a better place if we simply red-line some behaviour. Thou shall not torture, thou shall not rape, thou shall not use nukes, thou shall use jacketed bullets instead of soft bullets, thou shall treat prisoners of war with decency, thou shall not shit in thy neighbours air so they get sick and their kids have asthma.
Red-lining certain types of behavior creates a better world.
The pragmatic ethical problem is “but if I don’t do it, others will.”
If I don’t torture, those who torture have an advantage. If I don’t rape, those who rape have advantage (what?) If I don’t pollute, those who do, have an advantage.
The pragmatic ethical response is “if I do do bad things there are more bad things in the world.”
If America doesn’t have prison rape and doesn’t torture, there is less torture (and a huge amount) less rape.
This is a unilateral action that the US (or any other country which tortures) can take to make the world and their country a better place.
At some point the world only becomes better when we say “no, I’m not going to do evil whether or not I perceive an advantage to it.”
Now a strong argument can be made that treating people better is an advantage, and there are many ways in which you can deny an advantage to those who are evil (generally by refusing to compete with them on their terms.) That’s another article, so I won’t go into it here.
But I will say the following: personally, I hold torture apologists in the same sort of contempt I hold rape apologists and those who make rape threats. Such people are worse than animals, and are a large part of why the world has so much suffering. Their arguments from pragmatics are vile and self-serving. The line must be drawn somewhere, but no matter where you draw the line, torture is over it. If you torture, or support torture, you’re evil.
That we have to have this discussion is amazing to me. Torture should be the sort of action which people are ashamed of. If they support it, if they’ve done it, they should be trying to conceal it, knowing all decent men and women will have nothing to do with them if their vileness is discovered.
That this is not the case is the saddest thing about American torture.
Just a few quick points:
- It seems HQ wanted more torture than those in the field did, and would insist;
- Torture, Stirling Newberry once told me, is about sending information “we torture”, not getting it;
- But really, torture can provide any info you want, like that Saddam has WMD;
- It is interesting that the report is so negative. Maybe the CIA screwed up by spying on Congress and getting caught?
We knew it was happening over 10 years ago. We knew then that it didn’t work in the sense of providing reliable information, and we knew then that the cost of torture in terms of damage to America’s reputation would be huge (and reputation does matter.)
As Bmaz points out at Empty Wheel, a great number of crimes were committed, and not just by the CIA, but by government officials, and they knew at the time torture was illegal. There’s no chance of them being prosecuted now, but we can hope that some of them will face a court in the future. Times do change, and those who must protect them to protect themselves will not always be in power.
One day it would be nice to see Bush in the dock. Cheney, unfortunately, will probably die before then.
Understand this, if you understand nothing else:
the system is working as intended.
It is true that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a sandwich, and it is tempting to blame the prosecutor, Donovan. Certainly he made a decision, but he made the decision that the system wants: police are almost never prosecuted for assault or murder and on those rare occasions that they are, they almost always get off.
Donovan did what the legal system wanted him to do.
As for the police in question, well, they did what the legal system wants them to do, as well:
“Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”
” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” he said, as officers restrained him.
What you will hear defenders of the police say is “he was non-compliant.”
Non-compliant.
If a police officer tells you to do anything, you do it immediately. If you do not, anything that happens to you, up to and including death, is your problem.
The legal system exists, today, to ensure compliance.
From Wikipedia
American oligarchical society rests on people not effectively resisting. All gains now go to the top 10%, with the rest of society losing ground. Incarceration rates blossom in 1980, which is also the year that the oligarchical program is voted in and becomes official. (Trickle down economics can be understood no other way.)
Any part of the population which is inclined to resist, must be taught that it cannot resist. Get out millions to demonstrate against the Iraq war: it will not work. Protest against police killings of African Americans, it will not work.
Nothing you do will work.
You will comply, and you will learn that resistance is futile.
The more outside the mainstream you are, the more you will learn it. African Americans, Latinos, poor whites (in that order.) Those who are fundamentally authoritarian, but somewhat opposed to the system (like the Bundy ranch) are treated more carefully (though the militia movement has its martyrs). But the fundamental lesson of life is to do what your lords and masters tell you to, and to not protest any law or order, no matter how nonsensical, trivial, or unjust it is.
Three strikes laws and the end of judicial discretion are about this. During the 80s the legal system was taken away from the judges and given to the prosecutors and the police. Almost all sentences are plea-bargained: the person with almost all the power in the system is the prosecutor. He or she is judge and jury for the vast majority of cases, and even when a case does go in front of a judge, the judge’s discretion is extremely limited. Your third crime stealing a bike? Too bad, we’re throwing the key away.
Compliance when given specific orders and learned hopelessness about protest or organizing are the aims. Ordinary citizens must understand that they cannot change the system if elites do not agree with the changes they want made. If they try, they will be arrested and receive a criminal sentence, meaning they can never again have a good job.
In this system the wolves or goats identify themselves. An injustice is committed, people protest and the most aggressive protestors (which doesn’t always mean violence) are arrested. Certainly the organizers are. Those people are, as a result, usually destroyed economically even if they aren’t locked up for years.
The system is doing what it is meant to do. It teaches compliance, it teaches hopelessness and it identifies those who will not obey laws that don’t make sense (marijuana possession, for example), or who will fight or organize against the system and then it destroys them economically and often psychologically through practices like solitary confinement and prison rape.
The system will not change until those who want it to change have the raw power to force it to change, because it does serve the interests of its masters by destroying or marginalizing anyone who is actually a danger to oligarchical control of the system.
Race is an effective tool in this system, dividing the lower classes (and almost everyone is lower class now) against each other. No matter how bad a poor white’s life is, well hey, he ain’t black. He or she can feel superior to someone, can have someone to kick down at.
And understand this, most of what police are paid in is social coin: the right to demand immediate obedience and fuck people up; the solidarity of the blue line; the feeling of belonging and power, is what makes the job worth having for (probably most) of the people who are now attracted to it.
Being a thug; having social sanction to be a thug, is enjoyable to a lot of people. Since that’s what cops get to do, those are the sort of people who tend to be attracted to the job. The police are the biggest toughest gang around, and belonging to them has most of the rewards of gang life, without the dangers of going to jail.
Working as intended
