Torture: The Media, Obama, and the Establishment

Glenn Greenwald:

Jesse Ventura was on CNN with Larry King on Monday night and this exchange occurred, illustrating how simple, clear and definitively non-partisan is the case for investigations and prosecutions for those who ordered torture (video below):

VENTURA: I don't watch much TV. This year's reading, I covered Bush's life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects.

And I'm very disturbed about it.

I'm bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we've created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem.

I will criticize President Obama on this level; it's a good thing I'm not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.

KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was waterboarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Let's just repeat that: "I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law." That is the crux of the case for investigations and prosecutions. That's it. Can anyone find a "liberal" or ideological argument anywhere in what Ventura said? It's about as far from a partisan or "leftist" idea as one can get. Yet our establishment media has succeeded (as Digby recently argued) in converting this view into a "Hard Left," "liberal" or "partisan" argument because that's the only prism through which they can understand anything, and that's their time-honored instrument for demonizing any idea that threatens their institutional prerogatives and orthodoxies (only the Hard Left favors this).

This is not a partisan argument. It's not an ideological one. It's not a question of values or of opinions. Those who ordered torture and those who tortured broke the law.

That this has become a partisan argument shows the complete fecklessness of the media and the total cynicism of the Republican party. And it doesn't speak too well of Obama, Pelosi, or the other Democrats who've decided this isn't that big a deal, either.

If Obama doesn't want these people to go to jail, he should be forced to issue pardons. None of this "I want to look forwards, not backwards" garbage. The government is not a human being with a neck injury. It *can* look forwards and backwards. I understand that he'd rather focus on other priorities, but what does that say to the world? Everybody's going to think -- perhaps correctly -- that we're just like dictatorships all over the world that claim to oppose torture while giving their interrogators a nod and a wink? We can't just pretend it never happened. We need to find out exactly what did happen, and we need to punish those who made it happen. And then we need to make sure it never happens again.

How Smart Intellectuals Believe In Orthodox Judaism

Chana has a bizarre post today that I think explains one of the most confounding questions for us OTDers: how could smart, intellectually curious adults possibly believe that stuff?

The answer can be found in a paragraph she quotes from every Modern Orthodox intellectual's favorite rabbi, "the Rav," Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik:

The religious Jew accepts the entire Torah as a hok, both in regard to its immutability and also its unintellegibility... To be a loyal Jew is to be heroic, and heroes commit themselves without intellectual reservations. Only one who lacks the courage of commitment will belabor the "why"...

Do you see that? It's "heroic" to commit oneself to something admittedly unintelligible without intellectual reservations.

This is related to, but slightly different from the other technique I've identified that intellectual Orthodox Jews use to believe: compartmentalization. In compartmentalization, the intellectual simply chooses not to apply his/her full range of intellectual techniques to certain religious questions. (An example of compartmentalism is applying the techniques of textual criticism to the Talmud but not to the Bible, or using skepticism during one's day job as a scientist but not applying it to religion.) I've always understood compartmentalization as a technique people use when they are too scared to question their foundational beliefs.

But this is something different. This isn't turning away from the truth in fear, but rather turning away with pride. Somehow the Rav and many like him convince themselves that there is something noble ("heroic") about believing the unbelievable.

What should we call this technique? "Heroic denial?"

Words and Argumentation: Abortion

Mark and I have a longstanding argument about abortion over at his place. It generally starts like this:

Mark: Abortion is wrong because fetuses are humans and it's wrong to kill humans.
Me: You're just begging the question by overloading the word "humans." When we say "fetuses are humans," we mean it in a biological sense. When we say "it's wrong to kill humans," we are no longer talking about the biological sense, but a moral one.

Today, I came across a great post at Overcoming Bias that might be helpful. Excerpt:

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball"...

But then, by the time I discovered the game, I'd already been practicing it for years - albeit with a different purpose.

Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism:

All [mortal, ~feathers, biped] are mortal;
Socrates is a [mortal, ~feathers, biped];
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

But the principle applies much more broadly:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest makes a sound."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not make a sound."

Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "~sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates acoustic vibrations]."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

Now there is no longer an apparent collision - all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human brain, which takes as input a linear time series of frequency mixes.")

...

The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it. Though mostly they won't be able to answer at all, because it is mostly profession in the first place, and you cannot cognitively zoom in on an audio recording.

When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.

I think that's brilliant. Let's revisit Mark's argument, replacing "human" with membership criteria. The original argument:

Mark: Abortion is wrong because fetuses are humans and it's wrong to kill humans.

I'll let Mark respond for himself, but my guess is that he'd replace the first "humans" with something like [membership test: contains a certain subset of DNA or carries the potential of becoming the animal homo sapiens if carried to term.] When we get to the second "humans," though, it's clear there is a problem. Why should it be a priori wrong to kill [membership test: contains a certain subset of DNA or carries the potential of becoming the animal homo sapiens if carried to term?] Since when do we base morality on that sort of thing?

When I think "killing humans is wrong," I mean that "killing [membership test: is an animal that has consciousness and feelings and self-awareness] is wrong." (Obviously, there are exceptions even to that, like self-defense, but that's tangential to this post.) So the question then becomes, does a fetus pass that test? My answer is no. (It's also interesting to note that animals who are not biologically homo sapiens may pass that test, like intelligent aliens or possibly apes and dolphins. Mark would have to use a separate argument for why it's wrong to kill those creatures if in fact he thinks it is wrong.)

Now Mark has rightly pointed out that people in comas also don't have consciousness, feelings, or self-awareness, but we still think it's wrong to kill them (at least while there's hope of recovery.) That just gets into what we mean by "having" consciousness, feelings, and self-awareness. Coma patients have had it, and may have it again, so we treat them as "having" it, as far as the question of killing goes. Fetuses have never had it, although they may have it in the future.

It's perfectly rational then, to argue that "killing [membership test: is an animal that has consciousness and feelings and self-awareness or will have them]" is wrong as well, but then one would have to justify that claim, rather than relying on the humans-humans argument. I'm not trying to prove that abortion is okay in this post, just that the humans-humans argument is sophistry.

Political Pundits Worse Than Flipping a Coin

Via LeisureGuy, Jonah Lehrer:

Needless to say, the political pundits were hilariously wrong about the New Hampshire primary. I won't hypothesize about what actually happened, other than to say that I think many voters here wanted a longer primary. They went meta on the race and decided that they didn't want to coronate Obama in the beginning of January. This says less about Obama and Clinton and more about the over-hyped press coverage and shortened primary schedule. I voted for Obama, but I'm looking forward to a drawn out race for the Democratic nomination. This whole democracy thing is pretty entertaining.

But back to the failures of the political pundits. Nobody should be surprised. In 1984, the Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlock began an epic research project: He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends" - they were professional pundits - and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the experts were asked to rate the probability of several different possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the experts about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their mind. By the end of the study, Tetlock had quantified 82,361 different predictions.

After Tetlock tallied up the data, the predictive failures of most experts became painfully obvious. When asked to forecast the probability of a specific event happening, pundits tended to perform worse than random chance. A dart throwing chimp would have beaten the majority of well-informed experts. Tetlock also found that academic specialists - say, an expert in Middle Eastern affairs or a specialist on the New Hampshire primary - weren't any better than the-man-on-the-street at predicting the future. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock writes in Expert Political Judgment. "There is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals--distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on--are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations." Furthermore, the most famous experts in Tetlock's study tended to be the least accurate, consistently churning out overblown and overconfident forecasts. Eminence was a handicap.

So think about that the next time you watch those talking heads on CNN.

Now I was as wrong about New Hampshire as all the professional pundits, but then again, I'm not being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for my predictions and analysis, either.

The media do not have a liberal bias. They have a stupid bias.

Morning Links: Petraeus, Iran, and Belief

• I wonder whether the new issue of The American Conservative will ignite the same kind of controversy with its "Sycophant Savior" article as the MoveOn.org ad did:
  

  David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the “way forward,” Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind—one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes...
  
  Politically, it qualifies as a brilliant maneuver. The general’s relationships with official Washington remain intact. Yet he has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life. He has failed his country. History will not judge him kindly.

  
  Yowtch. I'm kidding, of course. There's no chance the media or the Senate responds to The American Conservative as they did to MoveOn.org. Because of liberal bias, you see.
  


• Glenn Greenwald points to some "extraordinary reports about what appears to be the virtual refusal of senior military officials to permit a war with Iran."


• Eliezer Yudowsky writes about belief and evidence and what it would take to convince him that 2 + 2 = 3.

Noah's Ark vs. UFOs

This post by Stardust got me thinking about standards of evidence. From a purely objective standpoint, UFO abduction reports appear to be much more plausible than the story of Noah's Ark. UFO abductions would not have to violate any laws of physics, for example, while having two (or seven) animals from each species (or "kind") fit into a boat built by a man to survive a 40-day flood that covered the Earth would require a "miracle," or violation of the laws of physics (not to mention biology.)

There is no scientific reason whatsoever that there couldn't be intelligent life on other planets. There is no scientific reason that intelligent life from a relatively nearby planet couldn't fly their spacecraft here and abduct a person. They could plausibly even do it undetectably. If they are advanced enough, they might even be able to selectively modify a person's brain to do their bidding.

Don't get me wrong -- I don't believe that any UFO abductions have happened, because there is no good evidence that they have and I tend not to believe extraordinary claims without good evidence. But I can't see how they aren't infinitely more probable than the Noah's Ark story. (Or the talking donkey or Jesus's resurrection, etc.)

Just another example of how many religious people don't apply the same standards of evidence to religious claims as to merely extraordinary claims. I challenge my religious readers who believe the story of Noah is more or less literally true to explain why they believe in that but not in UFO abductions.