The violence of indifference

Silence is often considered the mark of indifference, but ambivalence can be motivated, not exactly disinterested. Waiting out a risk of upheaval without taking sides is a gamble.

The now-obsolete Nazi Pope meme that conflated institutional complicity with the European holocaust and recent church scandals over covering for clergy implicated in child sexual abuse was an interesting choice of double entendres. Both sides of the meme involve scapegoating one church for what many other contemporary institutions have done or still do.

“The heart hid still in the dark,
hard as the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Scapegoats are embodied metaphors for what no one wants to deal with as a social problem, but everyone feels disgusted about. Other churches, any church really, is realistically predisposed to protect clergy if they are accused of inappropriate conduct, exerting their moral authority to insist that silence or disbelief is the politically correct response. As for the other half of the meme, the scope of institutional complicity in the European holocaust remains largely unexamined.

Since the Catholic church has done so well as a current metaphor in public discourse for “fallen” social institutions, I’ll pick apart some missing context to the child sex abuse scandal to illustrate the point. Genocide studies are really another kettle of fish, although the Catholic church is unlucky enough to crop up as one among many more recently implicated institutions in genocide research on Rwanda, as well. Colonial and post-colonial Catholicism, for Rwanda at least, operated like a “hologram” in the regime’s official self-image – “bright, shiny, perfect and unreal.”

Imported abstract Christian ideology, Gerard Prunier argues, provided “a legitimizing factor, a banner, a source of profit, a way of becoming educated, a club, a matrimonial agency and even at times a religion. But since it was all things to all men, it could not have any real healing power when faced with the deepening ethnic gap which the Belgian authorities kept absent-mindedly digging [between Hutu and Tutsi].”

The Belgian approach to governing the colony by proxy, through reinforcement and systemization of the political hegemony of a Tutsi minority, had rather casually formalized and entrenched discrimination patterns that had once been far easier to side-step or renegotiate in favor of social mobility and cohesion. The Belgians saw their own role as neutral with respect to local preferences about who should rule whom among the blacks. If they also conspicuously flattered the Tutsi as natural leaders among Hutu, they probably saw this as the shallow side of everyday diplomacy, not a dangerous new factor in Rwanda’s internal political culture.

Such self-styled neutrality, tacitly in favor of whoever looks to be the most powerful already, is typical of any social institution coexisting with a long-standing pattern of inequality, whitewashing its abusive or exploitative aspects in favor of whatever “natural order of things” has apparently come about of its own accord. Going along is always the easier route, and if pressed for comment on some long-standing injustice, anyone already in the habit of going with the flow is liable to rationalize on behalf of the status quo.

“All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

It’s easy enough to look at the church as a metaphor, remembering that accuracy isn’t necessarily the point when describing a scapegoat; the question is what they are being used to represent. There needs to be a fictitious hook, to explain away their culpability for a problem no one else wants to seem touched by.

Here the pundits chose celibacy. This conveniences the child welfare professions with a double scapegoat: “men can’t help themselves” is the shadow of this explanation for “what the church has been doing wrong”.

This “men have uncontrollable urges” assumption remains a fairly typical rape defense, but not a realistic one. As soon as mainstream feminism gets bored with its success at demonizing the male of the species, it will get easier to criminalize rape in particular, instead of scapegoating “tendencies inherent in male behavior” for social problems in general. For now, rape is only really illegal by the letter of the law – most victims know better than to bother trying to prosecute the crime.

In fact, rape victims who haven’t been penetrated aren’t legally rape victims at all. This distinction construes every form of coercion short of analogy to stabbing someone in the back unconvincing, and fosters victim-blaming any time other forms of coercion are decisive (especially “soft power” tactics like blackmail, economic dependency or bullying).

A confessional culture of accountability might make a more salient Catholic metaphor for political venality and merely procedural levels of accountability, in institutions that refuse to cooperate with standard approaches to seeking redress, much less attempt meaningful reforms. These real and pervasive problems with social justice are bureaucratic foibles more than peculiarities of a specific religion.

 “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” – Thomas Sowell, Chicago school of economics

But when the everyday complacency of any given bureaucracy is finally eclipsed by a newsworthy scandal, a public figure like the President or the Pope can be put on trial for the failure of the institution he officially presides over. The recently retired pope’s reliably meme-worthy grimace for camera was as spooky in its consistency as Lindsay Lohan’s pasty zombie persona (with “and you thought you didn’t have to grow up” captions) in the tabloids. The media knows it’s job is to keep a good thing going, I suppose.

And finding out what sells a paper is tricky when most people think the news is boring, when it isn’t too depressing to think about at all. As Alinsky says in his rules for radicals, narrowing the target for your vitriol down to a person who can be enthusiastically lampooned keeps everyone involved in a “mass movement” on the same page. The alternative, I suppose, would be the disorganization typical of an anti-globalization protest, with rainbow warriors, free Mumia hardliners, and every other cause known to aficionados of the hackey-sack jockeying for attention in a humanitarian carnival.

When the high-most official an institution has to offer takes the stage, excuses about lost paperwork are suddenly less than effective. Something has to give, but no one can afford to give ground willingly. Every admission is grudging, and dealing in bad faith tends to come first. Anything else would look weak.

It seems safe to infer many of these sorts of “voluntary” confessions are ultimately made for quiet non-prosecution agreements. Aggression American Style is a portrait of America’s secular confessional culture in high-profile corruption cases like Watergate. Describing America’s as an “artful” approach to openness, author William Blanchard argues that Americans claim to think of themselves as innocent, no matter how atrocious their actions.

This amounts to opening with a plausible deniability strategy, retreating with a diplomatic simper if confronted about the obvious, and issuing confessional apologies loaded with self-pity (for having been put on the spot for merely human frailties) as a last resort. This description of American ambivalence about power shows how “it is possible to deny our power while, at the same time, enjoying the pleasure of acting on it.”

Sadly, the only charismatic option here is facetious denial.

Maybe in the court of public opinion, which hears only sound bytes, ignorance is the natural alibi of innocence. The Alinsky rules may not work in favor of public interest advocacy, but they do seem valid for designing cheap PR. Experts have tried warning us that bureaucracy, like social/media buzz and well-orchestrated shell games that build market bubbles, has a momentum of its own from group dynamics that leaders are swept up in like the rest of us. That matters a lot less to casual news readers than it does to practitioners in a given organization that knows it’s failing its own mandate.

Even frustrated victims of organizational dysfunction are more likely to be in the mood to see heads roll than to listen to convoluted insider accounts of how a system of perverse incentives arose within the organization’s day-to-day efforts to make ends meet. The result is often an election-year executive promise to the public that major procedural overhauls are going to be undertaken, an approach to trouble-shooting that was recognized as counterproductive decades ago.

Top-down overhauls of organizational procedures tend to produce new administrative speed bumps interfering with daily business in the name of “hands on” micromanagement, without improving performance at all. Modern scholarship on improving performance in organizational behavior can’t help public sector practitioners on the ground floor when they’re drowning in paperwork created by cyclical cosmetic reforms.

But campaign promises never lose their luster, as long as each election year is announced with a new generation of buzzwords. Behind these stage-managed scenes of rhetorical flourish, as long as institutions are getting by on procedural standards of accountability, responsibility for unhappy outcomes can supposedly be canceled out wherever there are blind spots in a given office’s purview. In military jargon, that’s Situation Normal (SNAFU). The Steven King version? Same Shit, Different Day (SSDD).

I am trying to stay focused. Beer goggles still count, right?

But if the blind spots of convenience are built into a forward-looking plausible deniability strategy, this is all a pretense.

Unfortunately, even cover-ups can escalate. If foot-dragging in the name of secrecy privilege exacerbates the grievance, things can keep getting worse, while motivation to fight disclosure builds accordingly. But forestalling the inevitable is a temptation, when the people deciding which secrets to keep (upstream of the disclosure crisis) have been abusing their privileges from the start. They could have:

a)      Lied about the contents of the envelope after they used the TOP SECRET stamp
b)      Lied in the contents of the envelope before they used the TOP SECRET stamp
c)      Distorted any factual information included in the envelope in ways that won’t actually stand up to scrutiny, especially in hindsight
d)     All of the above

The problem with this kind of document handling strategy is that documents are prone to duplication, and their contents are always, at best, redundant with actual facts that can be otherwise known than by reading about them. Waiting for someone to divulge their own copy of a long-classified document is sometimes more a professional courtesy than a matter of curiosity about what was put on paper before the magic rubber stamp was applied.

This is why bureaucrats treasure newspeak, colorless disciplinary jargon, and the like. It greases the wheels, and has more staying power than a big red stamp for “sealing” manila envelops.

Knowledge of the history of the U.S. role in sub-Saharan African politics during the anti-apartheid era would be enough to reconstruct what could have been in the Burn After Reading envelope as a national security motive for what Reagan called “constructive engagement”. One could at least narrow down the possibilities:

a)    Strategic minerals (a short list of those with speculative defense technology applications, found only in South Africa – not that a list of minerals with speculative defense technology applications would normally be short)
b)    Anti-apartheid gradualism (because it’s not an acceptable post-colonial transition unless we can buy time for economic apartheid to entrench its position)
c)    Nuclear non-proliferation (because we sold them on nuclear technology, and now it’s not about our interests, the fate of the world is “suddenly” at stake)
d)    Anti-communism (because Marx has been so influential in post-colonial Africa’s radical program of socialist industrialization, and if this last domino fell the pink hordes would surely be unstoppable)

You don’t actually get to burn it after reading. The highest classification in government document secrecy nevertheless expires after 25 years. After that, a Freedom of Information Act Request should be able to obtain such things. Provided, of course, the government hasn’t strategically “misplaced” them.

The worst case scenario, should the terrible truth come out.

Innocence isn’t a latent characteristic in people who make claims about having a personal capacity for moral responsibility. To make claims about choosing rightly is part of exercising authority responsibly. With this kind of innocence, you use it or lose it.

If “being likeably Catholic” is souring, it’s mainly because school systems, health care systems, public welfare agencies, family courts, and informal communities of concerned friends and acquaintances make the exact same choices all the time. Who couldn’t use a scapegoat for social and institutional indifference to the welfare of other people’s children?

The “suffer the little children” line has actually gotten a little weird in this context. It really doesn’t bring to mind the pandering train of street urchins that must have been tugging on the messiah’s robes and pretending to want hand-outs from Santa, to create a diversion while their co-conspirators picked his pockets.

Here it sounds instead like a motto for resignation, to life in a country that adamantly refuses to sign an international convention on the rights of the child. Rape may not be a uniquely American vice, but not many countries use it for posturing in the name of their prerogatives. It makes an odd corollary for our reputation for moralizing and protesting our own innocence in international affairs.

On the belated exposure of various entertainment celebrities I’d never heard of as known pedophiles, Andrew O’Hagan recently wrote: “Janie Jones, a singer, appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1973 on 26 charges, which included controlling prostitutes and offering them as bribes ‘to BBC men as inducement to play records’. .. ‘a television producer’, might have made a 14-year-old girl pregnant and could therefore be blackmailed.” Unless, like Charlie Chaplin, he had the good sense to marry the little lady and evade blackmail from such diligent authorities in stamping out communism, and of course indecency, as Hoover’s FBI.

The rhetorical detail of the London Review of Books article, the specific banal pretenses wrapped in white lies and ironic pleasantries, is convoluted but salient. That’s the thing about political correctness in casual conversation, it can be circular, self-contradictory, anything but serious. I didn’t think it was a sign of pedophilia to express distaste for children’s company. I’d say claims of fondness for short, sticky brats with outsize entitlement complexes would be cause for suspicion.

Let’s just feed them to death. Ballast slows them down.

Taking child sexual abuse outside the context of pedophilia, and particularly the abuse of young boys, is still something many people are unwilling to do in serious conversation. We just don’t like to bring the topic up in real life, because anyone accused would deny it any which way they can, and everyone associated with the accused (casually or intimately) would then be in an incredibly uncomfortable situation.

“If .. the stories that constitute a hinterland at the BBC .. turn out to involve a great conspiracy, it will be a conspiracy that the whole country had a part in. There will always be a certain amount of embarrassment .. not because we didn’t know but because we did.”

Consistent prosecution of rape is required for the law to be enforceable at all. As for minors protected by statutory rape law, theirs is unreliable testimony for the same reasons that they are especially vulnerable to exploitation in the first place. If there is a trade-off here in accepting child testimony about abuse – that a child’s arm could likewise be twisted to elicit wrongful accusations – it’s easy to see one has to err on the side of caution, and that the child is in the more vulnerable position. This is probably far less problematic than historically has been the case, now that no-fault divorce is an option, taking a mundane conflict of interest off the table.

Unless, theoretically, some child abusers enjoyed abusing their children, and would vigorously contest the intrusions of busybodies in their personal lives even without a conflict of interest on the part of a witness. Because an easily confounded, underfunded authority isn’t much of an authority at all, if investigative leg-work would be required to make a case that could stand up to scrutiny. If the little brat in Atonement can scare us, catching the real culprits is not exactly an ambition we would be equal to, is it?

The logistical path of least resistance is a humiliating one, if you actually have a capacity for shame. Handling rape and other assault charges in a discretionary fashion – balking at the prospect of difficult and contentious case-work by pretending that keeping abusive families together benefits the child through the magical effect of “a stable environment for the child’s emotional development” – is just cynical.

 

Wait, human rights are for radicals.. What if selling candy to
kids is the only thing keeping consumerism from flat-lining?

Child removal is politically easier in cases of illegal immigration or non-violent crime, putting mothers separated from their children by deportation or incarceration at a distinctive and unjustified disadvantage for being reunited with their children. “Estimates based on Justice Department studies indicate that approximately 11,500 children of 5,000 incarcerated mothers are living with nonrelative foster care families.” Another 5,100 children are currently in foster care because their parents were deported under Homeland Security’s quota system for shuttling immigrants back across the border.

These children are actually less likely to be reunited with their parents than children whose primary care givers are accused of purposely maltreating them. Why? Because legal protections are afforded to the family first, when the only barrier to reuniting children with their “god-given” biological parents is concern about child abuse, a policy that takes no account of the preponderance of incest cases among all instances of child sexual abuse.

The result is a broad-based commitment to pretending that child abuse is adequately “prevented” under the status quo in institutional arrangements and routines, an achievement more easily demonstrated by silencing or discrediting victims than by intervening effectively when abuse comes to light.

The FBI probably advertises its commitments to stopping the distribution of child pornography rather than the illegality of child sexual abuse or prostitution in “the meat world” for this reason. Feasibility without effort is to law enforcement commitments what convenience is to health sector triage. “Dude, my algorithm found your shit, so sorry about that.” Same as apologizing for your sniffer dog when he accosts a Senator’s crotch, I guess.

Looking for a warm bodies, no papers? Brothels are good ..

Everyone in politics loves procedural standards of validity, the impersonal alibi of intentional failure to deliver on one’s stated commitments. Of course, even brothels organize, and some hackers also specialize in offering these types of service providers privacy consulting services, with fold-in supplements on how to lie through your teeth after you get caught anyways. Meanwhile the immigrant deportation quotas get sandwiched together with high-minded commitments to stopping human traffickers. The professional enforcers tend to shake their heads and point out that deported human trafficking victims never testify. No one can figure out why.

What about victims of sex crimes who happen to be U.S. citizens – don’t police have a “special victims unit” for that kind of excitement? What we seem to want from “special victims” is a prurient excuse for scapegoating the “criminally insane” oddballs who actually manage to get caught (insomnia can be a rather in-your-face symptom of bad conscience). Clinton got so much credit for stopping the crazies from gunning down innocents that the Democrats tried it again this year, but this time the NRA said no dice. Background checks for a history of mental illness may only make handguns a less convenient vehicle for suicide, but they make the Democrats sound interested in gun control even when they’re humoring the NRA about how central semiautomatic rifles are to the hunting tourism sector and the redneck lifestyle.

Choice of weapons actually permitted for licensed hunting is decided at the state level. In Oregon, the firearm use regulations for hunting licenses stipulate: “Semiautomatic rifles with a magazine capacity greater than five cartridges prohibited (except for western gray squirrel).”

God gave us these squirrels, absent-minded but tireless guardians of the forest. The uzi honors their, uh, velocity.

The real world experience for people with a mental illness label has more to do with accumulating a history of repeat victimization than for victimizing others. I suppose that just means the quiet ones are accumulating motive, like ticking time bombs at large. The medicalization of crime victims’ emotional distress as a correlate of psychiatric illness other than PTSD is now admitted, but only as a way to add urgency to the plea that states do more of the same. Whether nominal gun control campaigns or pharmaceutical marketing strategies have more to do with the stigmatization behind this vulnerability is perhaps beside the point.

The relationship in the U.S. between the mental health court system, inconsistencies in housing assistance provision, the systematic gaps in injury care coverage I brought up earlier that make trauma care virtually impossible for low-income assault victims to access, and emergency room routines for shuttling the homeless through “triage” share a set of interlocking inefficiencies with suspiciously well-placed blind spots. This state of affairs makes domestic violence allegations easy to confuse with symptoms of paranoia or other biochemical emotional disturbances, when claims are informally raised by victims who accosted the police or health care providers without first engaging a lawyer. The retort, when confronted about a victim’s allegations, that “she’s just crazy” is quite a convenience option, for empty-handed social service providers and assailants alike.

The protection of these enabling institutions extends naturally to perpetrators of violence against children, as long as one is content to abuse one’s own children rather than grabbing those of strangers and running off with them. When your maltreated pre-teen turns into a sulky high school junkie, it probably looks fairly reasonable to send her to a punitive rehab program for behavior modification therapies, or take away her shoelaces for quarantine in peaceful highly-medicated community of wards.

Is this a weird dream, or am I in a vintage photo?

A few hundred years ago, orphanages were publicly criticized strictly on the grounds that child removal over child abuse allegations rewards bad parenting by relieving the parents of undesirables who do no work and smell funny. If this sentiment still holds, perhaps we should stop making such a secret of it. Political correctness about whose best interests are actually being protected at present is making the notion of beneficence toward children come across as in bad taste.

But some lawyers now argue that the sexual innocence of childhood was a contrivance of the Victorian era (those same eccentrics who condemned the use of children as chimneysweeps), even insinuating that early efforts to forbid sex with children were a reaction to widespread infatuation with the iconic Peter Pan. I suppose if you can pull that one off, you’d find it even easier to paint child abuse memories as a commonplace psychotic symptom that warrants the use of parental authority (backed up by mental health courts) to institutionalize and sedate the disruptive, emotional patient. Freudian pop psychology can serve as the unofficial subtext for why “psychotic symptoms” manifest in this particular way.

Mental health courts don’t sound like an especially regressive dispute resolution system until you look into their willingness to forcibly institutionalize first-time psychiatric patients with assembly line justice procedures. This policy is especially problematic given the well-established inability of mental health professionals to distinguish mental patients from the perfectly sane in an inpatient setting. Once you’re there, they just assume you belong and carry on accordingly.

Such an arbitrary and capricious mental health court system penalizes those who speak out on the losing side of an interpersonal dispute and strips them of their right to speak for themselves and be taken seriously.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take a commission to help
their friend. The gentle king’s request? Glean what afflicts him.

Family values rhetoric paired with expressed hatred of welfare politics would be a crude strategy for gloating over “the situation.” But, not everyone is above being that crass.

If the CIA were partisan, they’d probably side with “rape culture”, wouldn’t they? If they thought it was a professional specialization among militants and not a slur from the opposite side (of the aisle). Someday people are going to stop talking about pedophilia and admit that when you like rape, the kids are just easier to run down and, as needed, discredit. In the mean time, keep it at home, or keep it in your pants – simple.

Children are hardly the only casualties here. Iron Jawed Angels illustrates this approach to using soft power in an overtly political dispute. The Alice Paul case backfired, but outside a watershed public crisis, the abuse of soft power can be brutally effective. You see its logical conclusion in the suffocating effect of a father’s authority over his son in Dead Poets Society, and in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man when the narrator’s perspective on informal racist discrimination is deemed a sign of psychotic paranoia.

Of course, the standard excuse for the standard of care in the mental health care system is that crazy people don’t pay their bills on time. That’s also why there are so many of them on the street (i.e., governments closed the long-term care public psychiatric facilities, without arranging for adequate access to assisted housing in the community for those unwilling or unable to live with next of kin). Not that quality of inpatient care is something many patients are thrilled about, but the street isn’t necessarily a great place to live either.

Technically they could eschew over-diagnosis if triage were such an overriding concern, but psychiatric consultations for renewing prescriptions are somehow considered cost-effective on a rather large scale.

And they call it “a consultation”

Health care simply invoke triage rhetoric whenever ethics conflict with entrenched routines and the conveniences they engender. Look at some other outstanding instances of health system failures that have become habitual. Are they truly irrational, or just opaque in economic rationale?

It can  sound like administrative efficiency to not double-check national spending on pharmaceuticals for overspending on recently-patented drugs that haven’t demonstrated substantive improvements on the effectiveness of more affordable drugs already available in generic formulations. That would make it sound efficient to sign off on “me-too drugs” that add questionable equivalency of effectiveness to exorbitant new-release drug pricing, too.

As for the social determinants of health, it looks like peddling affordable fountain drinks is a rights issue that trumps access to palatable tap water or health-friendly food subsidy regimes, in the arena of “free trade” agreements. The world’s advisory addictions treatment experts figured out how to shift emphasis from prevention to taxation for alcohol and tobacco a long time ago. And it seems we aren’t doing enough to export the McWorld body type as yet – we wouldn’t want smoking-related deaths to outstrip the rising rates of diabetes and obesity-related heart disease in the developing world. They might set up a black market for chicken nuggets.

Now this is exactly why self-help is against procedure, sir, ..

The U.S. has a health care system that asks pregnant teens at risk of life-threatening complications during vaginal delivery to choose between their own survival and the life of the child, if they show up without insurance coverage for a c-section. Pre-viability abortions may be affordable at Planned Parenthood, but assisted delivery is for those who can afford to pay. Their parents’ health insurance policies, if they have them, probably don’t cover unplanned grand-babies.

Technocratic partisanship does an especially lazy job here, to legitimizes gaps where there should be none in a service delivery system. From a right-wing perspective, the pregnant girl is at fault, and her fault absolves the system of any obligation toward her well-being. From a left-wing perspective, making abortion the default option for pregnant teens spares children the burden of raising children of their own.

Both sides are counting on the audience to flinch at the word “abortion” so that cognitive dissonance (i.e., emotional buzzing in the head) drowns out the substance of their arguments. But how many women wait until the fetus has photogenic hair and teeth before deciding whether or not they’re ready to change diapers? Girls, get the width of that pelvis measured in a timely fashion if you’d sacrifice “the child’s life” to save your own – timing matters.

The cost of neonatal intensive care for a pre-term orphan may incidentally outweigh what it would’ve cost to save the mother’s life with a c-section. But the Supreme Court figured out how to parse the ethics out in a way that makes abortion sound like a discretionary issue between state legislators and their lady voters, always deferential to the brutal career contests and heart-wrenching debates among humble elected politicians when it comes to keeping wedge issues alive.

Is this too economically irrational to be cynical? The hospital could always try to punt the bill to next of kin, if the mother’s parents might be able to deliver on a lien for the hospital fees for keeping their grandchild alive, after a delivery that cost their daughter’s life. Solemnly describing a life or death scenario without caveats could also negate the efforts of competitors to undercut a given provider’s prices, if knowledge of one’s options among emergency obstetrics providers appears to be lacking when the patient asks for a prognosis.

From a new Jane Goodall essay on power suits for ladies.

The “family values” nuts are doing their damnedest to establish credibility as fanatics by simultaneously cutting off access to contraceptives. Smart women move to blue states for Sophie’s choice (live today, have another one later, if you can ever figure out how to afford parenting). But are they dodging the impositions of red state patriarchy, or tacit class war? Somehow both political parties are content to leave the question of “what are acceptable consequences for an expecting mother’s inability to pay for life-saving services” out of the equation.

Winnebago rant

Civilians have always been clearly delineated as off-limits for violence. Take Euripides, in a few lines from Herakles:

“Strange-looking death group.
Old men, mothers, children all together.
Grotesque fate.”

Civilization differs from pitting all against all because it frames security as an ethical concern, both a national priority and a social good. Defending civilians from marauders, even if they are not your own kin, is a timeless and universal standard of honor among skilled practitioners of war.

Game of Thrones? How not to play musical chairs (and live).

Even love of individual freedom stems from respect for the ethics of security. A standing threat of proven feasibility (if you dare stick your neck out, this axe will fall) is as demoralizing as a sense of being chronically unprepared to cope with impersonal necessities like shelter from inclement weather. There is no individual liberty in a society that does not safeguard each citizen from the predations of whomever happens to have them outgunned at any given moment.

Yet when they feel comfortable enough, people want to be fooled, any time you show them someone dangerous they can like. This is thrilling and fun, when you haven’t developed a reflexive fear of “the fascist streak” in Kipling or Jack London. It feels natural and vibrant in children’s stories like White Fang.

Overcoming oppression through non-violent resistance is possible, and sometimes non-violence in protests is what makes a movement for change impossible to crush. But the practice of non-violent resistance is far less intuitive and often more demanding – more is risked by each individual participant who takes this radically ethical stance.

In contrast, the old-school war hero is a man of action only under the right circumstances, opportunistic, even willing to use guerrilla tactics, if nothing else seems likely to threaten the entrenched regime forces. This is hardly the atrocious audacity of the confidence men in John Huston’s expedition through the Khyber Pass, experimenting with delusions of grandeur as self-styled kings of Afghanistan like amateur warlords. But if guerrilla machismo is the gold standard for ruffians, one thing leads to another, and the upper crust is liable to flaunt their clout in similarly unruly ways.

In the air conditioned halls of power far from such unpromising battle fronts, half-assery in the arena of delusions of grandeur is less often penalized, and humane regret could not be taken seriously. It would count against your credibility as a political man. Early American oligarchs had “class” of the plantation home variety. But thanks to the privileges they enshrined in the constitution, the contemporary sort probably don’t have to be conspiring busily to manipulate “the mob” efficiently. Looking busy would imply they didn’t know the trick to it.

Putting on airs, in Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.

Most of them can be self-serving half-wit millionaires who sincerely want to shoot each other in the face, and still succeed in systematically sabotaging the political influence of mere voters. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau warned: “I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but .. voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.”

The nastier sort in politics – the ones looking for excuses to use their authority as viciously as possible – seem to be coasting on what one delirious war correspondent describes as “aphasia.” I think by aphasia he means an authoritarian situation where those not presently under the gun are just not reacting. Not putting the obvious into words. Some are more affected than others – their eyes starting to glaze over, as the aggregate levels of cognitive dissonance spiral out of the range of human tolerance.

You don’t have to go all the way to Algeria to find it. There’s no vehemence left when people talk about political corruption here either. The modest outrage of the ATF agent in Lord of War about some particular “obscene bureaucratic loophole” is out of step with the times now.

Rule of law can get thorny when the fine print is of no interest to anyone involved, and getting things done hinges on the ability to compete at bribing or elbowing one’s way up the chain of command.

But laws and regulations are written (and only open to revision through painstaking democratic and deliberative procedures) to communicate a stable, and mutually acceptable, scope of accountability that goes both ways. Far easier to restore credibility to the government’s routines in honoring constitutional law, than to arm each against all for an egalitarian-utopian anarchy that supplants it.

This anarchist propaganda was stage-managed, folks.

To be fair, the anarchist feeling is usually a reactionary one, not a realistic vision of an alternative way of living together that many of us would welcome. Anarchists aren’t great organizers. More often the idea of anarchy acts as an intellectual blank slate for reflecting on the way governmental abuse of power plays out in the real world. Anarchist literature is thus a venue for discussing bad governance frankly without cluttering up the conversation with aspirational hypocrisies how the current system is supposed to work already.

But fear of anarchy and terrorism doesn’t have to be realistic to be sufficient to keep liberal people in their chairs and conservative types feeling smug, under conditions of aphasia. People want to be fooled. This makes blending easy for aspiring sociopaths, because as they say in Monty Python, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

When your “disinformation” targets are lucid, you can even tease them with the option of knowing better, or telling themselves that evil deeds are a difference of degree that has a natural limit, so if they just give a villain enough rope…

In the mean time, your atrocity functionaries can enjoy a justifiable sense of impunity instead. This is a great delight for self-assessed villains. People who identify with perversity per se are obsessed with proving they’re not afraid to reject vanilla “role expectations” to anyone who sees role deviance as a sign of monstrosity.

And if you want to resist this kind of neurotic professional depravity? I think it’s safe to skip the scholarship on authoritarian personality structures, the attention flatters the behavior unnecessarily.

The trick is taking for granted that you don’t have to make sense of people who respond to non-violence with force. It’s not intended to be an intelligible response, and the more categorically dismissive you are of the behavior, the better. Give them some general pointers on breathing more slowly, and let them work it out on their own time.

And when they have you surrounded, and threaten to sneeze in your general direction?

Confessions: “I love that Darken Rahl had a few scruples.”

On the other hand, acting like your life is blissfully unencumbered by intentionality could be a ruse. If you have a consistent knack for looking foolish, you can (theoretically) get extra mileage out of stabbing someone in the back while looking like you “tripped” – as if you obviously would never have done anything so reckless on purpose.

These types catch the attention of the self-serious eventually, like Ethan Hawke’s character in Lord of War, who is reduced to the role of Greek chorus with a perspective that can be summed up in the refrain: “He must be lying. He’s talking.” Meanwhile the villain in question has a double life, able to execute both the magnetism of the unapologetically ruthless, and the suave popularity of the silver tongued, whichever suits his purpose or his mood.

Sometimes, doling out rope just isn’t enough. But nearly everyone likes to defer the initiative, when it comes to kicking the chair.

We tend to associate activism with escapism, and young people who have too much free time. A retired intelligence professional’s boast that he got a personal, point-by-point reply out of a current president he wrote to, with criticism of new economic policies he thinks he understands quite as well as the president’s advisers, gets an eye-roll. No one accepts an invitation to dinner hoping for a lecture on economic policy.

Saying “I don’t think international trade negotiations should be carried out behind closed doors in utmost secrecy” isn’t the same as saying “and I really want to read the minutes of the meetings personally.”

This may be a foolhardy preference though. It turns out the occasional excel error and complementary distortions of how the numerical results of a complex model can accurately be interpreted tends to be enough, when special interest groups are asked to rationalize convenient gaffes in macroeconomic policy at all. Conveniently, macroeconomic theory is turning into a thinly-veiled rationale for political privileges favoring the priorities of a handful of mega-corporations. Before long they won’t need to make excuses about the fact that macroeconomic outcomes are dismal when their favored microeconomic advantages are in place.

Now there’s a way to talk about economics over dinner.

The dismal truth is that science affects all of us – even technocracy’s most boring open secrets can be dangerous. Those of us not collecting PhDs are warned we would be under-qualified to study these applied sciences ourselves. But this is a fiction. Most jargon, to quote Jean Améry, “in sounding learned, strives to prove its own significance more than the value of its knowledge.”

Jargon often works as a secret language of self-importance used to screen interlopers, lest potentially damaging “trade secrets” be leaked. A show of clubbishness and pride in putting down those who haven’t passed enough exams is part of this charade. But it can backfire, now that fudging the numbers (with models so convoluted almost no one pretends to understand them) feels redundant with the political tradition of simply lying about the math.

We are usually less ambitious than a scientist about figuring out whether we are listening to facts or fabrications. We listen for other reasons. Sometimes, Doris Lessing argues, “Our left hand does not know – does not want to know – what our right hand does” for very good reasons. Besides, social and political resentment over higher education classism can make indifference to “what the scientists are saying” a way of affirming where you stand politically, even if you secretly subscribe to Nature magazine.

A good meat-and-potatoes Republican might staunchly defend aerial wolf hunting rights even if he would be sick from the turbulence and couldn’t hit a deer on solid ground with anything less powerful than an uzi if it posed for him. It’s no secret that those silly tree huggers piss themselves when you show them a video of wolves being run down and shot down from the air. They romanticize the wolf and make big plans to cool their asses in snowbanks at night in a Minnesota winter, hoping to hear pack song. Depriving them of the satisfaction of protecting wild wolves from the harassment of hunting is the next best thing to killing horses.

It’s a symbolic wedge issue, not a matter of actually convincing anyone that Alaska’s sublime arctic division of the Fish and Wildlife Service approves of hunting wolves to meet quotas that will magically lead to booming numbers of caribou and elk. Basic ecological science showing that prey populations are limited more by availability of forage than intensity of hunting by wild carnivores doesn’t enter into it. Taken out of context, there is always a way to make evidence that “when wolves eat a moose, there are fewer moose left in that immediate area” look like responsibly completed research that can shape hunting policy uncontroversially.

I’d believe you if you said a wolf stole your girlfriend.

Identity politics are a commonplace, lazy cover for electoral strategies that don’t promise voters any policies that are in their own interests. The rabble-rousers who use it tap into an unconscious appetite for permissible targets, people we can hate and scapegoat for what we dislike about ourselves.

The strangest thing about group-think and arbitrarily designated “out groups” is that the psychological phenomenon of projecting one’s own traits onto someone else cuts both ways. The narrator of The Quest for Christa T., having decided that Christa was unmistakably a non-conformist, and that this made her rather shy friend secretly brave, found that she could project her own non-conformist attitudes outward as likely attributes of Christa’s (picked up by osmosis no doubt), rather than seeing too much political incorrectness in herself.

The passage about literally painting wild birds in the novel The Painted Bird also captures the inane yet inevitable momentum of this kind of social status, estranged in a put-on way and not by prior or inner difference. It is one of the Holocaust narratives that, using the perspective of an orphaned child, strips the cruelties of that genocide of any real interest in what it had to do with either “being Jewish” or being perceived as a Jew in particular.

When a false controversy is more balanced (in terms of balance of power) than is the case with scapegoating a vulnerable minority, our purported “opposites” often function as complementary counterparts. We might actually lose the advantage of such balancing acts, if these natural enemies weren’t always “at each other’s throats” in important ways. A good show of hostility between insiders can at least keep trouble-making third parties at bay. A featurette on the tattoos in the London mob drama Eastern Promises reveals that Viggo Mortensen’s feet were exchanging the following insults the whole time: “Where are you going?” and “What the fuck do you care?”

 “I’d rather not take sides.” – Star Trek

Sometimes I think the strangest thing about the CIA’s role in coaching the major news networks in self-censorship is that they even bother. The production values invested in the CIA’s first major intervention in war reporting (Bush Sr.’s bombing of Baghdad) were probably superfluous.

U.S. propaganda has probably only ever worked because no one bothers to scrutinize propaganda at all. The “audience” will be distracted by the scenic details of the pictures or other trivialities, and unconcerned with the credibility of the official line. They expect none, and pay attention to other things about the programming – they are, after all, only looking for infotainment.

But according to former agent John Stockwell, the CIA has always been more worried about accidentally gossiping irresponsibly with journalists, than about outmaneuvering the spies of other superpowers. Maybe the CIA is just more comfortable dodging, finessing or impersonating journalists than inviting interference from the KGB.

This adds another level of significance to the argument that the Cold War was just a mutually approved propaganda strategy, for propping up each militaristic regime with the popular perception that they had an ideologically absurd common enemy to fear in the other.

But there was a story behind the decision to introduce formal self-censorship protocols in mainstream U.S. news.

The networks were mirroring one another to avoid losing channel surfers to flashier coverage from a competing studio, as usual. Somehow everyone ended up settling on split-screen coverage of Bush Sr. mid-gaffe at a press conference with some moody war correspondents aware of pointless casualties in a lightly-debated invasion of Panama, and coffins arriving at a military airport.

“He’s pissing into the wind! How brilliant can he be?”

Some paratroopers had found themselves not on land but in shark-infested waters off the coast of Panama, and died there. The consensus on the framing used to convey the reporters’ displeasure? In hindsight: that was tasteless.

Was it regrettable enough to justify a renegotiation of press freedoms when it comes to military affairs? Taken By Storm gives the incident as the official pretext for a “voluntary” arrangement that took shape soon afterwards, installing CIA liaisons at all the networks and institutionalizing rules about war correspondence.

The result? Privileged access to flashy photos of the hardware and explosions (at a distance from the gory splatter on the ground), embedded coverage of the chasing and shooting, but minimal photographic coverage of the blood actually shed on either side.

I don’t think much of their audience ever actually put two and two together. Public interest in the invasion of Panama was that slight among Americans, considering how quickly it was initiated and finished. General disaffection with the mass media was already old hat. Imposing an extra layer of political correctness screening on the production process might not have surprised anyone. Watergate had set the stage, and the baby boomers had gotten older.

What worries me about habitual self-censorship in the so-called watchdog reporting business is that by now, it has likely produced too many open secrets. By “open secrets” I mean little details called facts that don’t happen to be official secrets (in the sense of being classified or privileged information), yet about which most people are unaware because politically influential interest groups are having too easy a time keeping them unaware. Officially speaking, that is.

You know, sometimes it’s funny to pretend to buy in.

Ignorance can extend to what probably ought to be obvious. And it’s not all that funny, when you combine thoroughly effective censorship with hatespeech propaganda.

In the early 20^th century, not all Europeans were completely sure the fabled Jews didn’t have cloven hooves concealed in their shoes. And in late 20^th century Rwanda, where most people considered themselves Hutu under the “sociological majority” pseudo-democratic Hutu government, some rural illiterates relying on state-controlled radio for knowledge of the outside world could be persuaded that the Tutsi had tails.

Why would a devious oligarch set up artificial race hatred dynamics in the general population? Arbitrary selectiveness of shaming and scapegoating in civil society is a reliable trick for maintaining a “pathological equilibrium” and protecting the status quo. Prejudice against a local minority redirects much of the resentment that would otherwise be directed toward people who use power exploitatively but are too entrenched as “the establishment” to be easily resisted.

Why go so far as to dehumanize a minority like the Tutsis or the Jews? It’s a necessary evil, they say.

Why, then, would everyone else agree to fear and blame a figment of the imagination for all the social ills in question? Maybe they only “buy in” as successfully entertained consumers of infotainment, and only pay lip-service to the hatespeech tropes when they feel expected to say something formulaic and jingoistic to clarify on which side they stand.

The villains supplied by the theatrical mind are always larger than life. Put a regular ne’er-do-well on the stand as the culprit on trial for having brought about most of society’s ills through a career in sociopathy, and no one is convinced.

Let an actor bring such a boogey-man to life and the crowd is spell-bound instead. The show must go on, we won’t have it any other way.

 “When dealing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remember that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.” 

To drum up a false dichotomy as “too volatile a conversation topic” for most people to feel comfortable contesting reasonably, Doris Lessing points out “the rules of this particular game demanded that it was not enough to say: ‘So and so disagrees with us, who are the possessors of evident truth.’ It had to also be said: ‘So and so is evil, corrupt, sexually depraved,’ and so on.”

As absurd as this sounds, the more stigmatizing the label in question, the more impolite it would be to include the issue in polite conversation, especially when those so-characterized are present to speak for themselves. Look at it in terms of a hypothetical. “Why they hate us” narratives so consistently skip the question of how anyone claims to know “they” really do hate us, that asking someone so specified could be taken as a rhetorical question. Bad idea, if you’re trying to be polite and “socially inclusive.”

So talking about an “out group” being built up as a social scapegoat by propagandists is really only possible in the abstract, and the topic is always essentially divorced from reality. This artificiality can make the propaganda in question seem so predictable and shallow that people who know better feel cavalier about brushing it off.

It’s unusual for racist mass mailings to culminate in acts of genocide, and when they actually do everyone feels caught off guard, a bit bewildered, as if some empty words had suddenly leaped off a page and started bayoneting people on the street without warning.

For the Nazis and others instigating genocidal violence, a propaganda strategy to scapegoat the Jews could be carried to a “logical” conclusion only by systematically murdering those bearing official responsibility for social ills ranging from petty crime to political corruption. But real life is rarely so frighteningly logical at all, and most political blather, like most hate speech, is “just talk” in the end.

“You can still get Count Basie… they probably think he’s the head of some country.” (Swing Kids takes place when only “hip cats” took pride in knowing better than the Nazis.)

Only among the most uneducated, socially resentful chauvinists in the easily militarized youth vote would “excessive interest on loans” be a winner in pinning the tail on the donkey, to scapegoat Jews for the very palpable economic frustrations of the German people.

Many young men felt the sting of an economy likely to keep them in long-term unemployment, under the pressure of rampant inflation and heavy reparations payments imposed by the Allies after World War I.

To those who weren’t inclined to put much thought into politics altogether, it mattered little that the notion Jews charge excessive interest on loans to non-Jews was an archaism, one that had to do with the way Jews had historically been stripped of the right to hold property other than money.

Propaganda never worked its magic through substantive arguments or lost face when serious arguments were made against it.

To avoid being ignored altogether, good jingoistic propaganda is campy, shameless, and fun to get excited about. If you aren’t having fun, you adjust to it ironically instead. At least a little irony could cut the sincere adherents who annoy you, and the minor retribution might make you feel better. Lazy micro-aggressions are a great outlet when one feels powerless about the things that really matter.

“Jesus, Joseph and doggy-style Mary!” – Jarhead (no blue girls
on location for these guys – just “guy talk” about girlfriends)

Philosopher Richard Rorty argues that autonomy and compassion are diametrically opposed, as if to enjoy greater autonomy we must privilege our own inclinations above any concern about causing other people pain. But he speculates that the world’s political culture may have begun to shift its priorities, away from asking one another first “Do you believe and desire what we believe and desire?” before deciding whether or not to offer the pro-active compassion previously reserved for members of one’s own tribe, and asking of one another, “are you suffering?”

Looking out for the interests of others is no longer something we generally see as an imposed burden of responsibility, but rather as part of what makes life fulfilling – we just expect some freedom deciding how to define our personal commitments to others. As Sennett puts it, we no longer feel that autonomy is the right that needs to be asserted at all costs – now we sense that “life appears completely meaningless when nothing is felt to depend on it. … Put another way, an iron law of spontaneity would make most human relationships trivial.”

Perhaps vague fears of “communist” oppression can really be got rid of soon, with the fictitious ideological battle behind the “cold war” about as dead a horse as it’s going to get. There were inter-generational conflicts muddying the waters then, highly charged tensions within families over newly established rights and freedoms like feminism, freedom of conscience, and full suffrage for all adults regardless of race.

An old liberal like Richard Sennett sounds downright regressive to me, when he tries to dissect the sociological dimensions of a case of parental “concern” about interracial dating. But things are moving along, I suppose. Perhaps one day it won’t make sense for parents to quickly draw the conclusion that a white teenage girl would logically prefer to date a classmate who was black strictly as a way to express independence from her parents, i.e. for the sake of making a statement.

“We just hope or starve to death.” – Pearl S. Buck

Certain barricaded frontiers of justice remain, even after the most brutal excesses of authoritarianism have been pushed back to uphold the more orderly workings of a democratic-egalitarian polity with a commercial, demilitarized oligarchy. As writer and activist María Suárez Toro says in a recent interview, a social revolution in which women have led does not produce de facto victories for feminism.

Call it institutional inertia or ideological patriarchy, the scope of effectively permissible injustice is wide even under liberal constitutional democracy. And political pressure can be still exerted more easily wherever the protections of what are generally regarded as basic rights are already weak in effect, if not missing under the letter of the law.

But shown any alternative to socially unacknowledged forced choices (e.g., between violent oppression under a property-owning “breadwinner” and unsheltered destitution if you leave an abusive home), people continue to seek a better life.

Rorty is partial to ironists like Nabokov, but Orwell, he points out, found ways to flip the subversive powers of irony to serve the interests of solidarity: “‘Imaginative’ writing is .. a flank attack upon positions that are impregnable from the front .. by using words in a tricky roundabout way.”

Both for its strengths and the ease with which it can be limited to a diversion, satire’s is a special case under the law. Far more is permitted in the context of humor than is guaranteed as freedom of speech generally. The funny thing is, propagandists tend to use word play poorly. Their attempts at irony risk disaster.

 

Sadly, this was an unpremeditated irony.

So where does a tone deaf ruling class come from? Pervasive intentionally-corrupt practices might make having gut feelings a handicap in those who are actively engaging in what they themselves see as “the exploitation of the less-fortunate.”

When this kind of self-regard in a villain is defiant rather than ironic, it’s hard to know what to think. But it does suggest the villain isn’t actually thinking.

Brainwashing formulas from authoritarians like these run along the lines of “shock and awe” – they probably aren’t intended to persuade anyone of anything, except to make examples of those the authorities can get away with pummeling. Cowering in the face of today’s information control strategies doesn’t seem worthwhile, whatever the threat. If they can’t put forward a coherent position of their own that they expect you to endorse, what’s the point of being willing to retract your own point of view?

Better to giggle under inane pressure, evade cheap tricks like induced exhaustion and headaches, and casually brush off lies told with brevity and repetition, recognizing them as slogans too shallow to mean anything at all.

As for the partisan participant-observer excuse for dysfunctional technocracy, people who try to use culture war as an alibi for pseudo-science are asking for a kind of trouble they don’t know anything about. If you weren’t involved in the Britney vs. Christina fan feuds, you don’t know culture war.

Trust me, pleading age-ism or “culture gap” won’t work.

Humor has to have dramatic rhythm to work as an ironic stratagem. Forced irony (cynicism) is easy to spot and anything but compelling. It has a nails-on-chalkboard effect on the senses. If Hobbes warned against invoking intellectual authority by name-dropping, and “neo-realists” are trying to make sense of villainy for its own sake with vague genuflections toward Machiavelli and Hobbes, there is irony to be had here. But it is likely to be a rout.

Not all Machiavelli’s ideas were cynical – he even anticipated Jeremy Bentham’s famous formula “the greatest good for the greatest numbers” – his words, not the utilitarian’s. Thing is, he did so not as a strategist, but in a play. C.V. Wedgewood points out this was, fittingly, a quip in a ribald comedy “to justify a seduction.”

Maybe the dramatic perspective is just more promising for realizing “inter-subjective ethics” than any attempt to achieve pluralism of perspective and authority in writing. In the world of drama there is a “third space” for human conduct to defy the censorial détente among party leaders in the oligarchy.

When more than one speaker takes the stage for anything other than an election-cycle debate, the wedge issues intended to keep identity politics alive are easily played off against each other. The false controversies that are supposed to politicize culture along bi-partisan lines dissolve into irrelevance. If politics manages to impose itself on drama (or real-life conversation about the banal), the lock-stepping partisanship dividing the constitutional oligarchs is unconvincing. They look more like a monolithic 1% regime.

The “officially” politically incorrect blends naturally into every other indecency on the stage, because human attitudes are so habitually adversarial and quick to condemn, whether a demagogue is trying to co-opt that tendency on a certain point of argument or not.

“Phil? Uh, his first name is Agent.” – Tony Stark

Of course, politics can make anyone uncomfortable, one way or another, and is usually considered an impolite topic for social conversation. But if there are those select politically subversive truths that many of us can sense but no one wants to stand for by saying so, little details about everyday life that are universally condemned when they can’t be avoided in polite conversation yet banal and uncontested in visible reality, many of them can be made visible on a theatrical stage.

Visible is not the same as spoken. What isn’t spelled out is optional, as an interpretation of what the audience saw.

Technocracy, corporatocracy, food and drugs

When I come across complaints from the international health community that the CIA is giving public health professionals a bad reputation by using their jobs as covers, I have to wonder who’s ruining whose reputation. The CIA, truly, deserves a bloodthirsty reputation and tends to be inept enough to appear indiscriminate in its use of violence, if it isn’t in actual fact.

Some people work too hard to look stupid. Wait, what if..

But there’s more to the HIV conspiracy theory (that whites invented the virus to wipe out blacks) than the reputation Washington earned in Africa during the wars that ended the colonial era. And that conspiracy theory isn’t limited to rural and remote areas or people who are soft in the head by virtue of … well, you know, vulnerability and stuff.

The missing piece in that puzzle is the authoritarian style of public health’s version of technocracy.

Public health is the canary that died in the coal mine of technocracy’s credibility test, as an improvement on democracy (favoring rational, disinterested planning instead of rowdy, debatable interest group politics). If public health is here to tell you what’s good for your children, and the CIA is supposedly tied up trying to kill people in far-away places, who do Americans fear most – their doctors, or the foreign policy set? They may have actually noticed that whistle-blowers are rather aggressively targeted even within my area of specialization, at least by the FDA.

That would explain the existence of safety syringes designed to reduce the risk of needle-stick accidents and marketed for multi-patient use without reprocessing (disinfection, heat sterilization, rinsing, you name it, you can’t do it, because you can’t even disassemble this plastic hunk of junk). This product comes to you from a manufacturer who seems to believe in the existence of one-way permeable barriers (i.e., a world without backflow). Likewise the attempt to find markets for air guns (needle-free delivery devices the size of a water gun) that splatter.

Travel medicine: because med school was boring.

Thank goodness no one is marketing male circumcision safety kits for hurried reuse in unprepared African hospitals that just got rid of their dysfunctional autoclaves. They were pretty relieved not to have to pretend they had the resources to maintain them in working order, after the transition to disposable syringes.

Of course, if an AIDS epidemic in Africa was anyone’s dream-come-true excuse for shortening African penises in the name of public health, it was actually more serendipity than good planning on the part of an evil genius. Back when the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) was adapting to its new human host in central Africa, Western biomedical professionals were still enjoying tunnel vision about the miracle of antibiotics. And part of the miracle of injecting people with penicillin is that you don’t even need a clean syringe to do it safely.

Or so they thought, assuming they only needed to worry about bacterial sepsis if the injection equipment wasn’t exactly sterile. And there probably was some wishful thinking involved, because skipping the sterilization step is a real time-saver when you’re struggling to meet public health quotas on a schedule.

To be fair, they probably didn’t notice the role mass injection campaigns to eradicate debilitating endemic diseases (like leprosy, sleeping sickness and yaws) were playing in the spread of blood borne viruses like hepatitis C virus (HCV) at the time. People infected with HCV may show no symptoms and even those who develop serious complications are often asymptomatic far longer than people infected with HIV, so the iatrogenic spread of this potentially deadly virus was slow to be recognized. In general, of course, tropical medicine doesn’t rigorously attempt tracking adverse effects of fly-by-night charitable interventions (unless they’re specifically studying the side-effects and using the poor to experiment with novel drugs). So the evidence of those mistakes would only come to light decades later, after the people affected by the mass injection campaigns started getting tested for HCV.

By then it was too late to evaluate whether the same practices made it possible for HIV to spread rapidly among humans, instead of causing sporadic outbreaks at worst like other zoonotic infections in Africa. Similar mass injection campaigns had been carried out elsewhere with disastrous effect on the spread of HCV, in parts of the world where the risk of exposing patients to blood from SIV or HIV index cases was still negligible. Even the aggressive global campaign to eradicate smallpox may have had the same problem, but luckily it predated the emergence of HIV.

Researchers examining the evidence that these mass injection campaigns were well-timed to expose shocking numbers of people in Central Africa to blood from other community members on contaminated needles have noted that this scenario would have created a more promising opening for a zoonotic disease to adapt to a new (human) host than the previous theory (that all SIV exposures resulted from misadventures hunting bushmeat, and sexual contacts between those hunters and other community members).

But their reports haven’t circulated much yet. Maybe it’s fear of engaging in a new who-fucked-Africa-over blame game, maybe not. Some people probably liked the mental image of illicit bush orgies, or bushmeat barbecue orgies, or … the thing is, Americans read Heart of Darkness to form their preconceptions about Africa, and Conrad without Kipling is a painfully distorted picture of the colonial era. For whatever reason, Conrad had no sense of humor, so you hardly know when to suspect him of hyperbole. He also seems to have shown up on the colonial scene without the prerequisite delusions of grandeur, which makes for an especially dismal perspective on the whole project (of “saving Africa for the Africans” or more romantic, fatalistic dreams of Nineveh and Tyre). And when there were still spaces beyond the edges of the map in Darkest Africa, adventurers wanted to believe there were monsters outside over there, and tribes of cannibals with tails.

Hey, maybe Africans get rabies by fucking dogs. Why not?

To this day, foreign correspondents selling the run-down on tropical medicine seem to think these legends are the main selling point for audiences who wouldn’t care if it wasn’t a scandalously exotic (illegally erotic) story. But not dirty needles, double dipping in the multidose vaccine vial, that’s just gross.

Biomedicine did produce a miracle in the end, developing antiretroviral drugs that seem to be able to keep people with HIV free of AIDS in the long run, when they have access to high-quality drug management and supportive care. The early years of the devastating AIDS epidemic also left an imprint on the world’s imagination that convinced the public health community to worry about emerging infectious diseases and zoonotic blood-borne viruses like ebola. Even making the connection between HIV and AIDS was no small task, because of the infection’s latency period and the indirect mode of AIDS death through opportunistic infections. It forced biomedical professionals to think more holistically about their options in saving lives from infectious diseases, after half a century of coasting on their ability to treat discrete diseases by attacking one microbe or class of microbes at a time.

But there was a rocky transition involved in deploying the biomedical solution to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and it wasn’t wholly a question of patents keeping the drugs out of reach for the poor. When ARVs were introduced that could save an AIDS patient or prevent HIV patients from progressing to AIDS, the fact that this had never been accomplished before was cause for skepticism, especially in parts of the world that were used to getting stuck with a lot of placebo medicine because of mismatch between the health system infrastructure and the population’s health needs.  They were used to relying on a modest supply of essential medicines without affordable lab tests to confirm which drug a patient with non-specific symptoms would actually need, if the drugs for locally endemic diseases were even affordable on the world market. But they couldn’t extend reasonable prevention measures like sanitation and adequate nutrition that would likewise reduce the prevalence and mortality rate from the same types of opportunistic infections.

To this day an important cause of death among AIDS patients in Africa is water-borne disease from inadequate sanitation infrastructure, and unreliable or non-existent access to clean running water. Whether they are able to access ARVs or not, AIDS patients still need to be careful about their exposure to common infectious diseases in their communities that are far less dangerous to other people. Many of the opportunistic infections that lead to emergency hospitalizations for AIDS patients in Africa are preventable, and by the time a medical emergency leads to hospitalization their chances of surviving are far worse. And even in wealthier countries like South Africa the hospital supply of ARVs is often interrupted, with serious consequences for those in treatment who are unable to adhere to best practices in using the available drugs. In other parts of Africa, local infrastructure even for services as fundamental as offering HIV testing at all hospitals is still lacking, because of the difficulty scaling-up access to basic laboratory services for diagnostic testing, for this and many other endemic diseases.

He also knows that international aid experts have decided failing at prevention is cheaper than trying at treatment.

This disconnect between the initial unprecedented excitement about rolling out ARVs to treat AIDS and the scope of additional contributing factors to AIDS deaths had more to do with South Africa’s “denialist” era than refusal to engage rationally with the propositions of medical experts embedded in the pharmaceutical industry and the public health wing of technocracy. The shock the epidemic had caused to those who seemed to continually be going to funerals for another friend, colleague or family member only deepened the stigma attached to the disease when it was first characterized as a “gay cancer”, because of the tacit message that people who had already been uneasy disclosing gay relationships due to homophobia now had something even more shameful to hide. Whether overt or not, the message that anyone in a gay relationship with an HIV patient shared responsibility for killing their lovers with their secrecy and infidelity became a central factor in politicizing both treatment and prevention.

Eventually a grassroots movement within South Africa (the Treatment Action Campaign) was able to insist on improved access to ARVs, partly by overturning international agreements that had prevented the use of generic drugs more affordable for South Africa’s poor. But ill-conceived efforts to raise awareness about the risk to sexual partners within marriage and exclusive relationships (guess what guys, people cheat!) continue to frustrate HIV prevention in regions and communities that are less accepting of homosexuality in the first place. Whether the fear is being suspected of adultery or homosexuality or both, getting tested comes before getting treated, and is something many people who know they may be at risk are reluctant to do, because of stigma. And the way condom use is promoted (just for the lovers you don’t really trust, folks) doesn’t exactly help. You can forget about discussing lubricant as an essential to using condoms effectively, if you expect a stuffy public health official to keep a straight face.

Africa has a long history of being on the receiving end of stigmatizing Western fantasies about the morbid extremes of human potential for depravity, including sexual craziness. Reclaiming a sexual identity in touch with local culture is a challenge in the African mass media, one that takes creativity in assessing where the past and present meet, and won’t produce one-size-fits-all narratives for a region as large and diverse as this giant, multilingual continent.

Some modes of imposing risk awareness are finally being recognized as cultural imperialism within the public health community. But there is a comfortable middle ground to be found when we’re talking about a deadly disease like HIV that is absolutely a prevention priority whether prevention is difficult to achieve or not. Local control of narratives used in mass media strategies and public health planning for prevention messages is crucial to ending up with messages that aren’t out-of-touch with local culture and the real sticking points people are having locally, when it comes to talking about sex with partners, accessing sexual health products and services at stores or hospitals where there is little expectation of privacy, and protecting their sexual health in the face of difficult relationship choices.

Everyone worried about their health has a lot on their plate.

Still, it sometimes seems like the one thing that brings medical professionals and public health officials the most satisfaction in life is the prerogative to condescend. And this professional narcissism trading unconvincingly on the presumption of decency may be what makes public health the weak link in “public interest” technocracy. If torture failed at doing anything constructive with the ability to induce psychological regression and PTSD, technocracy has at least figured out alternative ways of infantilizing political opposition. You see it in the coolly patronizing PR science insisting that GMOs are for the best, and in the bait-and-switch transition negotiations Naomi Klein highlights in the events that substituted economic apartheid for apartheid in South Africa.

In some ways, that sort of brazen bullshitting is less offensive than the tone of the unabashed nanny state, but the scope of damage being inflicted is no less catastrophic.

The technocratic flash and dazzle of Monsanto’s PR platform has promised the world a second Green Revolution through genetically modified food crops, and instead delivered on a monopoly interest in seed stock, backed by globally enforceable intellectual property rights that make the ethical challenges to terminator seeds politically redundant with an accomplished fact. Countries like South Africa with substantial numbers of AIDS patients struggling to afford ARVs can choose between access to marketable seed stock through agreement to honor intellectual property rights across the board, or leaving the bargaining table for agribusiness exports in favor of access to generic essential medicines.

This decision was made before the ANC knew what hit them. What was done in secret transition meetings to which most anti-apartheid politicians never sought access (from lack of relevant technical expertise) left the anti-apartheid leadership slack-jawed, when they realized what they had bargained away while they were focused on negotiating a right for blacks to participate in democratic elections. The administration was militant about checking its own facts after that fiasco, despite the attitude of the public health community about people snooping around in their science discipline.

Economic apartheid looked a lot like revenge to the new government. Though not as vindictive as the Portuguese (who poured concrete down elevator shafts on their way out of their African colonies), the white South African government’s handling of the transition to a Rainbow Nation put an interesting twist on the limits of public diplomacy for the Mandela administration. They staged stampedes on South Africa’s financial markets any time the ANC showed signs of commitment to extending access to basic infrastructure (running water, electricity) more completely to the majority population. Naomi Klein makes the parallel between using torture to demoralize political prisoners and using these types of artificially engineered financial shocks to silence political movements a core theme in The Shock Doctrine, and documents their use in many other settings.

For their part, Monsanto had the gall to present a Bullshit Award to Vandana Shiva, who has been exposing Monsanto’s moves to secure monopoly power over the world’s food supply since before it was an accomplished fact. The genetically modified strains that offered “zero-till” Roundup Ready traits and “all natural” Bt pest deterrence were a Trojan Horse for shuttling biotech patents on DNA through the courts. The Union of Concerned Scientists has confirmed that the benefits the EPA cited when signing off on the technology have yet to materialize in the real world. Users of these seed strains have to apply at least as much of the same pesticides as before, and despite spiraling production costs, are seeing no improvement in yield. At the same time, herbicide use is higher than ever thanks to the marketing of round-up resistant crops.

“Life finds a way.” – Jurassic Park

The seed stock monopoly is discouraging, but then, so is the buzz about the impending extinction of bees. Researchers may have finally isolated an anthropogenic driver of bee colony depletion, and the EU now recommends against using the class of pesticides in question. Where else do you look for urgent action priorities in agribusiness, if The Road made an impression on you?

A monopoly on seeds alone could explain the recent fresh basil stockout, which I assume is behind the attempt to fool fans of margarita pizza into eating toasted parsley on cheese. But primary producers have been complaining about food wastage from lousy global transportation and marketing options for longer than that, and those refrains belie the Malthusian despair over the limited extent of potentially arable land on earth’s surface, at least for now. What else is contributing to recurring food shortages that’s not new?

It may be that the food marketing gurus have captured the timely transportation business, using marketing genius in the arena of price distortion to subsidize the logistical challenges of getting produce from the tropics to the grocers in Europe and the U.S. in presentable condition. Or maybe the integration of those two sectors isn’t strictly economically rational, just an accomplished fact closing most potential producers for global markets out of the game. What any of this has to do with various rashes of land speculation in the tropics is hard to say, speculators being what they are. But one persuasive set of case-studies on overcoming barriers to market entry for third world entrepreneurs trying to survive globalization also draws attention to the difficulties of value-added technology transfer in manufacturing and other business sectors. For agribusiness, this means  food processing work that needs to be highly adaptive to keep up with fads in consumer tastes and militant demand for standardized mass market consumer goods, no matter how unreliable those tastes are year to year.

Whatever it is, no one eats toasted parsley on anything. There’s something wrong with that, and I tend to assume global catastrophes engineered by multinational megaliths impersonating solvent corporations, because they’ve squeezed out most other plausible explanations.

Food envisioned by the foundation behind peer to peer theory.

Back on their home turf (i.e., in air-conditioned offices and conference rooms), the international health, public health, and corporate biotech wizards are sitting pretty. If you count knowing where to find gourmet goo served by the $1,000 shot glass that invariably includes tortured duck as knowing what to do with your exorbitant wealth. These are the lean and mean types, not to be confused with the all-American Falstaff who goes to Vegas for the buffets and thinks you can win at slots. Small wonder they have nothing to fear from these neighbors at home.

The most well-known current public health controversy in the U.S. is the theory that vaccines can cause autism, and they have themselves convinced that they won that debate, for all intents and purposes. Vaccine coverage may still be lagging, but the experts don’t see much point in continuing a serious conversation about vaccine safety any more. There are enough misunderstandings cluttering up the vaccine safety criticism clearing houses on the self-help side of the internet to leave the experts feeling secure about the adequacy of the status quo.

Vaccine safety trade-offs could, theoretically, be handled as informed choices that patients and parents are qualified to make. If informed of the real risk-benefit trade-off in language they could understand, enough parents probably would be willing to have their children vaccinated to maintain herd immunity. But there are a lot of things clinicians are willing to do to avoid getting into conversations with patients.

Clinicians virtually never try to explain options to patients. Most of them aren’t predisposed to learn how. Biomedical interventions are more difficult to do right than anyone wants to admit, clinical practice is an “error-ridden activity”, in the sense that mistakes are made more often than patients are helped by what they pay for. They’re lucky that the documented error rates are as artificially low as they are, because they don’t even make a credible effort to conceal their intentional deviations from best practices or legally binding standards of care.

All they do is lie for each other when talking to outsiders, because they knew if they ever called each other out on the frequency and gravity of their mistakes and misrepresentations, any of them (practitioners) could be assured of having their own work picked apart, because each of them is qualified to destroy the careers of any of the others, with their knowledge of the open secrets of corrupt practices that are embedded in their routines. Hence the strong preference for working with people who pursued a PhD in epidemiology or other public health specializations after starting a career in clinical practice as an MD or RN, someone who won’t dare to rock the boat in the name of improving the quality of care or any other official ‘public health’ mandate.

The trick is walking out before you’ve started lying to yourself.
From Statistically funny (learn more: They just Google THAT?!)

Placebo medicine is a major part of clinical practice for all biomedical practitioners, no matter where they work or how much their patients are paying for their time. Their insistence that they consistently outperform placebos and are therefore more credible than the quacks and chiropractors and alternative medicine gurus is actually part of what’s destroying their credibility with patients.They have a marginal advantage over placebos, and trade on tacit guarantees when they are actually only bound by procedural quality of care standards, which themselves are only lightly enforced.

It’s in rural and remote parts of Africa where people who feel that biomedical practitioners aren’t living up to that promise are at real risk of missing an opportunity to save a child’s life. In cases of severe malaria, for instance, if they tend to think they should seek out an alternative provider first, they might blow their savings on the work of someone who prescribes herbal tinctures or even scarification as a ritual healing practice, when their child really needed intravenous quinine or other inpatient health services before the complications worsened. And sadly, the poorest populations with the least access to education and current information on best practices in health and wellness tend to be the ones short-changed the most by service-delivery models in health systems run on shoe-string budgets in “the tropics”.

But the shape of the problem isn’t often that exotic, when you look at it as a service-delivery clusterfuck instead of a problem with mosquitoes. It all boils down to the five-minute consult: that’s the (approximate) ideal in a general practitioner’s routine, to get away with the pretense that a five minute work-up is all they need to tell someone what they need to know to get better. And more often than not, it works because of the placebo effect, which is cheaper and more reliable than exhaustive application of the available diagnostic tests for common symptoms like fever, headache, stomach ache, diarrhea, or cough. If you’re lucky, you have a common self-limiting infection that was going to clear up anyways, and your doctor will say something and maybe prescribe something that helps reassure you that you can expect to get better, hopefully with a reminder to get some rest until you actually feel better.

And if there are clear indications of something else that is both treatable and common enough to enter into the provider’s routine decision trees about what the average patient needs, you might find out instead that you have heart disease, diabetes or high blood pressure, and that you can take steps to correct or manage it with the standard of care.  But if it’s not obvious enough or common enough to get figured out in five minutes by a clinician flying by the seat of her pants without admitting how sketchy her diagnostic assessments are for the patient’s benefit, you could get the run around for quite some time before figuring out whether or not there are treatments on the market for whatever is screwing with your health.

May you live in interesting times? Define “interesting”.

As for the public health community supposedly keeping clinicians and drug manufacturers in line, mind control isn’t something they think they need in their tool kit. Fluoride may not turn people into reavers, but it can do more harm than good to your teeth cosmetically. The dose is the poison, but you don’t have to ingest much more than the clinically recommended dose for fluoride treatment to make your teeth look funny. In the doses they used to recommend for osteoporosis treatment, it’s actually quite dangerous (it moves the bone matter around so arbitrarily that it can give you bone spurs, which are worse than osteoporosis).

The real scandal behind the fluoride conspiracy theories is that it started out as an industrial waste product too expensive to dispose of in accordance with environmental safety standards. The public health community’s standards for drug and additive safety were so lax in comparison that the industry stuck with finding a way to get rid of it in bulk was able to market it to municipal water treatment systems. And they put it in toothpaste to borrow credibility from the private sector, because regulatory capture is something people actually get nervous about when they notice you putting something in the water.

As for the petulant public health goons arguing against concern about vaccine preservatives, they don’t even acknowledge that heavy metals like mercury are normally excreted in the bile, which newborns aren’t able to produce yet (their guts are immature). At best they can argue that a tuna sandwich or shark sushi habit is no safer for pregnant women or mothers of nursing neonates (because of the way mercury bio-accumulates in aquatic food chains), insinuating that liberated women would hardly want a nanny state policing their personal fish consumption in the name of child safety.

They don’t bother energetically disputing that the mercury substitutes that work as preservatives have the same biochemical properties and probably carry the same neurotoxicity risks as mercury. Because they don’t care about the risk, they thought changing the name of the preservative would be enough to shush the conspiracy theorists screaming cover-up. They never mention that vaccine preservative risks, whatever their magnitude, are relatively easy to eliminate without giving up the benefit of vaccines. The need for heavy metal preservatives could be eliminated just by switching to single-dose vials, so that the contents aren’t exposed to significant amounts of airborne microbial contamination from being unsealed for each use.

Screaming bloody murder is what the vaccine safety activists do wrong. Worrying about the total scale of population-level adverse effects is needless, and most of the population-based research in this area on whether or not any concern is warranted isn’t worth wiping your ass with, methodologically speaking. The deadlock only came about because the public health community refuses to try, despite the effect that their indifference has on vaccine acceptance.

It comes across as either refusal to take child safety seriously, or refusal to acknowledge that parents are well-enough educated these days to be able to read their own medication instructions, and they don’t like to settle for less when offered a vaccine for a child. Probably just part of the rigid Biomedical Expert Knows Best branding of pharmaceuticals as all the world has to offer, as if everything outside the purview of the FDA (including common sense palliative care) were quack medicine. Consistency of attitude has become a higher priority than making the available science truly transparent, when patients are balking at what the public health community feels sure would be good for them.

You’re no hero. (The “can you do better?” theory of criticism.)

The live-virus vaccine risk (that sometimes a vaccine can cause the very illness it is intended to prevent, and that sometimes those illnesses are extremely dangerous) is a separate issue from preservative toxicity. If rubella can cause autism, measles probably can, too, though it may happen far less often. The biological plausibility is analogically sound. There could be brain swelling in some cases, and in some cases severe swelling could probably cause autism. But in the arena of live virus vaccines carrying the adverse effect risk of the illness being vaccinated against, the rule of thumb is that having been vaccinated reduces both the chances of getting the disease, and the severity of illness if you get it after all.

Only in the case of the live virus polio vaccine is there already strong suspicion that known ways of adjusting the vaccine schedule could definitively reduce the risk of adverse effects. The timing of subsequent injections is considered a significant factor in whether people who receive the live-virus polio vaccine are likely to develop polio instead of immunity to polio. Because the live-virus polio vaccine is far more protective than the alternatives, working on its safety would be a more effective strategy for protecting the population than switching to alternative polio vaccine formulations already on the market.

Peter Aaby’s notable work on unanticipated vaccination effects through more complex phenomena in immune system development during childhood is exploratory in nature, and comes far short of confirmatory evidence that would warrant definite expectations that vaccine safety could be improved by adjusting the schedules. What is troubling here is that there appears to be little interest in following up on the research questions raised by his work at all.

If Big Brother were bored…

Despite my best efforts, I still can’t make the conspiracy theory angle fit. I just don’t happen to be sitting on any state secrets that could explain the presence of FBI interns shadowing me around the university library, lobbying the Student Union for a sushi bar, or making judgmental eye-rolls while they pretend to be inconspicuous and watch me read. Synchronized sneezing in the library stacks? Definitely my imagination.

Nothing to see here, move along…

And yet, I can see bonuses getting awarded for stranger things than prodding an increasingly unbalanced dissident long enough to draw them onto an actionable offense that then can be reported as Successfully Thwarted Plot! and including anti-authoritarian messages under the heading of anti-American propaganda, anytime a dissident avails themselves of the cliché that “America is the world’s jackass teenage neighbor always looking for an excuse to blow shit up” as an aside mid-rant about their own country’s problems.

As they say in Sneakers:

Blind David Strathairn: “I want peace on earth and goodwill towards men.”

James Earl Jones in a trench coat: “We are the United States Government. We don’t do that sort of thing.”

I probably got carried away with the idea that if it were true, that kind of FBI surveillance behavior would explain why anyone ever thought underwear bombing would advance the cause of an anti-American agenda in some convincingly self-serious way. Supposing normal surveillance behavior involved extreme boredom and unconscious micro-aggressions directed at the improbable, unbalanced target of your investigation, that could be a recipe for disaster.

It’s just that I saw a girl lick a sheet of paper last week. Who does that? And for whatever reason, my first thought when confronted with this kind of random, sub-clinical crazy was: bored intelligence agent.

Normally I would put this sort of thing past the FBI – that thing between Hoover and MLK was probably just a celebrity crush gone bad. But with show trials going on in Portland over possession of anarchist literature, I can’t really give anyone the benefit of the doubt. (These guys are out there investigating FIFA as if there weren’t abundant evidence that the Octopus knew too much.)

Still, if I haven’t provoked someone in politics capable of pulling strings in the national security sector to have me framed for posing a threat to something other than their credibility by now, it’s not for lack of trying. I’d especially like to offend someone with the Heritage Foundation, originally dominated by beer money, but presumably diversified into arms dealing in connection with the Project for a New American Century.

Uhh..  Special Extra Terrestrial Earthling Counter?

Who would humor them on account of politicized fangirling, you ask? Who knows. The State Department’s internal secret police do seem to think that Wikileaks could happen again. I know it would be going out on a limb to speculate that Wikileaks was what happened when a naive computer repairman within the military rank and file stumbled across the inbox of the Dissent Channel and wigged out, staring at endless messages from the front lines of diplomacy detailing how misguided U.S. foreign policy invariably is, and not appreciating the context or purpose of creating an internal dissent channel (these are, effectively, snarky letters to Santa).

Maybe I do sound like John Nash at times like this, and not in one of his more lucid moments. So what if a student I overheard making conversation in an elevator seemed to think that calamari comes in sliders. Maybe it does now. The feeling about being watched when I am trying to mind my own business on campus isn’t that hard to explain away. Clearly I’m just doing that thing where you read too much into the all-knowing glances people throw at anyone who starts a suspicious-glaring contest, which is probably just one of those cases of mutual paranoia where no one can really tell who started it.

It just seems obscenely logical that someone, somewhere in the CIA gives out cookies for trying stupid shit that no one could afford to get caught doing, and gives them preferentially to stupid sociopaths motivated as much by personal viciousness as anything else. That way, the plausible deniability link is built into the chain of command right where you need it most. And when the sedimentation of stupid over all the really cynical choices the government makes gets too deep, you have to hang some people out to try for getting confused about why they were expected to believe the lie.

But I do consider conspiracy theories a “special” interest, in the autistic sense of the term. People who don’t obsess over them usually just act like it’s escapist and adolescent to take an interest. And a lot of Americans are isolationist enough not to care, as long as they can tell themselves that foreigners take the brunt of it.

They really do think it’s childish to care about obscure details of reports from far off places about human rights abuses. As if war correspondents are just a bunch of adrenaline junkies and burned out alcoholics who can’t tell a buzz from a death wish any more. And maybe the photojournalists don’t doodle their own captions, because the propagandists who buy their pictures will write their own stories about who killed whom and why, different versions for different target audiences.

Documenting China’s non-flammable monk experiment leaves less room for interpretation, but when all else fails you simply suppress it.

(Leopard painting is from a different political context.)

Why should Americans themselves have nightmares about the CIA, and daydream about being singled out for dissidence by the secret police? Well, it would probably be unfair to assume they’re naive enough to think that the CIA is serious about the official line of only fucking with non-nationals and credible threats. But it would also be unfair to assume they noticed the CIA’s involvement in turning Angola and Mozambique into minefields for harboring ANC refugees. Most Americans thought their government opposed apartheid, more or less, and was serious about supporting Mandela’s reconciliation government.

Most people in Washington’s foreign policy set probably had plausible deniability even while it was going on, from lack of interest in what was going on in Africa, and genuine inattentiveness to what the Southern Democrats were up to on the Senate foreign policy committee for sub-Saharan Africa. And some of them, more than most southerners would like to admit, probably did congratulate the Coors family on their African adventurism. They did sell collectible coins to raise money for financing American mercenary involvement in the “civil wars” on South Africa’s borders.

Even Reagan may not have fully understood what he was signing for, when Chester Crocker got an executive order sanctioning the effort to factionalize and punish the anti-apartheid movement. Necklacing is not a beadwork activity in this context. This is why some South Africans still show disdain for the way Nelson Mandela disavowed his wife’s efforts to fight apartheid, and still harbor profound bitterness towards the patronizing hypocrisies of the Anglophone West and its empty endorsements of human rights and poverty reduction priorities in their region.

We are talking about the guys who were poking around in a post-Soviet shit hole we picked for an ally on the logic of “location, location, location” (for military bases on the border with a country we felt like invading), found out that this was the regime believed to have most recently boiled someone alive for political dissidence, and immediately started picking their brains for superior torture techniques and arranging extraordinary rendition to their facilities. These were clearly the type who know that the purpose of torture is torture, not 24 fans who bought the ticking time-bomb pretext.

If we’re all potential torturers, some of us may need practice.

Uzbekistan’s cops don’t even consider chaining grandma to a radiator and gang-raping her in front of the person of interest a technique that requires specialized training or secrecy beyond normal levels of state censorship. How many American intelligence professionals with the responsibilities of atrocity functionaries know that traumatizing a beloved third party is considered a more effective way to prolong the effects of PTSD than directly harming the person of interest? And Americans in human rights advocacy worry about us encouraging them.

Even so, insulting the CIA’s intelligence is not necessarily a direct route to inspiring behavior change on their part. The interns, in particular, put up serious resistance when faced with a steep learning curve. Young people want to believe no one will insult their intelligence ever again (by understating how perfectly they do everything they put their minds to) after graduation. They don’t like to hear that they’re starting from scratch in the tacit knowledge of applied science on day one. They’ll counter that it’s not applied science, and that thinking isn’t part of their job, if you convince them that they don’t know everything yet.

As for the people setting the national security priorities in Washington, you can gripe all day about their credibility problems and skill-sets, but cultivating credibility isn’t exactly on their agenda. They’re habituated to operating on the logic of an arms dealership, trying to deregulate the gun trade while playing up the mass media’s “Sandy Hook moment”. And the value of defense contracts in pork barrel politics cannot be overstated. Just look at the proportion of Maryland’s state budget carried by income taxes for the NSA’s staff.

And when it comes to small arms export industries that are fairly obviously of limited relevance outside military combat that directly targets civilians (cluster bombs, land mines, etc.), just give us an excuse to blow shit up. We want to demonstrate cutting-edge subsidized technology that (supposedly) makes up for the fact we burned out most of our ground forces on a shit hole like Afghanistan, and even figured out how to bring Iraq down to their level. Maybe shortchanging the intelligence-gathering needed to justify a drone strike makes them feel better about those intelligence-gathering competency issues. As for drone war ethics, apparently the Geneva Convention does not apply, but new rules are an afterthought when new toys are in the pipeline. Because really, Major Barbara is the only socialist satire the Ayn Rand fans in government are ever going to understand.

How many other countries made the mistake of hauling ballpark stadium seating out to the desert for nuclear fireworks demonstrations, with sometimes regrettable health effects on the spectators, thanks to bullshit internal accounting on the radiation health risks, finessed to justify furtherance of the exorbitantly expensive pro-apocalypse arms race make-work?

Machining jobs: the ones that make greed look good.
Especially if your job makes you glow in the dark, you hero.

Noam Chomsky’s cheat sheet to Reagan’s foreign policy legacy (globalism, universalism, interventionism) helps: “massive increase in the state sector of the economy in the traditional American way, through the Pentagon system, a device to force the public to invest in high technology industry by means of the state-guaranteed market for the production of high technology waste (armaments) and thus to contribute to the program of public subsidy, private profit,” and lastly, to put it more gently, off-leash CIA adventurism abroad, to complement overt state intervention and admitted (but operationally covert) subversion of political adversaries in the contest for global hegemony, such as it is.

Letting pork barrel politics propel the U.S. military into engagements initiated largely at the behest of corporations that control various compartments of their budget isn’t a truly recent development in Washington at all. General Smedley Butler remarked at the end of his career: “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China in 1927 I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested … I had .. a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions … I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.”

Global hegemony, for Washington, is little more than dibs on major consulting and administrative engineering contracts. We no longer have material or furbished exports much in need of captive markets, and what we do ship out is not in sectors that account for much American employment or votes, apart from the guns, land mines and drones. Where the contracting is concerned, hardly any Americans are needed on the job – these risk-subsidized business deals function more as money-laundering arrangements for Beltway insiders than as job creation for Americans abroad. The surplus of military bases does better at keeping Americans off the street and in sharp dress.

If adequate mercenary make-work to keep the consumer economy afloat sounds like the kind of entitlement program Americans can agree to stand behind, they could at least drop the token rhetoric of innocents abroad in their announcements about why we ever go to war.

Sorry, we don’t produce the Wall-E model.
We do have killer drones that play concert piano.

In Aggression American Style, William Blanchard cites Vietnam kill quotas as an example of how bureaucratic performance metrics go wrong in the defense sector. The hardware equipping bloated military capabilities that may have started out as economically rational domestic politics doesn’t tend to gather dust indefinitely.

If Vietnam proved that the government runs some risk of alienating engaged citizens with excessive hypocrisy over foreign policy adventures for special interest groups, today’s all-volunteer army gives the foreign policy set more freedom from public scrutiny. All that spending basically has to be justified with a certain amount of live fire exercise, something that demonstrates the toys we pay for work. As Bertrand Russell put it, “Napoleon had asserted that you can do everything with bayonets except sit upon them; Lenin disproved the exception.”

That probably sounded clever to those who were disappointed for Lenin, but now it seems too long ago to matter what Napoleon or Bertrand Russell said. Today, no one needs to be warned that “we cannot advocate wars on the ground that they cause national unity. No doubt something of the same effect can be produced by the fear of war, but if fear of war is acute for a long enough time it is pretty sure to result in actual war, and while it promotes national unity it also causes both lassitude and hysteria.”

We’re okay with that, or prepared to settle in for the long haul anyway, for lack of a better idea. As Doris Lessing wrote before the close of the 20th century, “This is a time when it is frightening to be alive.” Still true. Aphasia goes like this: “The screams worried no one in the country. Everyone had left pity, even compassion, behind and entered the harbor of indifference by the bridge of powerlessness, cowardice, and dehumanization.”

But there’s another point to be made about Reagan’s legacy, one that Obama has yet to correct. Unpredictability, unreliability in negotiations – giving no one reason to negotiate or take American commitments on the international scene seriously. Americans like to think of it as “retaining the initiative” – but it is a rule that establishes, in effect, one would be foolhardy to ever give an American the benefit of the doubt. At gunpoint, it is reasonable to think they may shoot; otherwise wait and see, but do not listen.

Trust us, we know what we want.
It’s not up for discussion.

Talk is “just talk” to Americans. George F. Kennan saw this coming during the Cold War, with the shift from diplomacy directed at international audiences to ‘public diplomacy’ from American executives designed to make an impression on American voters, a shallow pretense at “open covenants openly arrived at” promised by the Wilson administration.

These statesmen stumping for the foreign policy set “make statements and take actions with regard not to their effect on the international scene to which they are ostensibly addressed but rather to their effect on those echelons of American opinion … to which the respective statesmen are anxious to appeal … Until the American press and public learn to detect and repudiate such behavior, the country will not have a mature and effective foreign policy.”

Nukespeak was icing on the cake. In a contribution to Blaming the Victims, Edward Said observes that “most writing about terrorism is brief, pithy, totally devoid of the scholarly armature of evidence, proof, argument.” The audience is not asked to be persuaded, just informed of what countermeasure is underway to root out the scourge “in question”. It is a style of militarist jingoistic rhetoric well matched to American isolationism and ambivalence toward state violence.

In the same volume of essays on the Israeli-Palestinian embarrassment to international relations theory as a rational practice, Noam Chomsky points out that France has used similar rhetoric to justify blowing up the Rainbow Warrior when Greenpeace was protesting the heavily subsidized and environmentally high-risk use of nuclear weapons and energy technology. Israel has used the ironic plausible deniability angle of painting all war crimes allegations during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon as fabrications of the anti-Semitic propagandists.

I suppose they must be anti-Semitic if their military posture showed hostility to Israel. They must be seeking to destroy the Jews if they would deny them their own little corner of the “land of milk and honey” every exiled minority in the world imagines can be found where they were driven from, just at the end of the good old days.

Vermont: the land of buckwheat pancake mix and fudge.

This is the most ordinary kind of propaganda in the world. And it still works as well as ever, because it hardly ever needed to anyway. War is waged by those who would be as well suited by any given war, on the indulgence of those who disapprove of virtually all wars on principle but will not stand too firmly on principle alone, being wise to the ways of the world.

The trick is not doing it badly enough to offend the barest common standard in good taste. Anatole France had a good ear for jingoistic hack writing, something that translates rather easily. “The penguins had the most powerful army in the world. So had the porpoises.”

Obama’s Executive Orders Clearinghouse, if it resembles Reagan’s use of the same powers, is good for blank checks, blackmail of the executive branch, and virtually anything else under the sun. Today one sees the remnant investigative reporters in print missing the forest for the hanging trees, and fuming over their irreverent, generic security pretexts. This approach to authoritarianism without rhetoric offends the career journalist, the glib public diplomacy no longer intended to deceive so much as to flaunt disinterest in public opinion.

We all have our vices, and for whatever reason, conspiracy theories are one of mine. Especially when they come in books; the web versions tend to be riddled with alien abduction narratives, because once the government has made you well and truly paranoid, you can believe anything, apparently.

As I see it, anyone who could mistake “neoliberalism” for an ideology is an authoritarian. If this seems no small cohort of civil society, there is likely to be a more widespread, conventional and thoughtless reason for the mouthing of economic theory by people who would never even consider thinking any of it through.

Look at it this way. Baby boomers grew up in a world where it was considered sane to tell children they should practice cowering under their desks in the event of a nuclear explosion. But in hindsight, commentators like Joseph Stiglitz are joining Noam Chomsky in concluding that the ideological battle between superpowers we thought of as “the cold war” was largely a hoax. “A more open discussion of the evidence would have shown what is now all too apparent – Russia was not a formidable opponent, the industrial giant, which it was depicted as for almost half a century.”

Their space monkey program and participation in the nuclear arms race (which was technically started by Nazis) was miraculously financed on the back of alcoholics, and alcoholism is something Russia does in fact produce in abundance. Trying briefly to ban liquor to save lives nearly bankrupted the country, due to the importance of taxing it (and the attempt probably cured no alcoholics whatsoever, since everyone had already figured out how to manufacture their own gin when they were short on cash).

He didn’t notice where it was headed? Next you’re going to
tell me Minority Report ends in Anderton’s head.

I think MK-ULTRA urban legends are relatively fair-minded to the CIA, the defense administration, the spirit of technocracy, and the FMSF (when they end up getting roped into the “everyone is out to get me” narrative of a suggestible survivor). Technocracy working hand in hand with high-technology information warfare is a known source of sci-fi/fantasy inspiration in psy-war genre thrillers.

The fan references are endless: The Matrix, Minority Report, The Manchurian Candidate, Men Who Stare At Goats, Mercury Rising… and the partially declassified real-world attempts to make mind control work are no less absurd.

They’re each wonderfully salient as metaphors. Naomi Klein’s theory of new-agey strategies for manufacturing consent through “the shock doctrine” lines up beautifully with the premise of the Bourne franchise, that you can use PTSD to prime a human being’s susceptibility to violence until he is easily triggered to focus all his attention on expertly shooting down anyone his handler points him at, sans personal compunction or human compassion. Fear and exhaustion can wear you down until you’re itching for circumstances to designate a permissible target.

But apart from priming people to be jumpy, she doesn’t think brainwashing has ever been particularly effective in real life. The only use made of MK-Ultra documents in The Shock Doctrine is to underscore the point that while torture can be quite effective at breaking someone down, trying to combine torture techniques with behavior change goals appears to be a waste of time. “Psychic driving” has never produced mind control, and it has nevertheless been justified to produce wards full of political prisoners with chronic psychotic symptoms. That probably happened primarily because the research was justified in terms of national security interests, and they figured they had to do something with it. Some people would have spent too much time on it not to hold out for a career-making opportunity to announce that it worked (for something).

Besides, terror tactics do have military applications. Torture does scare people. And an intriguing concept has an appeal of its own beyond mundane questions like whether or not it performs well in applied science.

Because science is fun.

As for those poor sops taking the brunt of MK-Ultra urban legends, the marginalized white pagans being persecuted by alleged PTSD victims for their love of quartz crystals…

Witch hunts may be out these days, but most people can agree that we could very nearly justify lynching pedophiles, if not burning them at the stake. Many UN member states are still quite cool with issuing death penalties for anyone discovered having gay sex, period. And I’m sure they’re thinking of the children.

Hence, if you were looking for a conspiracy theory angle, who would be better qualified to succeed at blackmail than a specialist in fact-checking cases against pedophiles? As Terry Goodkind points out in Soul of the Fire, keeping lightly-policed laws on the books creates very convenient mechanisms for blackmail, if you have the legal know-how to work the weaknesses of the system and at the same time exploit the conventional morality that of course everyone abides by the law unless proven guilty.

This is a matter of exploiting conventional stupidities about the distinction between “procedural fairness” and common sense, with respect to holding everyone innocent until proven guilty (a ploy greatly helped by media personalities who occasionally have to apologize for jumping to conclusions on an open mike and thereby prejudicing a case). As Shaw put it, if Jesus taught that “revenge and punishment only duplicate wrong … No doubt many private amiabilities have been inspired by this teaching; but politically it has received no more quarter than Pilate gave it.”

And it is not uncommon to prefer amiability with a known or probable villain, over the social awkwardness of acknowledging his crimes when it is not one’s own job to do anything about them.

Technocracy and “the dismal science”

Technocracy as an approach to running a government is something Perkins credits Robert McNamara with inventing, first as a militarization strategy during the Kennedy administration, and later as a strategy for dressing up hegemonic economic policies as development strategies at the World Bank.

Historian Richard Walton speculates that the flash and dazzle of concise briefings on military realities and options that McNamara used with Kennedy were the decisive victory for the idea of technocracy.  Kennedy, he laments, was “like a juggler, already juggling too many eggs, who, often at the most anxious moments, is forever having more eggs tossed at him. No writer, no presidential adviser, perhaps not even the President himself can be fully aware of the size and complexity of the job.” Brevity (in the name of time-efficiency for the executive who wants to do it all) created an exciting routine through which the President could be led around by the nose while feeling very well informed indeed.

Trust us, we’re specialists. You don’t even have time to watch
24/7 news. You’d never have time to check the facts yourself.

Brevity no doubt helped Kennedy maintain a sense of self-efficacy while struggling to keep up with the business he was expected to carry out. But it also gave McNamara disproportionate influence when it came to agenda-setting. The quantitative style of sounding rational in technocracy allowed McNamara to “provide the pseudo-precision – with charts and maps and lists of such tangibles as aircraft carriers, howitzers, helicopters, etc. – that appealed to the President,” and persuade him of a clear choice in the face of fuzzy-headed opposition from experienced diplomats.

The State Department doves were  offering only headaches – they would “talk subjectively of personalities and parties and possibilities, notably imprecise stuff,” as if McNamara’s briefings hadn’t conveyed a sense of urgency about the numbers that so clearly dictated an immediate course of action. “This confusion of brevity with wisdom was nothing less than tragic, for the proposals of the ‘realists’ who operated on Kennedy’s wavelength – McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, W.W. Rostow – led to the Bay of Pigs, to the brink of the missile crisis, to the involvement in Vietnam.”

Strangely, today’s technocratic style puts more emphasis on obscure gestures about complexity and uncertainty than artificial confidence in mathematically formulated predictions. Clarity, I suppose, would imply ignorance of one’s plausible deniability options. Now half the point of using jargon (or rattling off summary statistics by the bushel) is to convey one’s superior appreciation of causal complexity, which is a headache if you go into it in depth looking for verifiable solutions to a real-world problem, but a sign of intelligence if you’re glib.

Still, my best guess for explaining Obama’s flawless composure is that he read the memoir of one of Carter’s advisers, who boasted about how easily briefings about why the President wants to sign any given Executive Order can be used to mislead someone with an over-stretched mandate. Brzezinski said this specifically with reference to Carter’s personal commitment to a human rights agenda, which he deliberately co-opted for militant-strategic goals. To this day Human Rights Watch, founded in connection with Cold War negotiations in Helsinki, enjoys less legitimacy outside the U.S. sphere of geopolitical influence than Amnesty International, due to the way in which the human rights mandate Carter brought to the White House was politicized.*

As career-making ideas for influential Presidential advisers go, McNamara’s breakthrough was to ensure that his whirlwind explanations of how the President should interpret the “hard” facts gave him de facto control of foreign policy, with which he could favor the “conglomeration of feuding baronies and duchies that was the Defense Department.”

The military-industrial complex Paul Nitze had quietly advanced in spite of Eisenhower now enjoys its own political momentum, with respect to the generic character and scope, if not the particular targets, of U.S. foreign policy. In Richard Walton’s words, “One can formulate an iron rule for American – perhaps for any nation’s – foreign policy: the more available military methods are, the more likely they are to be used. Peace through Strength becomes Intervention through Capability.”

Because we can, that’s why.

One of the most universally recognized defining functions of a state is its monopoly of violence (i.e., arbitrating the judicious use of force). Perhaps the neoliberal security-state that has privatized the security-intelligence complex is no longer properly a state at all, maybe something more like an oligopoly of violence. A lot depends on who the army answers to in life. John Perkins credits McNamara with bringing the same technocratic leadership style to the World Bank’s international development strategy first thing after Vietnam. The next domino? Indonesia. But this time, they figured the numbers would do the trick without even bothering to start a war.

Certainly a President doesn’t have time to check his own facts; that’s why he has advisers in the first place. And with little enough context, you can’t catch a liar by his speaking voice. Then again, tone-deafness also works as a mechanism for maintaining plausible deniability when subordinates are being coached in using technocratic smoke-screens to tell you what you want to hear without appearing to lie. According to Theodore Porter in Trust in Numbers, an honest decision-maker would have to “decide whom to believe as well as what to do,” not just juggle different interpretations of “objective” facts offered by competing stakeholders while giving all parties full credit for having interpreted the data in a plausible way.

This is something he says Americans are stereotypically unwilling to do, even when “the model of applying general principles to the hard facts of each case is rather implausible, especially in the context of science done for regulatory purposes.” Blogger mathbabe attacks Nate Silver’s analysis of the financial crisis on similar grounds – that he gives the purveyors of technocratic smokescreens for corruption entirely too much credit for being too dumb to know better.

Look at his exposition of how investors are limited in their options if their goal is to beat “the efficient-market hypothesis” and outperform other people betting on the same games [first five points verbatim]:

1. No investor can beat the stock market.
2. No investor can beat the stock market over the long run.
3. No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk.
4. No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk and accounting for his transaction costs.
5. No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk and accounting for his transaction costs, unless he has inside information.

This is hardly news – to beat the system, you cheat. The interesting questions would be about how inside information is traded, in what respects inside information is valuable, and under what circumstances the game can be rigged. He does, however, go into some of the finer points in an accessible way. While you can try to be on the winning side of a bubble by shorting a stock, you better know what to expect from the ghost in the machine when you place those bets: “If the stock goes down in value, you will make money on this trade. The problem comes if the stock goes up in value, in which case you will owe more money than you borrowed originally.”

Your losses, should you choose your timing poorly when betting against the stock, “are theoretically unlimited. In practice, the investor loaning you the shares can demand them back any time she wants .. [and thus] she can quit any time she’s ahead, an enormous problem since overvalued stocks often become even more overvalued before reverting back to fairer prices.”

You did say you didn’t like nice girls, right?

Silver goes on to quote John Maynard Keyes saying, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” So knowing better isn’t the trick to avoiding being victimized by a bubble at all. What this sounds like is a system in which no one can afford to bet against stocks in hope of extra profits, as opposed to simply selling a stock they believe will go down in value at its current price, unless they are assured of being able to punt the consequences of taking such irrational risks, and make the losses come at someone else’s expense. So they would have to be fixated on fiduciary responsibilities to show short-term gains on investments, and indifferent to the long-term risks that those priorities tempt them to take.

Which is pretty much what Richard Sennett thinks is wrong with a business sector being driven this way and that way by “impatient capital” combined with a white collar standard of professionalism that rewards irrational risk-taking even when it can only be expected to produce ephemeral profits on the balance sheets.

Maybe “impatient capital” is controlled by stakeholders who can penalize any business decision that settles for lower profits if there’s a shell-game in town and they’d rather be trading on it for the windfall profits that come with exploitation. Fiduciary responsibilities can be framed as time-sensitive. But as these priorities work their way down the chain of command, fewer and fewer people know what they’re doing, and most don’t care.

This is probably another reason why it can be tempting to attribute psychopathic agendas or leadership to dysfunctional organizations. Weak systems simulate the tone-deafness of psychopathic rationalizations for corrupt motives, through sloppy hand-offs, easily compromised procedural standards of validity, and other mindless routines that undermine the motivational authority of constituents in a bureaucracy.

Unnecessary hand-offs just increase the number of errors that happen for no good reason. Organizational behavior experts have highlighted the role of sloppy hand-offs as one of the most common contributors to officially preventable harm-causing medical errors (i.e., the kind that have breached layered fail-safe systems through routine violations of mandatory safety protocols). Hand-offs between people who don’t work closely together couldn’t be better designed to fail, because strangers are typically distracted by social avoidance priorities when they’re supposed to be working together. If a police officer reaches for his radio to figure out what he’s expected to do, it’s because nobody bothered to figure out what procedures he should be taught.

‘

How to tell “change from within” newbies to stuff it.

Any authority figure who seems torn between due diligence and protecting their own career and the institution’s reputation by covering up any indication that mistakes have been made can come across as profoundly corrupt, especially if a mistake has had the opportunity to snowball before being corrected. And because all cognition is motivated (subject to personal emotional bias), if an institution is no longer capable of executing its official objectives, intellectual loyalty drifts.

Lower level workers believe in something else that gets them through the day, something concrete enough to grab them on an emotional level, whether that’s hard currency or symbolic capital from what the institution’s brand name represents. Either way, commitment to the institution’s stated goals fades from top to bottom, and at most there is internal commitment to hiding its deficiencies to keep the shell intact.

For the institution to have motivational authority (so that the true emotional bias of its constituents is in alignment with its stated functions), it has to have a capacity to self-correct, to be receptive enough to criticism from outside and dissent from within that opportunities to trouble-shoot aren’t avoided in favor of saving face over the short run. Otherwise, a defense of the institution’s behavior in the name of its stated functions is a bit hypocritical.

Real psychopaths and pathological liars use similar tricks to get away with everything from murder to plagiarism, exploiting the naive sloppiness of social networks through gossip and unintentional distortions of information passing through the grape-vine. These ordinary weaknesses in casual social networks give false credence to lies that start at a weaker link (a relatively inattentive listener) and get passed around before they are evaluated for the credibility of the informant’s tone of voice. They make it exceedingly easy to undermine a victim’s credibility as a witness against a clever liar who offers only shallow proofs of having the best intentions themselves, and makes cheap pleas for understanding any time they are found out in an inappropriate behavior that can be minimized if taken out of context.

Tone-deaf = indifferent.

The statisticians, however, almost have to know better. How else would they know to establish what you want to hear before they set about recommending strategies for “torturing the data”? They seem to be counting on widespread innumeracy and gullibility outside any given sector of technical expertise for their own credibility.

If you wanted to do an affordability comparison between current best prices on solar power and nuclear energy, for instance, I think you would need to start by doing rigorous research not on direct and indirect government subsidies, but instead on the latest trends and most successful traditions in lying with statistics. Because there are extremely convoluted ways of doing it, and there are simple obscure tricks that work just as well, and they probably wouldn’t rely on only one method of distorting the math at a time.

Without comprehensive knowledge about how the distortions are done, you wouldn’t even see it.  And the real trick to trading on these technical methods is mostly kept off-the-books, a phenomenon Stiglitz describes as the tacit side of applied science. These are the tricks you wouldn’t learn with a public library card education, and could even overlook in graduate school, if you flubbed every wink-wink-nudge-nudge opportunity to buy-in along the way.

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins describes a personal meltdown occurring near the ruins of some sort of slave-dwelling archaeological site where his conscience finally caught up with him, in the middle of a plush career in lying with statistics. But he also claims that the generation of economists and development professionals he helped train wouldn’t even notice what they’re doing was unethical. They supposedly don’t question their own fact-checking abilities, or worry about correspondence between the work that moves across their own desks and the world they live in outside the office.

The report writers work with statisticians, but many of them can convincingly argue that they don’t know how to do their own math.

“You! Stop multiplying.” – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

But where does the dismal science of macroeconomics come in? Well, look at the artificial distinction between macroeconomic theory and microeconomic theory.

The grade school version of free-market macroeconomics favors intense competition among producers, so that prices move towards equilibrium and are reasonably close to the costs of production and distribution (i.e., not extortionate). But microeconomics is about the study of how to succeed as an individual business, trying to maximize profits, which is easier if you can find ways to exclude competitors from your market and enjoy monopoly power. Some macroeconomic theory sell-outs have found ways to rationalize monopoly power as part of a healthy capitalist economy (e.g., citing the efficiencies of economies of scale), but this is difficult if you are simultaneously trying to take a hard line against protectionist economic policies with respect to international markets.

Neocons trade on disillusionment with all this academic jibber-jabber by trading almost exclusively on threat credibility. Fox News branded this variety of anti-rhetorical rhetoric and has surprisingly subtle ways of playing dumb to win an argument. They know how to elicit unpersuasive informative self-righteousness from their adversaries in debate, by pretending not to know better when they lie with distortions, as if counting on their own audience’s stupidity. Their adversaries often bumble into the trap of patronizing Fox viewers for having presumably fallen for the ploy and needing to be told where they went wrong.

The right-wing politicians they seem to favor take it even further, sometimes showing outright disdain for fact-checking per se.  And the way fact-checking services are cited by media on either side of a contentious issue can be a distortion in its own right. But for their own part, Fox News specializes in regulatory capture, hence, through a protected monopoly, audience capture (especially at the local news level).

And then there’s neoliberalism.

One of the early papers on corruption research gives an economists’ notion of what should be done about bribe-taking in law enforcement. Privatize investigative responsibilities to shift the temptation for bribe-taking for favorable treatment by investigators into a legitimate activity (hiring bounty hunters and private investigators), and let the invisible hand bring these prices to an economically fair equilibrium.

The give away is that the economists blithely assumed that the total potential earnings of enforcers (bribes+wages) would move spontaneously towards equilibrium, unless the government unwisely tried to enforce rules against bribe-taking, which would lead to uneven enforcement of the laws, in the sense that there would be unequal opportunity to bribe the police, depending on the priorities of the anti-corruption specialists.

“You are special.”

Their reasoning was that prosecuting cases of suspected malfeasance is too costly to do consistently, but if the market set the disincentives for malfeasance (by offering hypothetically better pay in private sector work, like bounty hunting) economic disincentives to giving some law-breakers special treatment would be more powerful.

Because really, the police are in it for the money too. They just got lost on the way to graduate school.

Maybe I’m reading too much between the lines in that paper. It’s just too tempting to imagine a dogmatic economist saying, “two wrongs never make a right, unless one of them involves a fair market pay-off in exchange for assurances that the other one will be ignored.” But I know an economist who could pass for a patient-safety zealot, if he didn’t insist that his knowledge of free market magic implies that drugs and services bought on the black market are assuredly safer than those available in government-regulated hospitals.

This weirdness parallels a phenomenon in international development research where economists are continually citing the anarchic conditions in Somalia as some sort of optimal social experiment where one should be able to draw conclusions from field observations about spontaneous, unregulated market forces bringing some semblance of order out of chaos. As if we should be looking to conditions in Mogadishu for a blueprint to utopia.

At least the bounty hunters have a sense of humor.

Does this obsessive faith in invisible hands also imply that privatizing government services wholesale (the core agenda in neoliberal reforms) is essentially a way to make it more legal to favor certain contractors over others in getting the technical services provided? You could call the process of selecting contractors an outcome of blind market forces more easily than you could explain away government accountability for uneven or socially unfair service provision.

(Say the bloated prison system were a result of greed on the part of private prison operators lobbying for more convictions to get fatter government contracts, would people still associate racial discrimination in the drug war with some sort of secret white supremacist agenda in Washington? If the distribution of flooded homes were strictly the market’s work, we wouldn’t have to be chagrined about the fact that Katrina represents the second time in the 20th century that mismanagement of public works on the Mississippi river has driven huge numbers of blacks into refugee camps. If Alabama hasn’t gotten tired of fighting the voting rights act yet, we all know about Alabama – that hardly reflects on the rest of us.)

But of course, the more obvious argument for a corrupt motive behind the neoliberal agenda is that corporations hungry for government contracts and/or deregulation are the ones lobbying politicians for privatization of government services. So perhaps I’m over-thinking the whole thing. The state of scholarship on corruption dynamics per se is abysmal, but that early paper on how to discourage bribe-taking in police work (from the 1970s) seemed especially comical to me, almost suspiciously naive.

Then again, if one of the old school definitions of a market is a price information exchange capturing complex information about production costs as well as utility value to customers, and closely comparing figures at the negotiating table, it’ s hard not to see information asymmetry and shell games as power plays. Dumb shit economic theories of corruption have the potential to play out exactly like politically motivated bids to legalize corruption for the benefit of insiders in politics and white collar crime networks.

And the information revolution has always been political, even if we only sat up and noticed when events on Tahrir square were trending on Twitter.

* Human Rights Watch is still accused of preferentially targeting human rights abusers, now targeting those associated with Chinese investors in places like Zimbabwe. The Boston Review recently recommended this coupling of human rights rhetoric and investor agendas rather shamelessly: “If, for instance, Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa gave more weight to the Chinese government’s oppression of Muslim Uighurs, wider Muslim attitudes might change.”