Sexist Jokes Promote Violence Toward Women

As readers know, I've been interested for a while in the use of humor (particularly satire) for social justice work, as well as understanding what makes racist and sexist jokes morally problematic (check out the philosophy of humor tag). Now Spanish researchers have done a study that suggests that young men who listen to sexist jokes somehow become desensitized to statements that justify aggression and violence toward women.

Surprising?

Mark Rudd as Commencement Speaker? (or What can Kids today learn from a terrorist)

I can't imagine OSU ever doing this, but one can dream. Timothy Noah, over at Slate.com, suggests that colleges and universities shouldn't recruit successful people to give the commencement speech at the end of the year. Instead, schools should get failures--people who have screwed something up in their lives and can talk about the wisdom they gathered from the experience. One of his examples is our old friend, Mark Rudd. Here is Noah:

"Mark Rudd. Rudd (author of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen) is a refreshing departure from Weather Underground veterans like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who continue to glamorize their radical past and to deny the Weather Underground's violent intentions. Rudd sees "very little positive" in the Weather Underground and much to be ashamed of, including its destruction of Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-war group the Weather Underground grew out of. He does not deny that the explosives that killed three of the Weather Underground's members in a Greenwich Village brownstone in 1970 were intended to kill soldiers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix, N.J. He feels bad about the toll his life took on his parents. Worthwhile message: Don't intellectualize violence."

What a great talk that would be! (And I agree with Noah's review of Rudd's work in comparison to Ayers. Fugitive Days is a bore and a tad pompous. Rudd actually has some lessons for people about politics today)

Check out Mark talking about his new book on C-Span here.

We Get Excited Easily: Habermas on Obama and Human Rights

Jurgen Habermas received the Spanish Brunet Prize for Human Rights recently. He was asked about the implication of Obama's election for human rights. Here is what he said:

"Obama is an American phenomenon. After eight years of Bush, Obama has been a great gift...Something that sets us apart from the Americans is that they have a great willingness to get excited with things. The history of Europe in the twentieth century has been quite complicated, with disasters and dictatorships. Perhaps it is appropriate that here in Europe we are less enthusiastic and have both feet on the ground."

After these last two weeks--in which Obama has adopted the Bush position on not releasing military abuse photos from Iraq and Afghanistan, has decided to keep the flawed military commissions system for trying detainees in Guantanamo, and has pledged to keep some detainees in permanent preventative detention--maybe we should learn to be more European.

Are Prisoner Rights Human Rights?

The Dirty Bomber, Jose Padilla, was finally sentenced this week to 17 years in prison. He was not convicted of actually engaging in any terrorist violence or of arranging any detonation of a dirty bomb. He was convicted of conspiracy--essentially of associating with people who had ties with terrorist networks in the Middle East.

Andy Worthington argues that all Americans should be worried about this conviction. Jose Padilla was held as an enemy combatant for 3 years in a military prison and subjected to strict isolation and sensory deprivation. He had restricted access to legal counsel before he was finally transferred to civilian authorities. Worthington claims that giving the government this kind of power threatens the personal security of each American citizen--once the President declares a person an enemy combatant, that person can disappear into a legal limbo where the protection of civil liberties may not reach.

Two weeks ago, many American communities held rallies to close down Guantanamo Bay military prison and to put an end to the kind of detention suffered by Padilla. A few days later, the top U.S. military leader,Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, said he favored closing the prison because he believes that the stories of prisoner treatment have damaged the image of the United States around the world.

But closing Guantanamo may not mean our civil liberties are more secure. At the same time that they ruled that prisoners in Guantanamo have constitutional rights, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners in regular U.S. prisons do not have the First Amendment right to read secular newspapers, magazines, or have pictures of family members in their cells.

The case of Beard v. Banks deals with prisoners in condtions not much unlike what Padilla had in military prison. The Supreme Court ruled that prison officials can deny access to newspapers and magazines to certain prisoners if those officials believe that doing so would be a security problem, or if doing so was part of a institutional plan to punish or break a prisoner., or serve some other "reasonable" correctional interest. As one Justice put it, prisoners can read trashy romance novels from the prison library, but they do not have a right to have newspapers delivered to them that will inform them about current events or the state of the world outside their cells.

The prisoners in Beard are not nice people. They are housed in maximum security. The Supreme Court has said such individuals have some basic rights. But it is clear that many in our society do not believe they are entitled to anything like a dignified life. As the Pennsylvania Senior Deputy Attorney General Kemal Mericli, who was responsbile for moving Beard forward says:

“These people are not savants, are not intellectuals; they’re not at the Brookings Institution, they’re not professors. . . . I don’t know what their life is about. What they are, to my mind, they’re prisoners in a prison.”

As my mentor Darius Rejali has pointed out before in his work on torture practices, bad things don't start in places like Abu Graib or Nazi death camps--they can be traced to police tactics on the streets of Boston or in normal prisons first.

How Modern is Your Torture?

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern tries to show the political links behind the CIA's decision to destroy video tapes showing "harsh" interrogation techniques against suspects in the war on terrorism. He says the scandal should move the U.S. to abandon tactics, such as waterboarding, that find their origins in the Spanish Inquisition.

What's interesting is that now, unlike during the Inquisition, we have the technology to record the images of such practices. The CIA tapes might have recorded felonies taking place. But what could they reveal about the tortue itself or about the people who inflict this kind of harm on others? Reporter John Barry recounts here how he was able to watch torture films from Iran and Greece many years ago and how it dispelled some myths about what torture might be like.

Of course, one of the myths we might want to dispel is that torture is a tactic that is a hold-over from more brutal days or that it only developed in the context of authoritarian societies, such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. If you look at the introduction to Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy, you realize that there is a whole genre of "clean" torture methods developed in the 20th century by the world's strongest democracies (America, France, UK) that have spread and found their way into use by the dictators. But they started here, with the intent of being undetectable, not leaving marks on the body. Rejali's book is intended to be a civic primer for democratic citizens on the deployment of these practices of violence in our own societies. Perhaps we need to stop worrying about plunging back into the Dark Ages and start asking how much of our modern political institutions are literally built on the broken backs of victims.

Was Martin Luther King, Jr. a terrorist?

In the aftermath of 9/11, many states passed anti-terrorism laws modeled on the federal Patriot Act. These state laws copied language from the Patriot Act, making it a crime to "intimidate or coerce a civlian population" or to "intimidate or coerce a government unit to change its policies". At the time, civil libertarians worried that this language would be applied in an overly broad manner. It seems like the slippery slope ride might be beginning.

Edgar Morales, 25, was convicted this month under the New York state anti-terrorism law. He was a member of a Mexican street gang in the Bronx that apparently preyed on Mexican immigrants, extorting money, and engaging in street crime and muggings. In 2006, Morales was involved in a shooting in which a 10 year old girl was accidentally murdered. Instead of being charged with mere first degree murder, he was convicted under the terrorism law for trying to "intimidate a civilian population". The minimum for such a crime is 25 years to life. Under the full charges, Morales faces up to 50 years minimum. You can read more about the conviction here.

Civil libertarians are concerned with the application of the statute in this way. They point out there should be a difference between Morales and Osama bin Ladin. Others are concerned that there are already laws on the books that could convict Morales and that adding these kinds of charges penalize thought, not actions (these are the same people that complain about hate crime legislation, too).

I mentioned this case in one of my classes last week and a student pointed out that such laws could be used to convict even nonviolent protestors. I don't see why not.

In his famous, "Letter from a Birmingham City Jail", Martin Luther King Jr. argues that the purpose of nonviolent direct action (such as marches, sit-ins, lunch counter take overs, etc) is not simply to raise awareness, or get media attention for a social issue, but to create "tension" in a community. He also calls it "crisis". The point is to make a community so unable to function normally that it must deal with a social problem that it has been willing to sweep under the rug all things considered.

Why couldn't it be possible to see the lunch counter sit ins of the Civil Rights Movmements as attempts to "intimidate or coerce a civilian population"? Indeed, that's what they were trying to do--change the minds of people through forceful action--but without violence. Wasn't Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign--the idea to send thousands of people to sit in on the lawn of the Washington Monument for weeks, until Congress would pass anti-poverty legislation--an attempt to coerce a government unit to change policy? Its not clear that these anti-terrorism laws make such a fine distinction between violent methods and nonviolent direct action.

Edgar Morales probably deserves jail time for his actions. And its probably true that some gangs are sophisticated enough to be able to inflict widespread intimidation throughout the communities in which they exist. But there are two severe implications of this conviction:

It serves to increase the stereotypical perception that Latino immigrants are criminals, indeed, terrorists (just add Jose "Dirty Bomber" Padilla to this list along with Morales) who deserve increased surveillance and severe penalties, lest they degrade American public life even more. An excellent discussion of these kinds of stereotypes is found in Steven Bender's book, Greasers and Gringos.

It also implies that people engaged in the struggle for social justice need to be aware of the state tools now available that might severely limit their ability to enact social change in a nonviolent way. MLK was called a terrorist by those who wanted to maintain white supremacy--now there are laws in some 36 states that could have made that kind of talk more than just a metaphor.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Rorty speaks on the war on terrorism and the effects on civil liberties. One of the few philosophers in America who could genuinely be called a "public intellectual".


Online Videos by Veoh.com

UPDATE JUNE 12, 2007

An obituary by Jurgen Habermas for Rorty.

Gandhi vs. Osama: Who Wins?

If you're Peter Gelderloos, then the answer might be: Neither, because both of them are just as dangerous to real peace and justice in the world today. Gelderloos is the author of "How Nonviolence Protects the State". The main purpose behind this book is to try to shake off the supposed stranglehold that nonviolent theory has upon political activists in the United States and point out that nonviolent movements have never accomplished any significant social change in modern history. In a few short chapters, Gelderloos argues that nonviolence is 1) ineffective as a means of transforming society, 2) racist, 3) patriarchal and sexist, 4) tactically inferior to other methods of social change (read: direct action), and 5) statist (that is, instead of standing up the institutional injustices of the nation-state, nonviolence theory and its practitioners actually do everything to make sure that the state remains as an organization to inflict harm upon communities). You can read an exerpt from the book here.

What is most frustrating and seemingly contradictory about the thesis of this book is this: Gelderloos claims to want to open up the discussion of social change to include the possibility of a "diversity of tactics" and that peace activists today are so wedded to nonviolence that they immediatly rule out the use of sabotage, property destruction, and other forms of potentially violent ( to persons and property) action. But the argument quickly turns into how nonviolence is NOT an option in the world today and if you think thing are going to change using nonviolence, you are either 1) seriously deluded or 2) morally corrupt and part of the structures that need to swept aside. An passage from Gelderloos:

"Our options have been violently constrained to the following: actively supporting the violence of the system; tacitly supporting that violence by failing to challenge it; supporting some of the existing forceful attempts to destroy the system of violence; or pursuing new and original ways to fight and destroy that system. Privileged activists need to understand what the rest of the world's people have known all too long; we are in the midst of a war, and neutrality is not possible. There is nothing in this world currently deserving of the name peace. Rather, it is a question of whose violence frightens us most, and on whose side we will stand." (p. 134)

What is most frightening about this rhetoric is how closely is matches the language of world leaders used to justify war and violent retaliation (for instance, in the "war on terror"). The world is us against them, and the only morally relevant question is: whose side are you on?

For what its worth, most of the major theorists of nonviolent direct action, Gandhi, King, and Chavez for instance, rejected thinking of the world in these terms. Gandhi would have said the stark choices laid out by Gelderloos might be appropriate as part of the law of the jungle, but we are no longer in that kind of existence. We would not have survived as long as we are today if we had not learned different forms of cooperation and creative means by which to live with one another. The task for nonviolent activists, say these figures, is to push ourselves to learn more and more creative ways to resolve conflict peacefully.


Toward that end, I really appreciate Mark Juergensmeyer's article which attempts to point out how Gandhi might approach the problem of terrorism today. Juergensmeyer points out that Gandhi was certainly not passive and would not have allowed anyone to be taken advantage of (Gelderloos continually conflates the idea of pacifism and passivity), and might even have justified the use of some force to contain violent offenders like Osama bin Laden.

Hopefully the world is more complex than having to decide which forms of violence are more appropriate for the work of justice today.