Oh, yay... Learned helplessness...

a societal and organizational dynamic that i've observed for many years is what i have come to call "learned helplessness"... many of us develop that mindset when, over many, many years, we've come to believe that no matter what we do, our employer won't change a damn thing, our society will still be off the rails, and our government will still feel perfectly within its rights to do whatever it goddam well pleases no matter what we, the people, think about it...

now, i come to find out that very same dynamic, using the very same name underpins the oh-so-euphemistically labeled "enhanced interrogation techniques," known to you and me as torture, methods have been - and probably still are - so liberally applied at our < snark > club med-style < /snark > "detention" facilities, known to you and me as prisons and to our friends in russia as gulags...

well, at least panetta isn't sitting on his hands...

CIA Director Leon Panetta fired Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and all other contractors that aided the CIA in its interrogations of alleged terrorists, the New Yorker reported this weekend.

The firings took place in April, around the same time the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on the role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in developing "countermeasures to defeat" the resistance of captured enemy detainees from whom intelligence was being sought.

Mitchell and Jessen, who run the firm, had worked on a Pentagon program that taught U.S. service members how to survive harsh enemy interrogation methods. They relied on elements of that training in proposing an interrogation program for the CIA. It included methods such as sleep deprivation and other actions based on "theories of 'learned helplessness,' " the New Yorker reported.

our minders have worked long and hard to instill in us the learned helplessness mindset... we're ever so much easier to control when we feel and think that way... nothing to see here, folks... just move along...

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