Yes, there's something terribly wrong and it's much deeper than easy access to guns

at least once a day, i read something that gets my blood boiling and i often think, gee, maybe i ought to post that on the blog... yeah, right... i don't seem to be getting very far on that one...

well, today, when i read the latest horribly superficial and denial-ridden analysis of the latest in the never-ending parade of mass-slaughter incidents in my country, i simply couldn't let it go unchallenged... and, yep, you guessed it, almost the entire focus was on easy access to guns...

summing up steven rosenfeld via alternet...

...access to guns exacerbates violence...

well, yes, i don't think there's any doubt about that but where, ferchrissake, is the discussion of where all that damn violence is coming from...? but, ya know, that's not all such hard a question to answer... all it takes is opening your eyes and looking around... 

in the u.s., violence permeates the very air we breathe... it's in the movies, in sports, on television, seeded all through popular music, is the theme for countless widely played video games, on and on... the look, the feel, the attitude of barely suppressed violence struts around our streets with shaved heads, tattoos, piercings, male and female, in the malls, in the bars, and, yes, even on the playground... and i don't need to go into all the details of where and how violence manifests itself because it's visible everywhere...

i go to the gym several times a week as i'm sure some of you do too... general gym protocol seems to require loud rock music playing in the background... i'm not anti rock music to be sure but i'm appalled at how much of it involves anger, yelling, screaming, and implied if not outright violence... in-your-face aggression is more often than not the norm...

then there's the utter militarization of our society... fighting in endless wars, local police departments equipped like special operations hit squads, "support our troops" stickers, themes, and celebrations everywhere, assassinations by drone, u.s. military support to some of the most repressive and violent regimes on the planet...

i won't even mention income inequality better suited to a failed state, mass incarceration, stratospheric student debt, structural unemployment, and starving retirees...

in short, anyone who thinks that gun controls will fix anything is sadly mistaken and is only confusing the symptom with the cause... we have a very, very sick society, my friends, and, if denial about anything needs to be faced, it is that...

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The poor have to help the poor because the ones who make the money are helping the people with money

chris hedges...

[W]omen and men who rise up in the pockets of poverty and despair ... resist not because they will succeed in reversing the corporate onslaught against them, or even save themselves or their communities from poverty, but because it is right. They wake each day to defy, often in small, unseen acts of revolt, the intractable poverty, the despair and violence, by nurturing life. They often can do little to protect the lives, especially the lives of children, that are daily crushed and destroyed. But they refuse to bow before the forces of oppression or neglect. And in that defiance they achieve grandeur.

the above is just a small excerpt and omits the very personal and moving story in which chris hedges documents the hard life of one woman on the mean streets of camden, new jersey...

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Occupy reduced violence in Oakland

rebecca solnit in tomdispatch...

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland," the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city.

interesting statistic...

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Wondering why trained killers, steeped in violence, might consider suicide as an option

let's consider what goes into the making of what our government, in the most horrific perversion of verbiage imaginable, now prefers to call "warfighters"...

without passing judgement, the typical military recruit occupies a lower rung on the socioeconomic scale, has internalized a great deal of the media and government propaganda (new car, shiny electronic toys, owning your own mcmansion, a smoking hot squeeze, gq fashion, and, last but not least, the united states as global #1) dished out on a daily basis, has limited job prospects, and is educated to the high school level or perhaps a year or two of community college... he - or she - sees the military as a respectable option, a way to learn skills attractive to future employers, and as a way to be fed, clothed, and housed for a few years in the bargain...

enter basic training...

basic training is carefully constructed to strip away as much of your former identity as possible and replace it with the identity of a killing machine... the threat of a depersonalized, dehumanized "enemy" is constantly being thrown in your face along with the notion that it is you and your military "buddies" (the term "buddy" is military code for watching someone's back) who are the only thing standing in the way of the united states being overrun by the "enemy" who wants nothing more than to destroy the entire american way of life...

let's assume that, following basic and advanced training, the recruit receives an assignment in afghanistan... since i am somewhat familiar with both the military and afghanistan, i have a fairly good idea of what he or she is exposed to and, believe me, none of it is pretty... i've stood behind a soldier in line at the camp phoenix post office who was inquiring about how to best wrap body parts for mailing... (you can only imagine the scenario in which they were obtained...)

every day, whether there's action or not, revolves around either actual or potential violence, the kind of violence that scatters the blood, intestines and body parts of adults, the elderly, women and children everywhere, some of it perpetrated by others and some perpetrated by you... the only person-to-person contact with real afghans is with interpreters, basically mechanical accessories to a patrol or a sweep... it's almost impossible to get to know the locals as fellow human beings and the dehumanized stereotype of the afghan as murderous dirt-ball never has the chance to be challenged or dispelled...

the intensity of such circumstances cannot be overstated... it seeps into your very bones and is so far removed from the daily lives of those you left behind that you might just as well be on another planet... such "seepage" happens in the course of a single deployment and multiple deployments only lock it in... imagine coming back to the u.s. (and many return to a domestic shambles that has formed in their absence) to take in all the "support our troops" bling and trying to accept that your life will never be what you hoped it would be and that the experiences you have racked up in the past year, two years, three years, five years, will be a burden on you for the rest of your life...

and we wonder why so many returnees chose suicide as an option...

then you're treated to the vapid, soulless, essentially dishonest treatment of returnee suicides in today's nyt...

The statistics are endlessly grim: From 2005 to 2010, service members have killed themselves approximately once every 36 hours. For veterans, the rate is estimated at once every 80 minutes.

Why do so many current and former service members, including those who are never deployed, kill themselves? How can the U.S. reduce that suicide rate?

how...? in all the blather, the only really effective solution is the one that the nyt would never allow to be considered - let's stop the endless war...

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Glenn comments on the latest instance of children being killed needlessly in Afghanistan

glenn commenting on an nyt story about the second time in three days that a child has been killed in afghanistan by nato forces...

It's the perfect self-perpetuating cycle: (1) They hate us and want to attack us because we're over there; therefore, (2) we have to stay and proliferate ourselves because they hate us and want to attack us; (3) our staying and proliferating ourselves makes them hate us and want to attack us more; therefore, (4) we can never leave, because of how much they hate us and want to attack us. The beauty of this War on Terror -- and, as the last two weeks have demonstrated, War is the bipartisan consensus for what we are and should be doing to address Terrorism -- is that it forever sustains its own ostensible cause.

sitting here in kabul, it's particularly painful to me when i hear of any child - but especially an afghan child - having his or her life senselessly ended in the murderous reign of terror and violence we call war... i was just having my breakfast and talking with our cook in the kitchen, asking about his family... he has four children, a son, 15, another son, 11, and two daughters, 5 and 3... he is clearly devoted to them and i can't imagine one of them being taken away as "collateral damage"...

sadly, it isn't just the war machine that is killing kids... the violence spills over into the rest of society as well... our other cook was telling me just yesterday morning how thieves, desperate for money, are kidnapping children off the streets and holding them for outrageous ransoms which, if they don't get in the specified time, simply kill the child...

i can't imagine losing a child... i have three grown children and two young grandsons, all of whom i love dearly... losing one of them would be far worse than losing an arm or a leg, and my life would be irrevocably and permanently diminished... children are the light of our lives... losing even one of them is a tradegy beyond comprehension and yet that is a daily fact of life for afghans... it must stop and stop soon...

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Rejoicing in a corpse with half its head blown off

observing the orgasmic reactions of the news media over bin laden's murder from here in afghanistan is an interesting experience to say the least...

probably about half the afghans i know have said over the past few years that they aren't so sure that bin laden even existed, suspecting rather that he was a myth concocted and nurtured to feed the insatiable u.s. need for a "great satan"... in any case, the most common afghan reaction to the bin laden story was to ask those of us from the u.s. how WE felt about it, to remind us repeatedly that they had told us all along that he was in pakistan and to insist, as they have done ever since i've been coming here, that pakistan is the principal - if not the only - real source of the continuing violence in their country...

it's also interesting to note the hand-wringing in the u.s. over releasing the photo of bin laden's corpse... here in the house, we have access to a number of news channels in india and they splashed the photo all over their news reports within hours of the story breaking... whether they were the real thing or not is open to question, of course, but i can assure you, there was no hand-wringing...

meanwhile, back in the u.s., the blood lust is at fever pitch...

from glenn...

The Washington Times Editorial Page:

Those primitive, bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics sure do love to glorify death and violence.

yes, those nasty, vicious muslim fanatics...

meanwhile, i will sit here at my laptop for a while longer before heading off for a shower, breakfast, and spending the day working around a houseful of some of the most gentle, polite, good-natured, devout afghan muslims it's been my privilege to know...

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Juan Cole has a run-down on the escalating events in the Middle East

All Hell Breaks Loose in the Middle East

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Juan Cole spells out the big picture of the events in Egypt

professor cole...

On Wednesday, the Mubarak regime showed its fangs, mounting a massive and violent repressive attack on the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. People worrying about Egypt becoming like Iran (scroll down) should worry about Egypt already being way too much like Iran as it is. That is, Hillary Clinton and others expressed anxiety in public about increasing militarization of the Iranian regime and use of military and paramilitaries to repress popular protests. But Egypt is far more militarized and now is using exactly the same tactics.

The outlines of Hosni Mubarak’s efforts to maintain regime stability and continuity have now become clear. In response to the mass demonstrations of the past week, he has done the following:

1. Late last week, he first tried to use the uniformed police and secret police to repress the crowds, killing perhaps 200-300 and wounding hundreds.

2. This effort failed to quell the protests, and the police were then withdrawn altogether, leaving the country defenseless before gangs of burglars and other criminal elements (some of which may have been composed of secret police or paid informers). The public dealt with this threat of lawlessness by organizing self-defense neighborhood patrols, and continued to refuse to stop demonstrating.

3. Mubarak appointed military intelligence ogre Omar Suleiman vice president. Suleiman had orchestrated the destruction of the Muslim radical movement of the 1990s, but he clearly was being groomed now as a possible successor to Mubarak and his crowd-control expertise would now be used not against al-Qaeda affiliates but against Egyptian civil society.

4. Mubarak mobilized the army to keep a semblance of order, but failed to convince the regular army officers to intervene against the protesters, with army chief of staff Sami Anan announcing late Monday that he would not order the troops to use force against the demonstrators.

5. When the protests continued Tuesday, Mubarak came on television and announced that he would not run for yet another term and would step down in September. His refusal to step down immediately and his other maneuvers indicated his determination, and probably that of a significant section of the officer corps, to maintain the military dictatorship in Egypt, but to attempt to placate the public with an offer to switch out one dictator for a new one (Omar Suleiman, likely).

6. When this pledge of transition to a new military dictator did not, predictably enough, placate the public either, Mubarak on Wednesday sent several thousand secret police and paid enforcers in civilian clothing into Tahrir Square to attack the protesters with stones, knouts, and molotov cocktails, in hopes of transforming a sympathetic peaceful crowd into a menacing violent mob [emphasis added]. This strategy is similar to the one used in summer of 2009 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to raise the cost of protesting in the streets of Tehran, when they sent in basij (volunteer pro-regime militias). Used consistently and brutally, this show of force can raise the cost of urban protesting and gradually thin out the crowds.

Note that this step number 6 required that the army agree to remain neutral and not to actively protect the crowds. The secret police goons were allowed through army checkpoints with their staves, and some even rode through on horses and camels. Aljazeera English’s correspondent suggests that the military was willing to allow the protests to the point where Mubarak would agree to stand down, but the army wants the crowd to accept that concession and go home now.

professor cole pretty much confirms my own impressions...

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Keith on the insanity of our guns and violence-obsessed society

our nation needs to face the fact that a dedication to endless war, fueled by fear-mongering and the bottomless greed of super-rich elites who are totally committed to manipulating us by any means at their disposal, can expect this kind of horror... we must also remember that our nation is perpetrating this same kind of horror elsewhere in the world and that what goes around, comes around...

keith...

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Edging closer to Pascua

a week from today semana santa - holy week - begins and argentina will be essentially shut down as will many latin american countries and other catholic countries around the world... as in the u.s., the stores are pushing pascua - easter - candy, hawked by cute cartoon bunnies sporting the traditional easter colors of dominant green and white...

meanwhile, here's a slightly different take on the season...


In this photo taken Jan. 30, 2010 in Houston and provided
by Jack Potts, a photograph by his 10-year-old son Jackson
Potts II depicts a nightstick-wielding policeman beating a child.
The image has sparked religious controversy and was excluded
from an exhibit depicting the Stations of the Cross. To Jackson,
a talented 10-year-old Houston photographer, and some art
lovers, the disturbing image is simply religious symbolism.
Jackson's younger brother Diedrich, 7, played the fallen
Christ-child role.
(Jackson Potts II/AP Photo)

evidently, the photo came a bit too close to the truth for some...

Jackson shot the photograph for an exhibit depicting the Stations of the Cross, but the show's organizers rejected it, sparking a controversy some say is overshadowing remembrance of Jesus' final hours during the season of Lent.

yes, it's disturbing but that's the point, isn't it...? senseless, inhuman violence directed at the innocent is SUPPOSED to be disturbing...

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The impact of all stops removed violence on returning military

from the colorado springs gazette via atrios...

stories from the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, the "Lethal Warriors"...

[T]he time bomb exploded when [Teresa Hernandez'] son [Anthony Marquez] used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield [Colorado] over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.

Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he wasn’t the last.

[...]

In December 2007, Bressler and fellow soldiers Bruce Bastien Jr., 21, and Kenneth Eastridge, 24, left the bullet-riddled body of a soldier from their unit on a west-side street.

kenneth eastridge speaks...

“The Army trains you to be this way. In bayonet training, the sergeant would yell, ‘What makes the grass grow?’ and we would yell, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ as we stabbed the dummy. The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off. ... If they don’t figure out how to take care of the soldiers they trained to kill, this is just going to keep happening.”

and then there's this fine litany...

In August 2007, Louis Bressler, 24, robbed and shot a soldier he picked up on a street in Colorado Springs.

[...]

In May and June 2008, police say Rudolfo Torres-Gandarilla, 20, and Jomar Falu-Vives, 23, drove around with an assault rifle, randomly shooting people.

In September 2008, police say John Needham, 25, beat a former girlfriend to death.

it's an extremely sobering read but one that shouldn't be all that surprising... these are the natural consequences of a society based on violence and the denial of its impact by our all-too-removed-from-the-stark-reality-of-violence-and-death leaders who like to pretend it simply doesn't exist...

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How about "wonderful and encouraging" rather than "baffling and unexpected"...?

from the wapo...

Violent crime has plummeted in the Washington area and in major cities across the country, a trend criminologists describe as baffling and unexpected.

The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

"Experts did not see this coming at all," said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

and, natch, cops are taking the credit...

Whatever the cause, police across the region are taking credit for the drop.

maybe, just maybe, people are beginning to reject violence and crime as behavioral options... maybe, just maybe, people are beginning to tune in to the fact that making things better can't be done by fighting and stealing... can i justify such a view...? no, of course not, but maybe, just maybe, there might be some truth in it and, if so, wouldn't that be loverly...?

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Violence, violence, and more violence permeates our daily lives

david sirota offers up a very thoughtful piece on the violent culture of the united states in today's alternet...

Today, one in every three dollars the government spends goes to defense and security. The killing machine and adventurism that money manufactures has delivered 1 million Iraqi casualties, thousands of American casualties and an implicit promise of future wars -- indeed, of permanent war.

Perpetuating this expenditure, bloodshed and posture in a nation of dwindling resources, humanitarian self-images and anti-interventionist impulses requires a culture constantly selling violence as a necessity. It's not just video games -- it's the nightly news echoing Pentagon propaganda and "hawkish" politicians equating militarism with patriotism and "embedded" journalism cheering on wars and every other suit-and-tie-clad industry constantly forwarding the assumption that killing is a legitimate form of national ambition and self-expression. Is it any wonder that a few crazies apply that ethos to their individual lives, and begin seeing violence as a reasonable means to express their own emotions?

i was moved to respond...

Although, I must say, I completely agree with your assessment. Our national culture is totally constructed on exploitation - of people, of resources, of the planet - and exploitation is inextricably tied to violence. But it's not only the deeper questions about people turning to violence that our superficiality-obsessed society avoids, it is ANY deeper discussion about ANYTHING.

I teach a graduate seminar in leadership and one of the things I say to the students right off the bat is that the corpus of writings on leadership that leap off the shelves at the unwary consumer in every bookstore in the country are nothing more than fast-food recipes containing little in the way of nutritional ingredients and probably not much more in the way of anything natural whatsoever.

What is the level of national discussion about sex? Janet Jackson's nipple? Sarah Palin's daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy? There's no "discussion" to be had, merely more titillation.

The recent national obsession with the shooting of the three Somalian pirates was nothing more than violence pornography. The lede in Jonah Goldberg's LA Times editorial was this: "Shooting three Somali pirates was a good start. Now let's shoot some more." Unbelievable or, rather, perhaps TOO believable.

I am typing this as I sit at my desk in Kabul, Afghanistan, the current epicenter of violence, at least from the perspective of our violence-besotted media. But even my Afghan colleagues, inured as they are to violence on a daily basis, scratch their heads over the violent episodes they read about in the U.S. The U.S. is the penultimate, they reason. Why in the world would people there engage in such behavior?

Why indeed.

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Is threatening to attack and kill your political opposition a form of vote manipulation?

this is soo-o-o-o-oooo wrong... and where the hell are the leaders of the african nations and the rest of the world community...?

Only five days before Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff election, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai announced Sunday that he was pulling out of the race because armed forces backing President Robert Mugabe have made it clear that anyone who votes for Mr. Tsvangirai faces a real possibility of being killed.

At a news conference, Mr. Tsvangirai, who leads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., said he was unwilling to ask the party’s supporters to go to the polls on Friday “when that vote will cost them their lives.”

Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision came on a day when governing party youth militia armed with iron bars, sticks and other weapons beat his supporters as they sought to attend a rally for him in Harare.

it's a tragedy that tsvangirai is pulling out, but, given the circumstances, also seems to me to be a display of true leadership...

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The REAL truth about the U.S. in Ethiopia and Somalia... Yes, it's about OIL and a "narrow, extremely violent kleptocracy"...

this is perhaps the best analysis i've read yet of what's going on in africa...

from the media alerts section of medialens...

On May 1, the BBC website reported an attack on Somalia with the words:

“Air raid kills Somali militants.”

One might think the BBC’s headline would identify the agency responsible for the bombing, but the first few sentences also shed no light:

“The leader of the military wing of an Islamist insurgent organisation in Somalia has been killed in an overnight air strike.

“Aden Hashi Ayro, al-Shabab's military commander, died when his home in the central town of Dusamareb was bombed.

“Ten other people, including a senior militant, are also reported dead.”

[...]

[T]he US is the world’s policeman; no need to mention it by name. The action of bombing an impoverished Third World country already indicates the agent. This also helps explain why no mention was made of the illegality of this act of aggression.

ok, now, let's get down to brass tacks...

The preferred media framework for making sense of US actions closely parallels cold war mythology. We are to believe the US is passionately, even blindly, battling ideological enemies in an effort to protect itself and the West.

[...]

As Andy Rowell and James Marriott have noted, the key fact is that “some 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa in the next ten years". (Rowell and Marriott, A Game as Old as Empire - The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, edited by Steven Hiatt, Berrett-Koehler, 2007, p.118)

The US has plans for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the US oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. The US hopes Somalia will line up as an ally alongside Ethiopia and Djibouti, where the US has a military base. This alliance would give America powerful leverage close to the major energy-producing regions.

[...]

[W]e are [only] free to chose from parties and leaders who all represent the same interests of concentrated state-corporate power - the tiny fraction of the population that owns much of the country and runs its business.

Crucially, ’our leaders’ front a political system that has an overwhelming advantage in high-tech military power. They are all too willing to use this power to convulse countries with bloodshed when doing so supports their lucrative version of economic ’order’. Iraq is the obvious example - Somalia is another.

’Our leaders’ rule in the name of democracy, but they act in the interests of a narrow, extremely violent kleptocracy.

excellent stuff... i encourage you to read it all...

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Violent video games

The above photo is of young people playing
Counter-Strike in an internet cafe in
Chico, California, in 2004. I could have
taken a nearly identical photo this after-
noon in one of hundreds of "cibers" (internet
cafes) all over Buenos Aires, throughout
Argentina, and in dozens of other countries.

i know - and have known - several people, some of them close friends, one of them my son, and two of them my grandsons, who like to play "first-person shooters," video games where the person playing kills characters in the games... some of the "deaths" involve large amounts of animated gore and some do not, instead representing "death" symbolically by having the character simply "disappear"...

the argument about whether or not there is a residual psychological impact from engaging for hours at a time in simulated "death" will, of course, rage on... i, for one, can simply not understand how there cannot be at least a desensitization effect... i've seen first-hand that there are definitely behavioral spin-offs to a heavy diet of wwe, but i can't say that about video games... however, watching my two young grandsons spending uncounted hours - in fact most of the time they are not either sleeping, eating, or in school - in front of the tv watching mindless cartoons (ok, i'll admit, i DO occasionally enjoy sponge bob) or playing video games, i have to believe there's an impact there...

here's one view...

Playing video games increases aggression in some children and young adults and normalizes killing, some doctors said.

Research suggests that violent video games can make children feel different. A brain scan of a teenager who has just played what was deemed a nonviolent video game was compared to the scan of a teen who had just spent 30 minutes playing a violent game. Indiana School of Medicine researchers said highlighted areas in the brains showed increased activity in the areas involved in emotional arousal.

"Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal," said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha's Children's Hospital.

Snyder said exposure to violence in video games can desensitize a teen to the real thing.

Research from Iowa State University, Kansas State University and the National Institutes of Health reached similar conclusions. Compared to teens who played nonviolent games, those who played violent games had a lower heart rate and lower galvanic skin response when they were exposed to videos of real violence, the studies showed.

"The more normal it is, the more likely it is they're going to activate or engage in those behaviors when provoked or even unprovoked," Snyder said.

Tyler White, 17, said he has been playing video games as long as he can remember. He and his friend, Erik Grove, 16, play a game called "Gears of War." Both boys said they enjoy shooting games.

"With a shooting game, you can't actually go out and shoot someone," White said. "The whole thing with video games is, do something you can't already do in real life, at least that's what it is to me."

After they played the game for about 20 minutes, the teens said they didn't feel more violent.

The video game industry notes that the research also finds that teenagers have similar responses to violence in movies or TV. The industry said no one can prove a definitive link between virtual violence and the real thing.

Ryan Miller, the manager of general operations for Gamers in Omaha, said video games become an easy scapegoat when children turn violent.

"Just like any new media, it gets attacked. When any new genre of music comes out, it gets attacked. TV will, of course, get attacked. I'm sure, way back when, books got attacked," Miller said.

Other research shows that antisocial behavior is not a result of the game, but rather the isolation that results when children play the games along for hours on end.

All sides of the argument agree that parental control is important, whether it's in the purchasing of games or playing them.

here's another from several years ago...

For young men, first-person shooters are the hottest computer games around. That's why the Army spent $10 million developing its own. But there's a catch. Big Brother gets to watch you play.

[...]

For anyone who hasn't seen one of these games--known as first-person shooters--here's the gist of them. You're placed in a combat zone, armed with a weapon of your choice and sent out to find and kill other players. Knife them, club them, blow them apart with a shotgun, set them afire, vaporize them with a shoulder-launched missile, drill them through the head with a sniper rifle--the choice is yours.

Depending on the game, blood will spray, mist or spout. Sometimes your kills collapse in crumpled heaps, clutching their throats and twitching convincingly. Sometimes they cry in pain with human voices. Their bodies lie there for a while, so you can feed off them if necessary, restoring your own health. Then you can grab their weapons and set off to find another victim, assuming you don't get killed first.

It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but among young men it's far and away the most popular genre of computer game. Some psychologists and parents worry that such games are desensitizing a large, impressionable segment of the population to violence and teaching them the wrong things. But that depends on your point of view. If, like the U.S. Army, you need people who can become unflappable killers, there's no better way of finding them.

It's why the Army has spent more than $10 million in taxpayer funds developing its very own first-person shooter, and why the Navy, the Air Force and the National Guard are following suit. For anyone who thinks kids aren't learning playing shooter games, read on.

[...]

For gamers, the attraction of online play is obvious. In the cyberworld, you're not hunting down slow computer-generated Nazis. You're matching wits with real humans (sometimes real Germans), which somehow makes a kill all the more satisfying.

Moreover, computer graphics and sound have evolved to the point that it is easy to think you're in a tangible world. Your immediate surroundings vanish. Crickets chirp, bushes rustle, bullets whiz by your head and shower you with chips of concrete. Shell casings clatter to the floor. Mortars crump in the distance, and grenades send up gouts of rock and dirt. It's a loud, bloody, violent and altogether alarming world. Yet it is oddly exhilarating.

"I have to laugh when someone says, 'Oh, the people playing these games know it's not real,' " said Dr. Peter Vorberer, a clinical psychologist and head of the University of Southern California's computer game research group. "Of course they think it's real! That's why people play them for hours and hours. They're designed to make you believe it's real. Games are probably the purest example yet of the Internet melding with reality."

[...]

Top Counter-Strike teams and top players have developed cult followings, and with that have come fame and fortune. Management teams have sprung up to develop new talent, and cash tournaments are commonplace. Clans from 50 countries attended the World Cyber Games two weekends ago in San Francisco, competing for a $25,000 top prize and lucrative corporate sponsorships.

Team 3D, arguably the best clan in the United States, boasts sponsorships from Subway, Hewlett-Packard, Nvidia (which makes graphics processors) and Sennheiser (which makes audio equipment). The world's No. 1-ranked clan, Schroet Kommando of Sweden, is sponsored by Intel and has its own clothing line. Fatal1ty, a legendary Counter-Strike gamer, also has a clothing line and a Fatal1ty-brand computer motherboard coming out.

In addition, top players make extra money by giving private lessons for anywhere from $50 to $120 an hour, schooling players on strategies, gunnery, weapons selection and squad tactics.

the notion that there's no residual impact or, at minimum, desensitization resulting from the enormous amounts of time spent in this fashion is, to me, ludicrous.

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U.S. troops raiding Iraqi homes

following up to jim's post last night, here's more of the stuff that mysteriously never makes it to traditional u.s. media outlets...



there was a lengthy article in the nation back last july entitled, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness" that explores this subject in depth...

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Kansas R's dumping abortion in favor of immigration (and the violence and hypocrisy that comes with it)

interesting...

from the la times...

[A]s the political season revs up, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party has issued a stern warning to his fellow conservatives: Abortion is not a winning issue.

"This is not something that the Kansas GOP is going to go out and lead on," Christian Morgan said.

Morgan said that he and his party remain firmly opposed to abortion. Most Republican voters in Kansas feel the same, he said. But Morgan also believes that those voters are fed up with years of fruitless political and legal maneuvering aimed at driving abortion clinics out of business. They would much prefer to see an all-out focus on curbing illegal immigration or cutting taxes, he said.

In an e-mail rebuffing an antiabortion activist who asked for more GOP support, Morgan explained: "My job is to win elections. . . . Your agenda does not fit my agenda."

so, kansas r's are "fed up" with the "fruitless" campaign against abortion and its related violence, so they're choosing to put their money on the wedge issue of immigration and ITS violence instead, eh...? let's see how THAT'S working for them...

this is from the southern poverty law center in an introduction to a list of the more egregious physical and psychological violence waged against latinos in the past two and one-half years...

There's no doubt that the tone of the raging national debate over immigration is growing uglier by the day. Once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists, vicious public denunciations of undocumented brown-skinned immigrants are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, radio hosts and politicians. While their dehumanizing rhetoric typically stops short of openly sanctioning bloodshed, much of it implicitly encourages or even endorses violence by characterizing immigrants from Mexico and Central America as "invaders," "criminal aliens" and "cockroaches."

meanwhile, arguably one of the more vicious individuals to implicitly condone a violent response to immigration problems displays what has become the oh-so-predictable repub hypocrisy... ladies and gentlemen, i give you the odious tom tancredo...

from max blumenthal in alternet...

When Tancredo (presidential candidate and R-CO) hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.

During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”

The Post report momentarily threw Tancredo on the defensive. In a fiery speech soon after the story’s publication, Tancredo blamed his foibles on the INS. “I haven't the foggiest idea how many people I may have hired in the past as taxi drivers, as waiters, waitresses, home improvement people,” he boomed from the House floor. “I haven't the foggiest idea how many of those people may have been here illegally, and it is not my job to ask them.” Then defiance gave way to vitriol as the congressman dubbed undocumented immigrants, “the face of murder.”

Only days before the Post’s story appeared, Tancredo had personally reported an honor student profiled in the Denver Post to the INS because the 14-year-old was not a legal resident of the United States. The stunt forced the boy’s family to go into hiding.

now tell me that calling undocumented immigrants "the face of murder" isn't an implicit invitation to violence...

i've mentioned before that i had a one-degree of separation moment with tancredo when i was living in colorado in 2002... my friend, the vice consul at the mexican consulate in denver, was being seriously slimed by the vile tancredo for merely doing his job, helping his own country's citizens, one of whom was the honor student mentioned in the last paragraph of the excerpt above... i won't bore you with the details, but anyone who has followed tancredo's history of bile can easily fill in the blanks...

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Hard on the heels of the previous post: "You are the law. You are God."

from an article in the uk observer via juan cole...

ok, the article is about israeli soldiers in palestine and gaza, but it could just as well be about u.s. troops in iraq...

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: [...] "At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger."

in the soldiers' own words...

(note: not for the squeamish...)

• The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.

• The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.

• We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look.

• With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.

• After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived... So we do a first patrol with him. It's 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn't so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers. He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock. The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.

the conclusion of the report cited in the observer article was that israeli soliders suffered from poor training and lack of discipline... no... i'm sorry... what's depicted here is only to be expected when a society uses war and the dehumanization of its "enemies" as tools for advancing its "interests..." the real tragedy is that most of us do not want to acknowledge the brutal and horrifying truth...

juan cole agrees but, unfortunately, fails to include our own troops in his condemnation...

The idea that these sorts of actions derive from 'lack of training' is absurd. They derive from hatred and from being able to act with impunity. They are a burden of the strong who have the opportunity to abuse the weak.

The US political elite and media that conceals the brutality of the Israeli occupation for sectional political gains are accomplices to this sadism, and their silence endangers the security of the United States. When we cannot understand why Arab audiences, who are perfectly aware of what the Israeli army has been doing to Palestinians for decades, are outraged, it leads us into policy mistakes in dealing with the Middle East. No one in the US media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word 'fascism' to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality.

the hope for peace in this world can only be realized when these kinds of nightmares come to an end...

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Are you listening, Bill O'Reilly? Religion incites violence.

yep, it does...



(thanks to nicole at crooks and liars...)

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