Day: October 15, 2015

by William Skink

When I see the need in our community here in Missoula; when I read that Big, Rich America can’t even afford a cost-of-living adjustment for the old and disabled; when I see multiple crisis’ already happening and getting worse, I think about foreign policy.

Not only do I think about foreign policy, but I think about what my younger self would think about today’s foreign policy.

Let’s say it’s October 7th, 2001. America has just launched it’s Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Remember, since it was oh so long ago, why we waged war in Afghanistan:

Its public aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda and to deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power.

Now, my October 7th, 2001 self is still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attack and things are moving fast. Emergency powers in Congress are pushed through, a broad Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists is pushed through, weaponized Anthrax is killing low-level aides to politicians. It’s madness.

And here I come, October 15th 2015 William Skink, and I say:

Billy, dude, I’m you from the future and I’ve got to tell you about how nuts we’ve become in America. People aren’t even paying attention to this Afghanistan thing anymore, which is probably a good thing because if they did they might wonder why the Taliban is as strong in 2015 as they were in your time here, as this absurd war is just getting started. And it gets crazier.

So Bush is all-in against Al-Qaeda, right? He even invades Iraq a few years later, justified by some bullshit like you’re getting about Afghanistan. Lots of Democrats vilify him, of course. Then a half-black Democrat by the name of Barack Obama ascends to the White House promising to end all kinds of insanity, like the wars and the torture prison in Cuba, but instead of doing any of that, this Democrat, who somehow gets a Nobel Peace Prize early in his presidency, does such a bang-up job of fucking up the Middle East that by October, 2015, America and its “allies” are actually arming Al-Qaeda in Syria in order to bring down Assad because the neoconservative strain of insanity merged with the neoliberal, neocolonial bloodlust to control everything and destroy whatever resists, and not even the latest brand of hopium offers any sanity for how to relate to the rest of the world.

Yeah, foreign policy.

Who seriously believes the original justification for the war in Afghanistan? And how can Obama quietly extend this war without anyone really giving a shit? From the link:

US President Barack Obama has announced plans to extend the United States military’s role in Afghanistan and keep the current force of 9,800 troops through most of 2016, amid a surge in Taliban attacks.

And here is something from the link before that:

The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) keeps as diligently careful records about violence in the country as is possible.

Little attention is paid these days to Afghanistan, as the focus of attention seems to be further westwards – with the Russian intervention and Western failure in Syria centre-stage. UNAMA data shows that the Taliban’s strength is now as it was before October 7, 2001 – when the United States began its Global War on Terror in the country.

American foreign policy is desperate, dangerous and insane. It accomplishes the opposite of what its stated goals are, time and time again.

While Obama extends a military presence in Afghanistan—which, remember, the original goal was to keep it from being a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda—US officials are complaining about Russia killing CIA Al Qaeda pals in Syria.

2001 me would have a hard time believing the state of affairs today. I have a hard time believing America remains collectively oblivious to the chaos this country is directly responsible for.

We are closer than ever to WWIII going hot. Will the spark happen in Syria? In the South China Sea? Can any entity talk America down from the most destructive tantrum a powerful toddler nation has ever thrown over not getting everything it wants?

Aliens. I always hold out hope that aliens will come down and save us from ourselves.

by William Skink

In a post titled Not Guns Again, Pete an anecdotal story from a shooting Pete Talbot covered as a journalist 16 years ago seems to indicate a background check at the Spokane gun show the Glock was purchased at could have stopped the mentally ill felon from buying the gun. I’m sure the crazy ex-con would have been so deterred at that point to not try and buy a gun elsewhere, right?

In that post I mentioned in the comments the sensationalizing media attention being a factor in perpetuating mass-shootings, and (not seriously) asked if we should pass an ordinance limiting media coverage of these horrific tragedies. To dismiss this sentiment, another comment said this: yeah these shooter gunnuts enjoy basking in their posthumous infamy.

That dismissive comment misses the point. Luckily we have Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker taking a closer look at How School Shootings Spread. I recommend reading the whole article. Here is one excerpt to start us off:

School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

To try and put the pieces of this puzzle together, Gladwell examines the group dynamics of riots. More from the link:

In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Gladwell has an interesting argument here about how contagious behavior spreads. For those who want to actually understand this phenomena instead of making symbolic gestures that will have little impact on stopping the next mass-casualty, it’s a must read.

The Columbine tragedy gets especially close attention paid to it by Gladwell because it has been the template over which others have added their own twisted death tolls:

The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic. Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s “Liebestod” aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal’s victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball Diaries.”

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

While the article is fascinating and in many ways deeply disturbing, there is nothing in terms of a solution offered by the author. The script established by Eric Harris is being revised by a new generation of young men. The riot is spreading.