Trump & Son on Torture

Okay folks, the next wander down rabbit hole emerged the other day. I kinda thought we were done with the torture thing and that we’d all agreed that waterboarding is torture, that it is against American laws and traditions to torture anyone and that, as even Napoleon knew, it doesn’t work because, “The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”

But now we have Trump saying he’d waterboard prisoners in a New York Minute. In fact, he said that waterboarding was too mild and he’d really kick the torture methods up a couple of notches. We even got an extra treat when his son said that waterboarding was “no different from what happens in frat houses every day.”

After a while it hardly makes sense to critique the things that emerge from Trump because those supporting him don’t care. After all, this is a guy who acknowledged that his supporters are so behind him that he could just shoot someone at random and wouldn’t lose a vote.

But for the still sane among us, three basic principles and three psychological ones:

I. “Enhanced interrogation” is torture. It is a pathetically transparent euphemism put in place by Bush and Cheney to cover their asses when/if they got pulled before the DOJ or an international tribunal.

II. Torture is immoral, unethical, illegal and counter to every principle held to by decent people.

III. It is against the Geneva Convention and those who use it are, in the eyes of the international community, criminals.

Those are the basic principles. Torture, in any form, is proscribed by all decent persons and is prohibited by international agreement. Then there are the more nuanced points, the ones with data behind them.

IV. Torture does not work. It does not produce valid or reliable information. Those who claim it does and defend it (Cheney, repeatedly) are just wrong. The problems are manifold. For one, in the mistaken belief that torture must be used to extract critical information there is a compelling tendency to increase the pain inflicted. For another, the more torture is used the more likely it becomes that either, (a) the prisoner increases the amount of information provided mixing up true and useful material along with the false and useless — and, of course, it is not possible to know which is which and, (b) as Napoleon noted, the prisoner simply tells his tormentors what he believes they want to hear without regard to its validity.

V. There are well-known, humane and effective ways to extract information from prisoners. They involve gentle and supportive interactions designed to gain confidence and respect. In short, pretend to be their friends, build rapport, find common links in social customs, films, TV shows, whatever works.

VI. So, if all this is obvious, why do people support torture? Why do Trump’s fans hoot in delight when he says that not only would he waterboard terrorists, he’d “bring back (things) a hell of a lot worse”?

I guess the answer’s easy: they think that anyone captured is a terrorist and terrorists should suffer. It has little to nothing to do with “interrogation” or getting critical information. It’s all revenge and steeped in the hate and vilification that has washed over the Republican Party and its candidates.

I also suspect that none of these big brave souls has a clue what’s involved in “enhanced interrogation.” Maybe they think it’s like getting a cavity filled without Novocain or, for the true idiots, a frat prank. Some years back The Sun’s reporter Oliver Harvey agreed to be waterboarded. His write-up of the experience is chilling. It’s even more compelling when you realize that it was being done by friends with medical help available if needed and that he could stop it any time he wanted.

This whole resuscitation of even the thought of the legitimacy of waterboarding or any other form of torture has to stop. So I’m ending this entry with the same line as the one before it:

Just stop it. Okay? Okay!

Bernie's Bashers

A strange thing is happening over here on the left end of the political spectrum. The supporters of the most progressive candidate to run for the presidency since Henry Wallace are trashing those who back the second most progressive candidate to ever run for the same office.

And it’s getting really weird, very aggressive and oddly partisan. It’s so bad that a friend who backs that “second most progressive” candidate told me that she’s uncomfortable making public statements supporting Hillary because she get attacks and insults from friends for not being wholly behind Bernie and supporting that “untrustworthy, pro-military woman” who is “in bed with Wall Street.”

I notice that it is not Sanders himself, nor is it the Sanders’ campaign or his peeps. There an admirable and consistent decency rules. Bernie respects and admires Hillary. He thinks his more revolutionary positions are the right ones but acknowledges that her more pragmatic perspective is workable. It’s his “fans” who are ramping up the rhetoric, raising the level of invective and innuendo and doing the trash-talking.

I’m a grizzled pragmatist, an aging feminist, erstwhile scientist and unpaid blogger who thinks this is a crock of shit, a poorly thought-through gambit by a bunch of idealists who are missing, from my perspective, a really serious point:

The more you pummel Clinton the more likely it becomes that a Republican wins the election.

That’s it; that’s the core of today’s message. Each and every assault on Hillary is fodder for the GOP. Each and every column, YouTube, blog entry, letter to an editor, comment on an Op-Ed will end up in some ad crafted by a SuperPAC with a bulging wallet that will hurt Hill’s chances in November should she end up the nominee.

It’s worth noting that Hillary’s supporters have not gone after Bernie (though, admittedly, Bubba took a serious swipe at him recently). Their public positions are in line with Clinton’s campaign message: distinguish between the points of view of the candidates on the (surprisingly few it turns out) issues where they differ and argue that hers are better and that she’s better equipped to lead the country.

Rachel Maddow interviewed Clinton just before the New Hampshire primary and asked her about this issue. Clinton gave what we cognitive psychologists can immediately spot as the right answer. It began, she said, back in the early days of Bill’s presidency when she began being targeted for a host of issues from the reasonable (how did she deal with Bill’s profligacy) to the measured (why was she, the unelected First Lady, trying to craft major legislation like a health care bill) to the truly bizarre (did she kill Vince Foster).

Hillary noted that the first assaults on her integrity made people begin to wonder. If some issue was raised then, perhaps, just perhaps, there may be something to it. When nothing was found that was even remotely incriminating  the issue died — but the damage had been done. Trust was weakened; questions that had been raised would linger. When the next accusation popped up the immediate, unbeckoned reaction was “hmm…, could this really be true?”

And it snowballed and became unstoppable. Any effort to deflect each new accusation was just another brick on a wall of suspicion and distrust built on little more than a wink and a nod, a measured head nod, all without a shred of evidence. To this day none of the accusations have proven out but the feelings that something isn’t right have lingered.

So, my friends on the left, my progressive comrades, my pro-union, pro-choice, pro-LBGT rights compatriots stop bashing Hillary. Just stop it.

Okay? Okay!

Abortion: A Thought (or Two)

The Republicans running for the presidency are unanimously and vigorously opposed to a woman’s right to choose about terminating a pregnancy. None are pro-choice. All claim to be pro-life.

But being pro-life isn’t straightforward. It sounds like it should be when painted on a banner or shouted through a bull horn. There’s some tricky here.

First, are pro-lifers really pro-life or merely anti-abortion? If you’re pro-life then you should be in favor of programs that support life like sex education, parental leave, pre- and post-natal health care, Head Start, pre-K schools, after-school programs. But, of course, none of the supposedly pro-life candidates back these because they really aren’t pro-life. They’re just using the label as a cover for anti-abortion stances.

As Barney Frank, famously, put it: “Republicans think life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

But there’s another, deeper element here. When pushed, the right wingers will acknowledge that there are some circumstances where abortion is acceptable — rape and incest are the usual cases. Here, they maintain, it’s okay to terminate a pregnancy, kill the baby, abort the fetus — take that living, breathing potential human being and toss the pureed tissue in the dumpster.

Stop and think for a moment what this position entails. It requires one to both accept and reject abortion, to accept and reject the legitimacy of terminating a pregnancy — to believe that, somehow, a fetus conceived by sexual actions between two consenting adults must be preserved and defended as a person fully protected by the Constitution but one who, with no role to play in the drama, was the result of a criminal act of a man upon a woman can be denied the right to life.

When you put it this way it becomes clear what the anti-choice campaign is all about. It has nothing to do with life. It is all about fucking.

If a woman fucks for pleasure and not specifically for the purpose of procreation then, in the narrow minds of the right-wingers, the fanatical religious zealots, she has sinned. Any pregnancy that results from such actions shall be punished and the sentence shall be for the offending woman to bear and raise that child.

But, pushing this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion:  if a woman is raped or forced into an incestual conjoining, the fetus is not one conceived through “illicit sexual pleasure” but one born of violence. This life can be terminated.

The hypocrisy here is crushing and the underlying ethic apparent.

The “pro-life” position is utterly divorced from and has nothing to do with life. It is a simplistic anti-sex position dressed up in pseudo-ethical clothes. Those who want to make abortion illegal are not pro-life. They are simply against women enjoying sex — specifically sex without the specific intent to become pregnant.

A King? Really?

My friend Wayne Lively (a committed political junkie who pretty much unfailingly puts forward intriguing views) commented today on the collective that is backing the most extreme candidates in the GOP primaries, Trump and Cruz.

“These folks,” he noted, “are the same people who would have supported the monarchy.”

Now THAT’S an interesting insight. I think Wayne’s hit on something here. A lot of folks are frustrated, think the status quo sucks, are worried about the economy, immigration, terrorism. They want something to happen but haven’t a clue what it is or who could pull whatever it is off. They look at “traditional” candidates, like Kasich, Christie and Rubio, who stand for “classic conservatism” (most of the time anyway) and think that this won’t help, these guys will just bring us more of the same.

So they flail about snatching at eccentric people like Cruz and his weird quasi-Dominionist  Christianity, Trump and his empty, unworkable promises, even Carson and his magic scalpel.

It does, in fact, appear that they are looking for a King — someone to be in charge, someone who acts like he knows what he’s doing and will just fucking do it.

Oddly, they don’t seem to care much about how “it” gets done or what “it” actually is.

Very weird, eerie even. Will this social pathology resolve? Will people return to their senses? I honestly do not know. We’ve never gone down this road before.

Creating Creativity

Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology in the Wharton School at my Alma Mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has an interesting column in the Times on raising creative kids. It’s a bit simplistic but that’s okay. How deep can you go when the paper won’t give you the 35,000 words you need?

Grant’s point is pretty straightforward. Most creative people come from homes where the structure was loose, the focus was on moral codes and the intense pressure to perform seen in many families was largely absent. In short, Tiger Moming may produce kids who are excellent musicians or superbly skilled at design and drafting but it doesn’t necessarily get you composers or break-through architects.

He also cited a survey comparing scientists who won Nobels with other scientists and the general public. The Nobelists were over twenty times more likely to have performed on stage, over ten times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music.

The foundations of creativity are complex and studied with well, creativity. A wander around Google Scholar will give anyone interested a feel for the more recent work.

All this got me into a bout of self-reflection. I think I’m creative. My research was kinda ‘breakthroughish’ in a modest way. I introduced a novel concept in cognitive psychology and saw it become the foundation of a series of insights in a variety of domains. It took some time for my empirical findings to be acknowledged and even longer for my theoretical model to be accepted which, in retrospect, isn’t surprising. I thought in ways compellingly different from my colleagues — so much so that they often had trouble getting their heads around what I was saying. It was frustrating but, in the end, satisfying.

I also had an endearing affection for “soft underbelly” of life — gambling, poker, horse racing, sports betting. I ended up penning three books on gambling and poker and writing several hundred columns for various gambling outlets, websites and magazines. Since retiring I’ve become the classic struggling writer who has managed to publish a novel and hopes to find the motivation to finish a second.

So I kinda fit Grant’s notions of a creative person — though still waiting for the Nobel Committee’s phone call… ; - ).

What intrigued me about Grant’s little essay was how closely his recommendations for nurturing creativity matched my upbringing and how my career was so off the standard road most of us middle-class kids were trained to walk. Yetta, my first-generation, Brooklyn-born, atheistic Jewish mother, was an artist.

She herself was raised in an orphanage when the family broke up, couldn’t afford the rent and ended up living for a time on the streets with her mother and two sisters. Remarkably, she loved the orphanage. She said it opened her to new people and ideas. When she was old enough she was sent out to be a house-keeper nanny to a wealthy family. While others might see this as something akin to indentured servitude, she saw it as another opportunity — to live in a new neighborhood, take their kids to museums, parks, eat new foods.

She became a reasonably recognized artist in and around Philadelphia with, at one point, two of her painting hanging in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Here are two photos of her taken in the early 1930’s.

But she was something well off the charts as a mother. Powerful, occasionally dominating, eccentric; with flaming red hair she would swoop through homes and galleries with her favorite purple cape overwhelming the unwary — not out of ego or insensitivity, it was enthusiasm for life bubbling over.

The home was just nuts. Nothing got done in anything like a routine way. She was a horrible cook — once buying a whole filet as a “special” meal for us and then roasting it for three hours because that’s how her mother cooked beef back in Russia. Her personal recipe for chicken soup began, “first open a can.”

My sibs and I sat down one day, cracked open a bottle of wine and asked the question: “Okay, how did you survive Mom?”

My sister laughed, “I just slammed down the gate to keep her out. It drove her nuts but it saved me.” She’s an accomplished cellist.

My brother nodded sagely, “Well, I saw this quiet, withdrawn chap over there (Dad) and realized he’d figured something out. Just let her do her thing. Nothing you do to control it will work.” He’s a recently retired psychiatrist who, last year, published a major book on autism and is, himself, embarking on a life as a short story writer (his stuff is pretty good).

Me? Hah. I was the oldest and my “solution” to Yetta was battle her at every turn, fight every move she made, carve out my own way of doing things and thumb my nose at her. We had some of the juiciest donnybrooks imaginable over art, music, politics, sex, marriage, relationships, money, religion. You mention it, we fought over it. We actually agreed on almost any topic but agreement was not part of our bargain. It just wasn’t any fun.

BTW, my father, an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon, was a quiet, unassuming and anxiety-ridden man — remarkably accomplished but unsure of himself, a constant worrier who saw monsters under every bed and demons in every closet. I loved him but much preferred the good ol’ knock-down dragged-out fights.

In retrospect I credit the whirlwind that spun around Mom for much of my creativity. I also “credit” her with the ragged path I took. I was a terrible student. I was suspended in high school, flunked out of Penn in my sophomore year, barely graduated with a 2.3 GPI after they, reluctantly, let me back in, and was only accepted into a single graduate program and that only because I worked with a famous psychologist who was a Brown graduate himself.

I was such a pain in the ass as a young professor that I was initially denied tenure despite having out-published all the members of the tenure committee combined and winning teacher of the year award. It took a year and a series of appeals to get that decision overturned. Amusingly, I was later elected head of the department, ran the doctoral program, the university named me to an endowed chair and the ASP, AAAS and the Fulbright Foundation all elected me Fellow.

But, you know, I’m still mildly ticked at a lack of recognition for some of my other little outbursts of creativity. I’ve published a novel theory of consciousness that has gone unacknowledged despite the fact that it makes provocative and nuanced arguments about evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind.

I also put forward a novel theory of gambling that redefines the term, restructures the enterprise and has important implications for legal, legislative and ethical approaches to gambling. It too has received few if any citations.

But I’m used to this. Being creative is cool but it’s not always easy — especially in a field like mine. In physics or mathematics the equations are there, the numbers stack up. In psychology it’s more complex and change is often resisted. It took years for my work on the cognitive unconscious to be noticed too.

Here’s hoping I live long enough for the folks working in fields like the origins of consciousness and the theory of gambling to stumble across my stuff.

If not…Well, life’s like that and I can hear my mother’s voice: “It’s no skin off my nose. I’ve got a wood carving I’m really excited about and barely enough time.”