So how’s ‘the most transparent White House in history’ faring?

In yesterday’s post I wrote about an anonymous government official who said that the justice department had prepared a secret memo saying that Obama’s order to murder Anwar al-Awlaki was legal but they refused to release it or reveal the reasoning.

David Shipler and Conor Friedersdorf pose the obvious question: Why is this document secret?

The usual arguments for secrecy, that it will put some people in harm’s way or impinge on their privacy rights or reveal some critical government information that would be harmful to the country’s national interests clearly do not apply in this case. This is presumably a legal document that would be of interest mainly to scholars. So why not tell us how the government arrived at the important conclusion that Obama can order the death of any US citizen without any oversight by any body?

The only answer that I can think of is that the government is afraid that legal scholars will rip their argument to shreds and that it will be seen to have no merit. Much better for them to keep it secret, using the “If we reveal this information, the terrorists will have won” mantra that seems to inexplicably satisfy so many people.

During his 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised that his administration would “run the most transparent White House in history” and some commentators even wondered if such excessive transparency might be a bad thing. It is clear that that worry is unfounded because that promise has turned out to be a joke. Obama is making even the Bush White House seem like a glass house.

UPDATE: Scott Horton rips apart the Obama hypocrisy on this issue. The exchange between Jake Tapper and White House press secretary is quite incredible.

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement

I must admit that the Occupy Wall Street movement took me by surprise. Back in June, I had written that one of the lessons of the Arab spring was that one needed sustained protests and demonstrations and occupations, day in and day out, to bring about major changes and that the US practice of one-day demonstrations, usually on a holiday, was ineffective however large the turnout. I pointed to the October 6 movement to create a permanent protest site in Washington DC in the vicinity of the White House and Congress, as a sign of such a movement emerging.

When I first heard reports of groups of young people occupying Wall Street to protest the corporate takeover of the US government, I thought it would be ephemeral, that these idealists would be there for a short while and then it would fizzle out. I also worried that it might shift the focus away from the October 6th movement and thus harm it. But I was wrong. What started out as a seemingly spontaneous occupation and protest movement that was greeted with condescending snickering of the “Oh, these kids today, what will they think of next?” has grown into something quite big. They have used their own website to publicize their message, and there is even a newspaper called The Occupied Wall Street Journal, with a starting print run of 50,000, that has been published.

These protests were initially treated with some disdain by the media, portraying the protestors as young and clueless with no clearly defined goals and agenda. We even had the sight of well-dressed people, possibly Wall Street executives, drinking champagne and laughing at the protestors from the balcony of a tony restaurant, as if they had never heard of the legend of Marie Antoinette. Even some liberal commentators treated them with disdain. But the message of the young people is quite clear and correct. They have identified the business interests symbolized by Wall Street as a maleficent force in American politics and are using the occupation to demonstrate it. What they are doing is inspiring people to get off the couches, leave their keyboards behind, and take direct action.

What is interesting is that it is also ceasing to be purely a young people’s movement. The protests seem to be catching on and spreading with trade unions and community groups joining in. Pilots in uniform also showed up. The protests are now spreading to other cities including major ones like Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and smaller ones.

As a result, after some initial silence, the media have been forced to pay attention. Although the protests began on September 17, up until September 26 NPR had scorned the protests as not worth covering with its executive editor for news saying that it was because “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective”, although it covered small groups of Tea Partiers with great gusto. But after NPR was shamed by media commentator Jay Rosen pointing out their neglect, they have now started giving coverage on a regular basis. Another journalist got arrested along with many others and wrote about his experience. Some ‘prominent people’ like Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore have dropped by, which should make NPR happy that its news standards had been met.

As the occupation and protests have grown, so has the repressive police tactics being employed by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is clear that the occupation has stopped becoming a laughing matter for the oligarchy as the police have started to use considerable force to disrupt the protests. In this scene, it looks like mace or pepper spray was used on some women who had been penned in by plastic mesh and did not seem to have done anything threatening that could have warranted it. Then last Sunday the police seemed to have first encouraged the protestors to march across the Brooklyn bridge and when they were halfway through, penned them in using plastic netting (a process known as ‘kettling’) and arrested over 700 of them. You can watch a video of the event.

What do the demonstrators want? Given that it is a loose and spontaneous coalition of young people, it is too much to expect a coherent single platform. Bloomberg has tried to deflect attention from the real targets of the protests, the oligarchy centered on Wall Street of which he is a member and protector, by saying that the protests are targeting the middle class, which is patent nonsense.

The movement has in fact issued a manifesto that lists their demands. But the specific demands are, in some sense, less important than the general goal. What these young people have done is placed their collective finger unerringly on the problem: 1% of the population in the US has become a monster that is devouring the other 99% and the heart of that beast lies is in the financial sector in Wall Street.

Their slogan “We are the 99%” has increasingly resonated with the public because in their bones people know that it is true, which is why the movement seems to be growing.

People who don’t think carefully are more likely to believe in a god

I came across this interesting report of a study that says that people who ‘go by their gut’ when solving a problem are more likely to believe in god than people who reason their way to a conclusion.

They correlated religious belief with the way people approached simple problems like: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” People who go with their gut tend to say (erroneously) that it costs 10 cents while those who think it through arrive at the correct answer. The former type was more likely to believe in god than the latter.

One could conclude that this suggests that belief in god depends on people not thinking things through, which is not really surprising. But the authors of the study downplayed this aspect and instead went out of their way to make the results palatable to religious believers, calling the gut-thinkers ‘intuitive’ and saying that intuition and reflection are equally important.

Intuition is undoubtedly important. But it is not the same thing as not thinking things through.

A lawless nation

There were some responses to my post on the topic of state-sanctioned murder, with defenders of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki saying the usual things, that the US is at war with al Qaeda and since al-Awlaki was supposedly a leading member of that organization, Obama was justified in ordering his killing. It is now being reported that another US citizen was killed in the attack but since he was in the same car as al-Awlaki he was presumably a Very Bad Person Who Also Deserved to Die, since the bar for killing anyone has become so low.
[Read more…]

We’re #1 …

… when it comes to imprisoning people. More than 1% of Americans are in jail. The US has 4.25% of the world’s population and but 25% of all prisoners.

Even I was surprised at some of the statistics about the use of cheap prison labor in the US. According to Stephen Fry, American prisons produce “100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, ID tags and other items of uniforms, 93% of domestically used paints, 36% of home appliances, 21% of office furniture, which allows the United States to compete with factories in Mexico… You get solitary confinement if you refuse to work!”

(Via Boing Boing.)

Carl Sagan

I never met Carl Sagan but in addition to being a good scientist, prolific writer, great popularizer and advocate for science, he had the reputation of being a really nice person, which is probably why so many of us mean and nasty new atheists are urged to be more like him.

Neil deGrasse Tyson relates an anecdote that reinforces that last characteristic.

The true character of a person is revealed in the way they treat people who, by the usual standards of society, are of no importance to them whatsoever.

Religious vetoes

A town clerk won’t sign same-sex marriage licenses because such marriages violate her religious beliefs.

I can understand people trying to get laws passed that enshrine their religious beliefs. But it is strange to me that people think that their religious beliefs let them pick and choose which laws to follow. If you allow a personal religious exemption, then you have to allow every individual’s personal religious exemptions. Are they willing to extend that right to any religious beliefs at all?

The danger of allowing that should be obvious to anyone who thinks it through. Would you allow an employee to not follow a law because it contradicts (say) Sharia law or Wiccan beliefs? Where would that end? Can a Muslim or Jewish employee in a cafeteria refuse to give a ham sandwich to a customer? Can a Catholic checkout clerk in a supermarket or drug store refuse to process the sale of condoms?

I strongly doubt that people would want to open up that mess. The people who ask for these exemptions are effectively requesting the right to nullify beliefs based only on the religion that they belong to.

Parenthetically, I found this pie chart from Balloon Juice to be amusing.

gaymarriage.jpg

State-sanctioned murder

Reports are coming in that a US drone strike in Yemen has killed Anwar al-Awlaki. If confirmed, this would mean that the US government has murdered a US citizen purely on the orders of president Obama. The media are relaying the anonymous and self-serving claims of the intelligence community that al-Awlaki was a top al Qaeda operative, ‘seemed’ to have instigated attacks against the US, and was ‘reported’ to have had links with terrorist groups, and similar allegations. But all skirt the issue of the legality of this act, let alone its morality.

When the dust settles, what we are left with is the stark fact that the US president ordered and carried out the murder of a US citizen without any due process of any kind. He had no trial, no formal charges were made against him, no efforts to extradite him back to the US, nothing. Obama decided that al-Awlaki must die and he was killed by Obama’s agents. It has all the hallmarks of kings in medieval times ordering the beheadings of their opponents or mob bosses ordering hits on their rivals.

Back in 2002, another US citizen Kamal Derwish was killed in an airstrike in Yemen but back then in the bad old George W. Bush days, the government felt obliged to say that his death was collateral damage and that they were unaware that he was in the car that was destroyed. But with our Nobel Peace Prize winning, constitutional scholar president, even such transparent excuses are not required because many of those who were on the alert for abuses by Bush now seem quite comfortable if the death sentence is signed by Obama. Even before this event, Jonathan Turley said that the Obama presidency may be the most disastrous in our history for civil liberties. One can only shudder at what further abuses are in store.

What I would like to know is in what way the killing of al-Awlaki differs from the heinous crime of ‘killing his own people’ which was laid at the feet of people like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Ghadafi and which formed the basis of war crimes accusations against those two people and war against the countries they led.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

Sexism in the atheist community

It is fairly obvious that women are a minority in the atheist community. The high-profile atheists tend to be men, even though there are many women who are making important contributions to atheist thought. This naturally raises the question: Is the atheist movement sexist? Is the atmosphere at atheist gatherings hostile to women? Are female atheists overlooked when it comes to providing high profile platforms as conference speakers?

I ask this because of a long simmering controversy that began when Rebecca Watson, who writes at Skepchick, posted a YouTube video where she recounted her experience, as a woman at atheist gatherings, that male attendees at these gatherings tend to unduly hit on women. She had been on a panel at an atheist conference in Dublin in 2010 and gave an example of an encounter with someone in an elevator late at night after her talk who invited her to his room for coffee. She declined. It was a minor incident and she treated it as such but used it to give generic advice to men to not too readily assume that women at atheist gatherings welcomed such advances, especially if they had given no prior indication that that was the case. The segment that deals with this starts at the 2:45 mark.

What happened next was astounding. Watson received an enormous outpouring of vitriol, presumably from members of the atheist community who form the readership of the blog, calling her names and accusing her of all manner of things. The comments quickly crossed the border from sexism to outright misogyny. What was worse was that Richard Dawkins heard about her post and also chimed in, belittling her concerns, in the form of composing a sarcastic letter to a fictitious Muslim woman in an oppressive country like Saudi Arabia telling her that her dire situation was nothing compared to the hardships that American women faced being propositioned in hotel elevators. And Watson says that she still continues to receive abuse and that people devote entire websites to attacking her.

Dawkins’ response to Watson’s comment is remarkably obtuse but illustrates the danger that always exists when you start thinking that you are fighting ‘big battles’ and that ‘lesser’ battles don’t count. The fact is that different people are immediately affected by different things and thus may be aroused to action by different passions and comparing them is generally not productive. For example, the battle for wage equality for American women does not cease to be a valid cause merely because women in many underdeveloped countries experience enormous hardships. My own approach is that as long as you are fighting for justice and equality and basic human dignity and rights, one does not gain much by belittling the efforts of those who are not fighting the same specific battles as you are. We should avoid the temptation to give too much weight to ranking social justice struggles in terms of importance. Instead we should support each other in our different struggles, though we obviously have to choose where we devote our own energies.

For example, I think male circumcision is wrong because it violates the bodily integrity of a child and should not be allowed until the child is old enough to give informed consent. But I am well aware that female circumcision is a much worse practice and is given the more graphic but accurate label of female genital mutilation. Now there are some who would argue that people who oppose male circumcision and try to abolish that practice are wasting time on a relatively minor problem as long as the bigger problem of female circumcision still exists. There are others who are offended that people who oppose female genital mutilation are not equally vocal about abolishing male circumcision. Both these attitudes seem to me to be wrong-headed because they make the assumption that other people should care about the same things that you care about, and with the same intensity. The fact is that people who see a wrong done anywhere are perfectly entitled to take action against it and try and recruit others in their cause without having to justify why that cause is more worthy than other causes. My suggestion is that we should devote our energies to fight for what we believe in and not undermine those who believe in other causes, as long as they all promote justice.

But this still leaves the question of whether sexism and misogyny is commonplace in the atheist community. It is hard for me to judge because I am not a very sociable person and do not hang out much with groups of any kind to notice these things first hand. I do occasionally attend a few freethinkers groups in my neighborhood and though the crowd has slightly more men than women, I have not noticed any overt sexism. I am also the faculty advisor for my university’s Center for Inquiry student affiliate. In the early days of that group I was a little concerned because the leadership and membership seemed to be almost entirely male but that has changed in the last year with two women taking leadership positions and doing a great job. But just because I have not noticed anything obvious does not mean that sexism or misogyny does not exist.

There is nothing intrinsic to atheism that would warrant sexism so any that exists must arise because for some reason the atheist movement tends to attract sexist males. This is disturbing and merits investigation. Is the level of sexism the same as in other sectors but that we notice it more and think it should be less because of the heightened social awareness of the community? One recalls a similar situation during the civil rights and antiwar struggles of the 1960s when those movements were also accused of rampant sexism, treating the women in the movements as either support staff or sex objects. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that just because one is fighting one form of discrimination that one has immunity from the charge of discriminating against others.

Whatever the cause, we should work to eliminate sexism and misogyny from the atheist community, as part of the effort to eradicate it completely.