One Utah

Last night, Bill Moyers interviewed Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power. It’s worth the time to read the whole transcript. In particular I was struck by this exchange - it began with Moyers reading a quote from Bacevich’s book:
BILL MOYERS: I was in the White House, back in the early 60s, [...]

In Mistakes were made (but not by me) , Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson discuss the psychological process of self justification as it relates to initiation.
In particular, they cite a study in which students, to join a conversation, had to go through an initiation process; for one group it was relatively easy, for [...]

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd, counter productive policy. At Pam’s House Blend, she’s got some fun video of Elaine Donnelly doing her whackadoodle best to argue in favor of the policy. Donnelly raises the “unit cohesion” argument again and again and Rep. Patrick Murphy smacks it down -asking in essence, “Are [...]

The history of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a sordid tale of bigotry, ignorance and fear-mongering. The Clinton Administration tried to do the right thing and got blown out of the water. Congress - stampeded by a bunch of raving homo-bigots - decided to set military policy. DADT was the result.
DADT has [...]

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

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Sometimes others say it better than I. I’d like to add one more culprit…OK, about fifty million culprits; every uninformed idiot that voted for him the second time too.
Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think
Posted June 11, 2008 | 04:57 PM (EST)
h/t Huffington Post
Rest assured, Mr. President, that [...]

Chris Hedges, former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times, has written a courageously truthful essay on Asia Times Online. Not all of the information is new, but it goes into uncomfortable detail that helps explain the current epidemic of PTSD among Iraq veterans.
Our soldiers and marines are waging a [...]

Large lies fries anyone?

Yesterday, nine members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) testified about the dehumanization of the Iraqi people, the abuse of detainees, the changing rules of engagement and the killing of innocent civilians before members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Unless you watched C-SPAN 3, you probably didn’t hear about it (my Comcast cable [...]

Via Talking Points Memo and other sources, today we got to read the infamous torture memo that sought to justify the horrifying abuses of detainees at the hands of the U.S. government at Guanatanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and CIA secret “black site” prisons. It was written on March 14, 2003 by John Yoo, then [...]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in [...]