The Complexity of the Syrian Situation

As I said when I posted this on Facebook, I hate these repetitious pictures that show up with different quotes on them (and here I add: especially the Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka one). But this one poses an interesting, if reductionist (as it was pointed out) question about the logistics of the Syrian situation.

My friend Ray Harris responded with this:

Ah jeez - if it were as simple as this the US, NATO would have intervened earlier. The use of chemical weapons breaches international law and it is up to the international community to act, otherwise international law is meaningless.

Nor would the US necessarily be fighting on the same side as al Qaeda. They would simply be punishing one side for a clear violation of international law.

The rebel side also includes people interested in a democratic Syria - unless you forgot that Assad is a Ba'athist dictator.

Ray also posted this and tagged me on it so that I would see it:

I am getting massively bored with all the simplistic, reductionist responses to the situation in Syria. It is extremely complex people. It is NOT like Iraq. It is NOT like Afghanistan. It is like Syria. It is NOT only because of a gas pipeline (although resources are always a factor). Nor does the US have any specific interest in Syria. But in case you have forgotten. Someone did use chemical weapons (both Hussein and Assad belong to the Ba'athist party and Hussein used chemical weapons on Kurds). And the use of chemical weapons is a clear breach of international law and someone has to police international law, otherwise it is meaningless.

Are the US hypocrites? Of course, but everyone is hypocrite. What of the Russians and Chinese?

There is a lot of propaganda flying around at the moment. Pro-Assad propaganda, pro-rebel propaganda, Iranian propaganda blaming Israel, socialist alliance propaganda blaming US imperialism, and so on and on.

After a bit of thought, this is my reply and my current (muddled) understanding of the complexity of the situation:

Ray, I get your perspective and I think, at the same time, that the situation is so absurd that is requires mockery to avoid simply giving up.

It's clearly NOT simple - if it were, there would be no hesitation on the part of Obama in launching a "punishment" - and the fact that both Britain and Germany, among others I presume, have opted out of a NATO attack, or even a "coalition" attack, is telling.

Obama has effed this up so thoroughly with his line in the sand nonsense and then his refusal to launch a strike that it is laughable. At the same time, he has good reason not to launch a strike - it likely will bring in Iran and probably Russia (who has already sent a fleet of warships into the Persian Gulf) - then we have WWIII in the Middle East.

The Syrian Rebels are also a mixed bag - some who want democracy, some who want Islamic law, some who are al Qaeda, and probably some other groups as well. We are probably supporting the rebels covertly at this point, but what will we end up with if they succeed in toppling Assad? Will we get Syria's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then have a messed up situation like Egypt, where we support the military in staging a coup to oust the first truly democratically elected president in decades?

That whole region is an example of what happens when we impose somewhat arbitrary lines and values (unsuccessfully) where there had been none prior, or at least not in the same way. It is ludicrous to think that creating nations at a bargaining table will put to an end to centuries of tribal hatred and a general sense among most Arab peoples of having been the oppressed - same thing happened on the African continent when the European territories demanded and took their independence. Witness Sudan - one tribe gains political and military power and then sets about eliminating the opposing tribe(s).

There is a huge difference between the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire following WWI [Ray mentioned this in a comment] and what we are seeing now. Those European nations were already developed and they (mostly) were not a collection of tribes and/or religious sects. More importantly, the West kept military bases in many countries as a kind of reminder not to get out of line (weak colonialism), but this did not happen when the European nations carved up the Middle East.

The complexity of the situation, which I suspect you get much more than I do, is well over the capacities of our current elected leaders to deal with effectively. This is obvious.

International law, by the way, IS meaningless in a practical sense. As long as Russia and China are permanent members of the Security Council at the UN (with veto power), things like this will never be punished by the UN. The US cannot be the policeman of the planet - and the American citizens are overwhelmingly opposed to our trying to do so.

After all the words I have just typed, I have barely scratched the surface of the complexity of this situation.

The reality here on Facebook is that Americans think in sound bites, so it's no wonder we post simplistic, reductionist statements about complex events - it's what our media has trained us to do. I'll bet very few people will have read this far . . . a picture with a trite quote is much easier to digest and simply agree/disagree. But this part of it is a whole other discussion . . . .

From Open Culture, two satires of the U.S. drone policy - including one from the New York Times Op-Doc series that mocks plans to use drones to police America. This would be funnier if it weren't a little too close to the truth.

Drones Over America!: Two Animated Satires of Misguided American Policy

March 25th, 2013


Drones over America –they’re a high tech assault on American constitutional rights, and they deserve to be met with a modern form of dissent, something more than a cranky op-ed in the pages of The New York Times. In this case, animated satire feels just about right. Enter Drew Christie, who created a satirical “Op-Doc” for the Times that mocks plans to use drones to police America. Christie hails from Seattle, whose police force recently announced it would adopt an aerial drone program. When the plan was later scuttled, K.G.B. agents everywhere were very upset. Who could blame them, seeing that we were so close to achieving our brave new world?

If Mr. K.G.B. feels a little too severe, then why not have a little fun with Mr. Blasty? He’s adorable, a barrel of laughs, but he pulls no punches. “While you’re all suddenly wondering about me and my drone friends blowing you to bits in Bowling Green, I've been busy abroad for years killing thousands!…” “Don’t worry, they’re usually just foreigners though. But whether they’re foreigners or citizens– first comes firepower [blam], then comes legalese! And if the legalese doesn't work, there’s always “state secrets” where nobody knows nothin'–.” The more the administrations the change, the more they stay the same.

This Vimeo video comes from Neuphi: Neuroscience and Philosophy, and this particular segment features philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel arguing that under the current understanding of materialism, it would be quite possible to consider the United States as a conscious entity.

So, is the U.S. conscious, or is the understanding and use of materialism flawed in some way, as Thomas Nagel and others have been arguing of late?

Eric Schwitzgebel - "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious"

from Paul Kelly

Abstract:

There seems to be no principled reason to deny entityhood to spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings. The United States can be considered as a concrete, spatially distributed but informationally integrated entity. Considered as such, the United States is at least a candidate for the literal possession of real psychological states, including phenomenal consciousness or subjective experience. The question, then, is whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. My suggestion is that if those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and weird alien species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States probably does meet those criteria. The United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings. Its internal representational states are functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned artificially from outside by the acts of an external user. And the United States exhibits complex linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external conditions.

Eric Schwitzgebel - If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

One of the papers featured in the Fifth Consciousness Online Conference comes from Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at U.C. Riverside (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley, 1997).

For the Online Consciousness Conference, he submitted a paper arguing If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious. A brief explanation of materialism might help (from The Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind):

There are two prominent construals of `material'. First, according to many philosophers, something is material if and only if it is spatial, extended in space. One might thus propose that what it means to say that something is material is that it is extended in space. This construal of `material' is inspired by Descartes's influential characterization of material bodies, in Meditation II. Given this construal, materialism is just the view that everything that exists is extended in space, that nothing nonspatial exists. This portrayal of materialism is attractively simple, but may be unilluminating. 

The problem is that the relevant notion of spatial extension may depend on the very notion of material in need of elucidation. If there is such dependence, conceptual circularity hampers the proposed characterization of materialism. The main worry here is that the notion of spatial extension is actually the notion of something's being extended in physical space, or the notion of something's being physically extended. It seems conceivable that something (perhaps a purely spiritual being) has temporal extension, in virtue of extending over time, even though that thing lacks extension in physical space. It does not seem self-contradictory, in other words, to hold that something is temporal (or, temporally extended) but is not a body. If this is so, the proposed characterization of materialism should be qualified to talk of physical space or physical extension. In that case, however, the threat of conceptual circularity is transparent. Even if there is no strict circularity here, the pertinent notion of spatial extension may be too closely related to the notion of material to offer genuine clarification. At a minimum, we need a precise explanation of spatial extension, if talk of such extension aims to elucidate talk of what is material. Perhaps a notion of spatial extension is crucial to an elucidation of materialism, but further explanation, without conceptual circularity, will then be needed. (Cf. Chomsky 1988.)

In this article, Schwitzgebel argues that if they (meaning materialists) accept that if other non-human life forms have consciousness, then by extension, the collected conscious entities that comprise the United States could be seen as a life form of its own, possessing consciousness.

If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different.  And you ought to think that.  After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism; the vast universe presumably contains many entities that a neutral observer would recognize to be as complex, linguistic, intelligent, and self-aware as we are.  It would be odd if among them only we with our neurons had subjective experience or (as we philosophers call it) phenomenal consciousness.  But, I will argue, a materialist who accepts the possibility of consciousness in oddly-formed aliens ought to accept the possibility of consciousness in spatially distributed group entities.  If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities.  Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort.  (Or maybe, even, it’s rather smart, but that’s more than I need for my argument.)  If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

Here is another section that may inspire you to read the whole article:

4. A Telescopic View of the United States.

A planet-sized alien who squints might see the United States as a single diffuse entity consuming bananas and automobiles, wiring up communications systems, touching the moon, and regulating its smoggy exhalations – an entity that can be evaluated for the presence or absence of consciousness.

You might say: The United States is not a biological organism.  It doesn’t have a life cycle.  It doesn’t reproduce.  It’s not biologically integrated and homeostatic.  Therefore, even accepting the relatively liberal views so far advocated regarding the types of structures that can house consciousness, there are good grounds for resisting the thought that the United States might be conscious.  A further step is necessary.

To this thought, I have two replies.

First, why should consciousness require being an organism in the biological sense?  Properly-designed androids, brains in vats, gods – these may not be organisms in the biological sense and yet are sometimes regarded by materialists as possible loci of conscious.  Having distinctive modes of reproduction is often thought to be a central, defining feature of organisms (e.g., J. Wilson 1999; R.A. Wilson 2005), but it’s unclear why reproductive mode should matter to consciousness.

Second, it’s not clear that nations aren’t biological organisms.  The United States is (after all) composed of cells and organs that share genetic material, to the extent it is composed of people who are composed of cells and organs and who share genetic material.  The United States also maintains homeostasis.  Farmers grow crops to feed non-farmers, and these nutritional resources are distributed with the help of other people via a network of roads.  Groups of people organized as import companies bring food in from the outside environment.  Medical specialists help maintain the health of their compatriots.  Soldiers defend their compatriots against potential threats.  Teachers educate future generations.  Home builders, textile manufacturers, telephone companies, mail carriers, rubbish haulers, bankers, police, all contribute to the stable well-being of the organism.  Politicians and bureaucrats work top-down to ensure that certain actions are coordinated, while other types of coordination emerge spontaneously without top-down control, just as in ordinary animals.  Viewed telescopically, the United States is a pretty awesome animal.

Nations also reproduce – not sexually but by fission.  The United States and several other countries are fission products of Great Britain.  In the 1860’s, the United States almost fissioned again.  And fissioning nations retain traits of the parent that affect the fitness of future fission products – intergenerationally stable developmental resources, if you will.

On Earth, at all levels, from the molecular to the neural to the societal, there’s a vast array of competitive and cooperative pressures; at all levels, there’s a wide range of actual and possible modes of reproduction, direct and indirect; and all levels show manifold forms of symbiosis, parasitism, partial integration, agonism, and antagonism.  There isn’t as radical a difference in kind as people are inclined to think between our favorite level of organization and higher and lower levels.

Secession Petitions Filed on Behalf of Citizens in 30 States (So Far)

Wow, some people seriously cannot stand living in a country with a black man as president. Or maybe it's that he supports caring for each other as citizens and acknowledging that we are interdependent both personally and economically.

According to Huffington Post, citizens in 30 states (or more) have filed petitions to secede from the union. The threshold for White House response is 25,000 signatures in 30 days. As of now, Texas already has 80,000 signatures.

Here's a list of states where residents have filed secession petitions in recent days: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

This number is way up from 20 states reported earlier today by CBS. Not at all surprised to see Arizona on the list - we think we are Texas's little brother.

Residents In More Than 30 States File Secession Petitions

Posted: 11/13/2012

Residents in more than 30 states have filed secession petitions with the "We the People" program on the White House website.

Petitions to strip citizenship of individuals signing onto petitions to secede and exile them have also been submitted.

A threshold of 25,000 signatures must be met within 30 days for petitions to be reviewed. The Obama administration explains, "If a petition meets the signature threshold, it will be reviewed by the Administration and we will issue a response."

Micah H. (no last name provided) of Arlington, Texas filed a petition that had nearly 60,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning. It reads:

The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government's neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the US suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it's citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

Unfortunately for Micah H. and Peter Morrison -- a Texas GOP official who called for an "amicable divorce" from the United States last week -- secession is not in the cards for the Lone Star State.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) sought to distance himself from the petition on Monday. The Dallas Morning News reported that the Republican governor's press secretary wrote in an email, "Gov. Perry believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it. But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government."

Alia Malek - Secret Experimental Prisons Subject Inmates to Drastic Isolation

Somehow, I really do not feel any safe knowing this. Nor am I surprised. The Bush administration wanted to create detention camps for Muslim Americans following 9/11 - this is as close tot hat as they could get. And to make it look more legitimate, they threw a few "domestic terrorists" in form good measure.

Secret Experimental Prisons Subject Inmates to Drastic Isolation

Inmates at secret prisons inside the U.S. are prohibited from having virtually any contact with the outside world.

Alia Malek, The Nation
March 16, 2011

The following article first appeared in the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.

On the evening of May 13, 2008, Jenny Synan waited for a phone call from her husband, Daniel McGowan. An inmate at Sandstone, a federal prison in Minnesota, McGowan was serving a seven-year sentence for participating in two ecologically motivated arsons. It was their second wedding anniversary, their first with him behind bars. So far his incarceration hadn’t stopped him from calling her daily or surprising her with gifts for her birthday, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. But Jenny never got a call from Daniel that night—or the next day, or the next.

It was only days later that Jenny heard from a friend that Daniel was in transit, his destination Marion, Illinois. She quickly researched Marion and learned that it housed both a minimum- and a medium-security facility. Daniel, however, was classified as a low-security prisoner, a designation between minimum and medium. Even though he had a perfect record at Sandstone and had been recommended for a transfer to a prison closer to home, Jenny still didn’t think it was likely that Daniel would be stepped down to minimum security. But it made no sense that he would be moved up to medium security.

By May 16 the inmate locator on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) website showed Daniel in a variety of places, including a federal correctional facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. After speaking with several people at the BOP, Sandstone and Terre Haute to no avail, Jenny e-mailed friends, “This is seriously like pulling fucking teeth.”

Finally on June 12, one month after their missed call, Daniel telephoned Jenny. He was still in transit and had only a few moments to speak. He was definitely going to Marion, where he heard he would be housed in something called a Communications Management Unit (CMU). He had no idea why he was being transferred. He simply had been told he was moving, given 30 minutes to pack and thrown into “the hole” until he was moved. All he knew was that the CMUs were supposedly run out of Washington and placed severe restrictions on phone calls, mail and visits. He was anxious about his new placement and asked Jenny to find out all she could about Marion.

But Jenny couldn’t find much. There was nothing on the BOP website about CMUs or a special unit at Marion. She did find a few scattered articles, all about a Terre Haute CMU, described as a secret experimental unit for second-tier terrorism inmates who were almost all Arab and Muslim Americans.

There was, in fact, little to be found; the Bush administration had quietly opened the CMUs in Terre Haute and Marion in December 2006 and March 2008, respectively, circumventing the usual process federal agencies normally follow that subjects them to public scrutiny and transparency. The first whisper of what the government was planning reached public ears in April 2006, when the BOP—in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—published its proposed rule for “Limited Communication for Terrorist Inmates.” Under the APA, federal agencies like the BOP must publish notice of any new regulations and solicit public comments in order to operate legally. After a period of review, the agency publishes the finalized rule.

In the 2006 rule, the BOP proposed restricting the communications of inmates with a “link to terrorist-related activity” to one six-page letter per week, one fifteen-minute call per month and one one-hour visit per month, limited to immediate family members. The rule left it to the discretion of the warden whether visits would be contact or noncontact. (As a point of comparison, the BOP generally allows most prisoners 300 minutes of calls per month and places few caps on the number or duration of visits prisoners may receive. Even at the only federal Supermax, inmates are allowed 35 hours of visits a month.)

* (skipping down a ways) *

In June 2008, Andy Stepanian, another non-Arab, non-Muslim low-security inmate, was sent to Marion for the last six months of his three-year sentence for conspiring to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992. The only notice he received after his transfer said that he “has known connections to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), groups considered to be domestic terrorist organizations.” “Enhanced review and control of inmate communications,” it claimed, “is required to assure the safe functioning of the correctional facility, surrounding community and American public.”

According to Stepanian, prison staff referred to non-Arab and non-Muslim inmates as “balancers.” One white guard comforted Stepanian, who had received biweekly visits from his fiancée at his previous prison, saying, “You’re nothing like these Muslims. You’re just here for balance. You’re going to go home soon.”

Based on these and similar reports, observers began to speculate that because of criticism, the BOP was trying to improve the CMUs’ racial and ethnic demographics. The BOP, however, told The Nation, “Race, religion and ethnicity are not a basis for designation decisions.” Nonetheless, as of this writing, the BOP reports that 18 of 33 prisoners at Terre Haute (55 percent) and 23 of 36 at Marion (64 percent) are Muslim. Muslims make up just 6 percent of the federal prison population.

The BOP declined to disclose the CMU inmates’ names or convictions. It did, however, provide a partial list of “examples” of activities that might land an inmate inside a CMU, including being convicted of or associated with international or domestic terrorism; repeated attempts to contact victims or witnesses; a history of soliciting minors for sexual activity; a court-ordered communication restriction; coordinating illegal activities from inside prison and a disciplinary history that includes continued abuse of communications methods. According to the BOP, twenty-four (73 percent) and twenty-three (64 percent) of the inmates at Terre Haute and Marion, respectively, were assigned to the CMUs because of terrorism-related reasons.

As the populations of the CMUs grew, civil rights groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights began to receive letters from inmates. Eventually, CCR attorneys Alexis Agathocleous and Rachel Meeropol communicated with a majority of the inmates. They quickly noticed that in many cases there was nothing in inmates’ disciplinary records—many of which were clean—or security-level designations that would suggest they warranted such drastic isolation. Indeed, convicted terrorists like Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and shoe bomber Richard Reid are housed not in a CMU but in high and maximum security prisons in Colorado. Many of the CMU inmates will eventually be released; eleven already have been. Nine others have been transferred back to general population housing.

Of the CMU inmates who are there because of a link to terrorism, Meeropol says, “The vast majority of these folks are there due to entrapment or material support convictions. In other words, terrorism-related convictions that do not involve any violence or injury.”

Bound by confidentiality, Meeropol declined to name these inmates, but The Nation was able to identify several. They include the officers of the Holy Land Foundation—a now-defunct US-based Islamic charity that sent funds to social programs administered by Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization—and the Lackawanna Six, who admitted to traveling to an Al Qaeda training camp before the 9/11 attacks. Some of the notable entrapment cases include those of Shahawar Matin Siraj, convicted for taking part in a plot planned by a paid FBI informant to bomb Herald Square, and Yassin Aref, whose underlying act was simply witnessing a loan in another plot planned by an FBI informant.

CCR attorneys also noticed the presence of CMU inmates who had neither links to terrorism nor communications infractions. They fell into three general groups, with occasional overlaps. The first had made complaints against the BOP either through internal procedures or formal litigation, and their placement appeared retaliatory. The second held unpopular political views, both left- and right-leaning, from animal rights and environmental activists to neo-Nazis and extreme antiabortion activists. The third seemed to be Muslims, including African-American Muslims, whose convictions had nothing to do with terrorism and ranged from robbery to credit card fraud.

There's a lot more - read the whole disturbing article.

Tags: United States, freedom, law, prisons, terrorism, The Nation, Altenet, Alia Malek, Secret Experimental Prisons, Inmates, Drastic Isolation, Federal Bureau of Prisons, BOP, Communications Management Unit, CMU, Administrative Procedure Act, APA, Limited Communication, Terrorist Inmates, Bush, Bush Administration, domestic terrorists, Terre Haute, Marion, Muslims