Situational morality and its consequences

Huffpo has a long article on the "moral injury" suffered by combat troops.

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, moral injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families. Moral injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens in war, the dark experiences that many veterans have always been reluctant to talk about. Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead? Can they be hardened against moral injury? Should they be?
I'm still trying to sort this out. I'm tempted to engage in a lot of finger pointing--American society happily celebrates warmongering--just try to think of a holiday where we don't stir in the idea of a soldier fighting or a soldier coming home from battle. We see and hear war images and sounds at many public events, especially sports events. On the other hand, though they are young when they sign up to join the war machine, members of the military are not children. To some extent, they know or should know what they are getting into. They know that they are willing to accept money in order to kill or to support killing on behalf of the United States. Some of them go because they will get to wield weapons and kill. Those people are getting exactly what they want. Those members of the military who don't actually shoot the weapons are complicit. Those of us who are civilians who fail to speak out are also complicit. Perhaps we should be said to be suffering moral injury too, but that's a hard argument to make, because most of us don't give a shit that our soldiers are overseas invading other lands and killing people who are typically poor and brown-skinned. Most of us don't call this kind of killing, where soldiers kill, "murder." After all, there are self-defense murders, and in some cases military actions, including some large-scale military actions do seem like acts of defense. The military PR machine has tapped into this idea by renaming the war machine the "Department of Defense," even those most U.S wars are wars of choice, acts of strategic aggression to suit the needs of banks and businesses. To get us reoriented, we should rename the Defense Department. As stated at Common Dreams,
America's discerning have long recognized that the country can never live without war. It is a country made for war. Small detail: Up until 1947, the Defense Department was called Department of War.
I do think we ought to reframe what it means to kill in uniform. That means that we should stop glorifying the act of killing in uniform unless the reason for the war itself is edifying. We should rename the act of killing in uniform as "situational murder." The analogy is situational homosexuality. Killing in war is a brutal act of ending lives that we are working hard to see in a special context. Akin to money laundering, we could call such killing "murder laundering." It's a matter of killing where innocent lives are blithely written of as collateral damage, something that is really hard to sell back home when police kill innocent people. I am keenly aware of the consequences posed by determinism. Embraced fully, it is an excuse for any action, because we were not really "free" to make our choices. This sets up a monumental paradox, because to keep order and sanity we are forced to assume that we are "free." It is in this crazy context that I resent the attempt to turn non-medical problems into medical problems. "Moral injury" is the suffering one experiences for making choices that are often bad choices. Why did you sign up for the military? Yes, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but only on the battle field did you realize that you were engaged in (I'm speaking of all of America's recent wars of choice) gussied up murder. Back when you signed up, you failed to think things through. The banality of evil was at play--Hannah Arendt's notion that the failure to think causes much more damage than intentional wrongdoing. "Moral injury" is not a medical problem. It is coming to grips with one's choices. It is usually a good thing that one focuses in on one's moral compass, even when the result is self-condemnation. Perhaps the occurrence of moral injury is to be applauded as an awakening of conscience, a terrible lesson learned, and a chance to take public positions warning others to say no to the seduction of wars of choice.

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Unread journal articles

If you spend many months writing a journal article, will anyone read it? If you are lucky, yes, according to this article at Pacific-Standard.

A burgeoning field of academic study called citation analysis (it’s exactly what it sounds like) has found that this joke holds true for not just dissertations, but many academic papers. A study at the University of Indiana found that “as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” That same study concluded that “some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited.” That is, nine out of 10 academic papers—which both often take years to research, compile, submit, and get published, and are a major component by which a scholar’s output is measured—contribute little to the academic conversation.

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The Fourth Amendment should be top secret

Here's a well written article by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. Of course, it's tongue in cheek. But listen to the serious argument by an attorney who represented Homeland Security, and a response by Freedom of Press Foundation:

"You can't debate our intelligence capabilities and how to control them in the public without disclosing all of the things that you're discussing to the very people you're trying to gather intelligence about," he said. "Your targets are listening to the debates." In fact, he continued, they're listening particularly closely. For that reason, publicly debating intelligence techniques, targets and limits is foolish. As soon as targets figure out the limits of what authorities can touch, they'll change their tactics accordingly. In his view, limits should be set in secret. A class of overseers with security clearances can make the necessary judgment calls. Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, attempted to defend normal democratic debate. "What separates us from countries like Russia and China is that we can have these types of debates with an informed public that are completely aware of what types of surveillance are available to governments and what the legal standards are," he argued. "We're not specifically debating who the NSA is going to spy on, but whole surveillance regimes. If we didn't debate that in this country, the Fourth Amendment would be classified. But it's not."

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Diane Feinstein doesn’t like it when she herself is the victim of government spying

Hypocrisy is not a beautiful thing, though sometimes it is a tiny bit gratifying. Rolling Stone reports. My favorite is #8:

8. The CIA was so angered by the Senate having its hands on the Panetta Review that it spied on the work of its Senate overseers. [O]n January 15, 2014, CIA Director [John] Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a "search" – that was John Brennan's word – of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the "stand alone" and "walled-off" committee network drive containing the committee's own internal work product and communications. According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the Internal Panetta Review. The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the Internal Review, or how we obtained it. Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee's computers.

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