Philip Zimbardo’s revenge: Turning knowledge of evil into actions of heroism

I've previously commented on Phillips Zimbardo's thoroughly engaging work, including his lecture on "The Secret Powers of Time."  He is well respected for his research on a wide variety of social psychology issues. Forty years ago, Zimbardo unwittingly served as the mastermind of the infamous "Stanford prison experiment."  He selected healthy young men with no history of any psychological problems, drug abuse or violence and he put them into a situation where they would fill the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison (in a school building) that soon turned ugly as Zimbardo stood by and observed. The prisoner abuse eventually become intolerable. During the course of the experiment, the "guards" became physically and emotionally abusive toward the "prisoners." Zimbardo took a lot of criticism for running this experiment, even though he shut it down six days after beginning what was scheduled to be a two-week long experiment. Zimbardo still today notes that his own "passive role" enabled the abuse. The Stanford experiment clearly demonstrated that a toxic situation can cause "good" people to act grotesquely. Based on his previous work, including the Stanford experiment, Zimbardo was called to serve as an expert witness in a case the US government brought against an Abu Ghraib guard who was accused of being a "bad apple." Zimbardo disagreed with that characterization, opining that Abu Ghraib was a terrible situation that was likely to corrupt many good people. As indicated in an article by Greg Miller titled "Using the Psychology of Evil to Do Good" in the April 29, 2011 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers), the guard being prosecuted:

. . . soon found himself supervising about a dozen military police and dozens more Iraqi police responsible for guarding more than 1000 Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The prisoner population had recently tripled, creating a chaotic environment in which standard procedures and oversight broke down. The language barrier made prisoner same anonymous, Zimbardo says, and many prisoners were forced to go naked, further dehumanizing them and creating a sexually charged atmosphere. Guards worked daily 12 hour shifts for weeks on end. Fear of a revolt-or an attack from outside-mixed with boredom and exhaustion to create a volatile brew.
In short, Abu Ghraib constituted an episode of déjà vu for Zimbardo. It was no surprise to him that guards with no history of troublemaking or bad character would engage in grotesque acts.

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United States Citizen Consent Form and Survey

I suspect that only a smallish minority of people deeply care about the many dramatic political and legal changes that have been occurring in the United States over the past ten years. Just to make sure, though, I have created a United States Citizen Consent Form and Survey, and I would like to propose that it be distributed to all U.S. citizens and they be compelled to fill it out by federal mandate.

Maybe the results will substantiate my fears that I am an outsider living in what used to be my own country.

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Defensive Justice: Inside the mind of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

On Monday, May 16, 2011, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Samuel A. Alito spoke at a function sponsored by the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. I attended because I was curious about his thought process; what was going on in his mind? I had no idea what Justice Alito was going to discuss until he began to speak. I recorded his speech on a small recorder and I took some notes. Alito is part of a Supreme Court majority that has repeatedly written opinions that have wrested power from average citizens at the expense of powerful corporations. Yet Justice Alito began his talk by proudly reciting an inscription on the walls of the United States Supreme Court: "Equal Access to the Law." That’s a strange line to recite by a judge who has voted to bar ordinary citizens from having meaningful access to courthouses (see AT&T v Concepcion) and barred them from having meaning access to democracy itself by unleashing an ocean of money into the electoral process (see Citizens United and see here). [caption id="attachment_18157" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image: Creative Commons"][/caption] Alito titled his talk "The Top 10 Things You Might Not Know about the United States Supreme Court." Because Alito is often touted as an “intellectual,” I assumed that the talk might be intellectually challenging, but it was a self-absorbed and disingenuous talk delivered in a humorless tone. Alito’s talk was also highly defensive, as described below.  His talk was especially disappointing in light of Alito’s claim that he has given this same talk to other audiences on many other occasions. That would presumably would have given him the opportunity to hone some inspirational messages into his talk, but I felt no inspiration.  Feel free to disagree with me after listening to Alito’s entire speech here. Without further ado, here are Samuel Alito’s "top ten things” along with my reactions to these “things.” Topic one: "Most cases are not about the Constitution." I never assumed otherwise, and I suspect that most audience members (all most all of them practicing attorneys) never assumed otherwise. It was curious is that Alito mentioned Brown versus Board of Education as one of the great cases coming out of the United States Supreme Court. Brown was a case in which the court was looking out for the little guy, something the current court has not shown much interest in doing. Therefore, one might wonder how the majority on this court would have reacted in such a case had this majority been sitting on the bench back in 1954. If this sounds harsh, give me one reason to think otherwise. Brown pitted the Court against legislators; it was inconvenient decision for those in power. It was a decision driven by a desire for “social justice,” an alien concept for the current court. Topic two: "Most cases are governed by precedent." [More . . . ]

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Barack Obama: The Surveillance President

Glenn Greenwald points to three extraordinary events this week that earn Barack Obama the title of Surveillance President. These events dovetail with the President's previous conduct aimed at furthering government secrecy at the expense of an informed citizenry. These events also need to be seen in the context of Obama's War on whistleblowers, as reported by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.  "[T]he Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. . . . [I]t has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined."  But that is just the beginning.  Here's one more excerpt from The New Yorker:

Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”

[caption id="attachment_18134" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Kgtoh at Dreamstime (with permission)"][/caption] But back to the three recent events: 1. Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the Patriot Act; 2. The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation; and 3. The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel violated federal open-records laws by refusing to release its legal opinion that concludes that the FBI may obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process, a watchdog group asserts. Welcome to the United States of Surveillance.

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“Retard” and other disability-insults.

The word "retard" possessed dual meanings for a long time. First used as a term for intellectual disability in 1788, the word took on a pejorative sense in the 1970s. For thirty years the two meanings curiously co-existed. Universities had "Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability" Departments and students who drunkenly called one another 'retards' for lobbing bad beer-pong balls, and the two existed in tandem. But once medical and social service experts finally disavowed the word 'retard', it vanished from official usage with amazing swiftness. The Special Olympics ceased using the 'r-word' in 2004, initiating the trend. In 2006, the (former) American Association of Mental Retardation changed its name to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. By 2008, Special Olympics turned the abolishment of 'retard' into a full-time effort and launched R-word.org. The site protested the derogatory use of 'retard' (including a protest campaign against the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, which featured a lengthy discussion on 'retard' roles in film). Special Olympics and R-word.org also pushed for their fellow disability-service organizations to drop the term. In 2010, 'retard' was legally banished from the professional lexicon. On October 5 of last year, Obama signed "Rosa's Law", which banned the use of "retard" in all federal health, education, and labor policy. "Intellectual disability" and "developmental disability" became the approved nomenclature. Non-federal organizations followed hastily: in Ohio, Google directs you to the "Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities", but the website itself has already been scrubbed of the R-word(even if the url still has the dreaded 'r' in it). It's official: 'retard' has no place in formal usage. Once a medical term for someone with an intellectual disability, it lives now only as an insult. One that means, roughly, unintelligent. Like moron, which began as medical terminology for one with a mental age of 8 to 12. Or imbecile, which meant 'a mental age of 6 to 9'.

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