Yikes!

65% of Canadians support the return of the death penalty:

 Andrew Barr/National Post

Let's be clear: instituting the death penalty means legitimizing the government's power to pre-meditatively kill its own citizens. Unless people truly feel that the government is unerring (which, judging by this list of the posthumously pardoned, is absurd), I think supporting the death penalty indicates a failure of imagination.

That is, 65% of Canadians imagine themselves only as the judge, never the accused.  

A quick thought

A friend of mine shared the following quote from economist Robert Higgs. It's a stunning reminder of what people are apt to accept when violence is instigated from behind a desk:

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous. 

Sadism and the Police

There have been a flurry of police brutality and misconduct reports over the past few weeks - recently Brian Hutchinson's article in Wednesday’s National Post. 

Hutchinson posits that the problems stem from the difficulties of police discipline. It usually takes third-party intervention to compel the force to call out one of their own, and “the rules don’t allow for simple, straight-forward termination.”


The popular explanation for the repeat indiscretions seems straight-forward: the police have too much power and need to  be reined in. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," said Lord Acton in 1887, quoted ad nauseum ever since.

There is another explanation that's a little more interesting, and I think well worth considering: the underlying issue is sadism, for which the police is a natural breeding ground. It isn't just that a few officers have a "sadist streak," as the Post  speculated a few weeks back, it's that the police as an institution is prone to foster that kind of thinking.

I recently read a fascinating 1996 study by political scientist C. Fred Alford regarding people's attitudes towards violence and victimhood. It turns out that many people see the world in kill-or-be-killed terms -- a particularly problematic view considering how our self-partiality clouds our judgment of just retribution. Given the right circumstances, it appears that most people would act sadistically. 


Alford spent two years interviewing two groups of people: ordinary citizens, and inmates at a maximum security prison. He wanted to find out how their attitudes towards the Holocaust differed. He was most curious to see what they considered evil. 

He asked a simple question: Was the Nazi “desk murderer” Adolf Eichmann responsible for the crimes he committed? Eichmann, though he never killed anyone directly, did organize the mass killings. Did that make him evil?

Nearly all of the ordinary people responded along the same line:

Look, he was just a cog in the machine. If he didn't do it, someone else would. Besides, he would have been killed if he didn't, and you can't ask that of anyone. 

Sound reasonable? Well, it isn't quite right. For one thing, they wrongfully assumed that if Eichmann had refused to do his job he would have been killed. There is no evidence that would have been the case.


The inmates didn’t just use the “cog in the machine” argument. They went hardcore Hobbesian:

"It's total war, man, and in total war there's no bystanders. Everyone is a soldier." Even babies? "Yea, they just don't know it yet." 

The two exonerations are remarkably similar. The response of the prisoners was merely more blunt. They both describe what is essentially a war of all against all -- only the regular citizens prefer to think of things in sanitized, bureaucratized terms. We are not all soldiers, we’re cogs.  

Thinking in kill-or-be-killed terms is close kin to the broader definition of sadism: aggression characterized by an intense identification with the victim, “the form aggression takes when it seeks to inflict its doom on others.” 

In a kill-or-be-killed world, it is understandable that a person would rather be grouped with the killers; identifying with the victims is just too horrible (speaking of which, remember this?).  When harming another person is seen as a way to “inflict one’s doom on others,” i.e. to escape victimhood by victimizing another person, the sadistic impulse takes over.

Law enforcement officials of all stripes are put into a world that is decidedly Hobbesian -- they are the Leviathan. They are the good guys, but they are also the killers. To maintain their position they must subjugate others -- it's part of the job description. That is ample fodder for sadistic thinking.   

The prisoners, writes Alford, seemed no more sadistic than ordinary people -- they had simply taken their violence “freelance.” It was the same kill-or-be-killed mentality, but the inmates lacked Eichmann's all-important desk.

It’s not surprising that the police, who work in an institution which gives them “the opportunity to express, channel, and implement society’s sadism,” would, once in a while, freelance on the side.

Labatt's totalitarian tendencies

Earlier this month Labatt provided a choice example of the "Streisand effect" when they threatened to sue the Gazette over a photo of Magnotta drinking Blue. They bullied the press and demanded that they retract the image that no one else, until that moment, had noticed.

The threatened lawsuit was a clear misstep, but what about the underlying motive of preserving the brand's cheery facade at the expense of reality? Isn't it odd that we accept the general desire to tightly-control the public image of corporations?

Andrew Coyne argues that this aggressive form of branding contains an element of totalitarianism:

In endorsing Labatt’s concern for its brand, we are implicitly accepting the essentially totalitarian assumptions that inform most advertising, and its close cousin, politics: in the world inhabited by this brand or that party, nothing bad ever happens, nothing ever goes wrong, no one ever is unhappy. In such a world it is impossible that there could be any negative associations. Therefore, they must be made to disappear. 

First - I like how this gives credence to Steve Murray's illustration. He was making a far more sophisticated argument than I thought. 1,000 words indeed.

Second - Andrew Coyne has a point. There's a vast difference between promoting the idea that only decent people drink Labatt, and eliminating facts to the contrary. When a company sets out to prove their ad-copy by manipulating the real world, the spin turns sinister.

In politics, transforming lies into prophesies is how ideology becomes total, i.e. how a simple, flawed idea becomes the only plausible explanation. A regular politician might say "our healthcare is the best in the world!" It may not be true, it's likely hyperbole, and it's most certainly debatable. A totalitarian politician will say the same thing, only they will suppress any contrary evidence by destroying all superior hospitals. Voilà! The statement is demonstrably true, the politician is sheltered from the changing winds of reality, and there is no room left for debate.

In totalitarian Germany, when Hitler talked about "dying classes," he meant "classes of people I am systematically murdering." See what I mean? Logical. Prophetic. Unhinged. Any statement can be made valid if sufficiently controlled.

Herein lies the allure of totalitarians: they don't "flip-flop," they make good on their promises. Whether in advertising or politics, logical, unerring consistency sells. Alas, water-tight predictions and infallible statements are exceedingly rare in the real world, so they change the world to suit their vision.

By redefining war, drones may redefine the Presidency

Peter Singer examines a trend towards war without deliberation in this fascinating article via the CIC:

The United States has carried out more than 300 drone strikes [in Pakistan] since 2004. 

Yet, this operation has never been debated in Congress. More than seven years after it began, there has not even been a single vote for or against it.

Apparently, it isn't a real war until U.S. ground troops are in the line of fire. The President can blow Pakistan to pieces without congressional approval as long as he sticks with unmanned machinery.

If left unchecked, this could fundamentally alter the balance of power within the U.S. government. Evidence, perhaps, of the increasingly imperial-bureaucratic nature of the regime.

The New Bad Jobs

Dear artists, Jim Flaherty's "There is no bad job" comment wasn't intended for you.

How could it be? You invented the day job. You figured out long ago that bussing tables beat going broke. You didn't study writing, or illustration, or music, or theatre, to become fabulously wealthy. You went into the field because you love it, and you're good at what you do.  Those are solid reasons, my friend. They always will be.

You know who needed to hear that taking a less-than-ideal job is okay? The people who went into traditionally stable industries, like government, business and education, who expected a clear path to success but were met instead with hiring freezes. The people who looked up to their unionized parents and planned to land the same kind of job. The people who chose their area of study based on what appeared to be economically solid reasons just a few years ago.

Generational conflict and a stagnant economy hit those people hard. It isn't because they're lazy or entitled, it's because working a job on the side isn't as socially acceptable in those circles.

Community makes a huge difference. When you're freelancing, there's no shame in walking dogs to make ends meet. People "get" that. Your friends are probably doing the same thing, and the writers you admire were likely once in the same boat.

That humble path is hard to take when your dream job was to work as a high school teacher, an assembler or a fabricator. What has changed isn't that artists are facing up to the fact that they might have to accept a job outside of their field, it's that other industries are discovering the artist's way.

Success wasn't always defined in terms of security. In ancient Greece, people preferred backbreaking day-to-day labour to cushier full-time careers. Assured work was considered akin to slavery, because the indefinitely employed didn't have the freedom to choose what to do everyday.

Rather than say "there is no such thing as a bad job," maybe it's time to rethink what makes a job bad. Not a lack of security, but a false sense of security. Not too few hours, but too many: the type of job that eliminates the individual's ability to start something new. When no job lasts forever, freedom and flexibility become vitally important.

"The conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong."

"The body changes as you lose," reports the New York Times in what is essentially a mathematician's guide to weight loss. "An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one." 


So calories in vs. calories out is scrapped, but a restricted calorie diet is still recommended. Takeaway: lower your expectations and stick with it. Forever.