The prisoner, the torturer and the poisoned soul
And other things I found on the net on my weekend
What happened in Guantánamo: a former prisoner and interrogator speak 17 years on
Mr X was supposed to break his prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He tortured him—and broke himself. Now they speak again
Mr X always tortured at night. Each night Slahi’s silence lasted, he tried out a new cruelty. He says torture is ultimately a creative process. Then he shakes his head. Pauses. Runs his hand through his beard. Fights back tears. He says, “man, I can’t believe this myself.”
Mr X says there is hardly a day when he does not think or dream about Slahi.
There was a moment that Mr X says poisoned his soul. One night, he went into the interrogation room where Slahi, small and emaciated, was sitting in his orange jumpsuit on a chair, chained to an eyelet in the floor. Mr X, tall and muscular, had thought of something new again: he pretended to go berserk. He screamed wildly, hurled chairs across the room, slammed his fist against the wall and threw papers in Slahi’s face. Slahi was shaking all over.
Mr X says the reason he never forgot that moment was not that he saw fear in Slahi’s eyes, but that he, Mr X, enjoyed seeing that fear. Seeing the trembling Slahi, he says, felt like an orgasm. …
“My country made me do some pretty shitty things, and I did them,” says Mr X. “I hate myself for it. And I hate my country for turning me into this monster.” He states it as a matter of fact. “What I did was torture. One hundred per cent. No doubt about it.”
Speaking of incarceration …
David Graeber’s latest and last
Whenever I’ve dipped my toe into David Graeber’s work, I’ve taken it back out decidedly unimpressed. I haven't read his magnum opus Debt: the first 5,000 years, but read this very thoughtful and critical review (Note it's from the left and so it's more convincing than critiques from the right would be – it's friendly fire as it were). He also seems to have been up to some fairly classic and nasty academic moves as documented here. I ground-truthed this in following up his debate with Brad Delong whom he traduced as a neoliberal stooge which is ridiculous.
His Bullshit Jobs was a good idea. But a whole book? Well, a whole book could have been very good, except for the fact that whether you’re an economist, a psychologist or an anthropologist, wouldn’t you be interested in what was driving bullshit jobs — how the market throws up so many of them? It seems obvious that all those jobs in advertising, marketing and PR exist because, however little value they add to the community more widely they reward those who invest in them. This explanation get short shrift in the book in favour of the idea that plutocrats like lots of lackeys. Indeed, no doubt many do, but Coca-Cola doesn’t spend a fortune on marketing because it likely lackeys, it does it to make profits. I even did a podcast with Gene Tunny on the subject if you want to listen.
Anyway, I finally have started reading Graeber’s valedictory book written with archeologist David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything. I expected to be irritated by its lack of fastidiousness in argument — particularly in summarising opposing views and — in Graeber’s coat-trailing style and irritated I was. But after I just put the style issues aside, I really started enjoying the remarkable survey it provides of the sheer variety of social and political forms of human society before the agricultural revolution.
Then I read the very lengthy review below which I thoroughly recommend. It’s an excellent survey of the contents of the book and, at least from my inexpert observation, a fair asessment of its strengths and weaknesses.
You probably know that Graeber was on holiday in Venice with the book launch weeks away when he up and died! The official cause was necrotizing pancreatitis but Graeber’s wife believes it was complications from COVID. At 59!
A terrible business.
Dear Boris … love Jesse
England is full of Burkean conservatives. Australia has none that I can detect — or rather none of any significance in Parliament. Jesse Norman is an interesting character who spent a decade or so before going becoming an MP being a policy wonk in think tanks. He has continued to write interesting and engaging books on prominent figures from Britain’s constitutional history, most particularly Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. He says he’s always supported Boris, which is a bit of a worry given how dissolute he had always been. But there you go. He’s had enough of the sleaze and incompetence.
First, as Sue Gray’s report underlines, you have presided over a culture of casual law-breaking at 10 Downing Street in relation to Covid. To describe yourself as “vindicated” by the report is grotesque.
Secondly, both in the Queen’s Speech and elsewhere, your current policy priorities are deeply questionable. Breach of the Northern Irish Protocol would be economically very damaging, politically foolhardy and almost certainly illegal.
You are the leader of the Conservative and Unionist party, yet you are putting the Union itself gravely at risk.
The Rwanda policy is ugly, likely to be counterproductive and of doubtful legality. Privatisation of Channel 4 is an unnecessary and provocative attempt to address a political non-issue during a time of crisis, at significant cost to the independent UK film and TV industry.
No genuinely Conservative government should have supported the recent ban on noisy protest – least of all when basic human freedoms are facing the threat of extinction in Ukraine.
Thirdly, under you the Government seems to lack a sense of mission. It has a large majority, but no long-term plan. There is no sign, for example, that it has even begun to get to grips with the need for greater security and resilience in a range of policy areas.
Rather, you are simply seeking to campaign, to keep changing the subject and to create political and cultural dividing lines mainly for your advantage, at a time when the economy is struggling, inflation is soaring and growth is anaemic at best.
Speaking of Boris
Easy and hard bias problems in algorithms
I discovered Ethan Zuckerman a few weeks ago commenting on the technical prospects of disconnecting national intranets from the global internet. Here’s another excellent article of his:
As with bias in computer vision [of black people], the poor performance of the Compas algorithm is a data problem. But it’s a vastly harder problem to solve. The reason Compas predicts that black Americans are more likely to be re-arrested is that black Americans are five times more likely to be arrested for a crime than white Americans. This does not necessarily mean that black Americans are more likely to commit crimes than Americans of other races—black and white Americans have similar rates of drug use, but wildly disparate arrest rates for drug crimes, for example. Compas cannot predict criminal risk fairly because policing in America is so unfair to black Americans. …
AI systems calcify systemic biases into code. That’s why it’s so important to interrogate them and prevent biased algorithms from harming people who are ill-equipped to challenge the opaque, apparently oracular decisions made by computer algorithms. But the problems AI has with bias can serve as a roadmap out of some of society’s most pernicious and ingrained problems. What if our response to bias in AI wasn’t just to fix the computers, but the society that trains them?
The article also led me to this tweet on a different subject:
Brad Delong on J. K. Galbraith
From a few weeks back.
I remember talking to my father about Galbraith’s New Industrial Estate when he returned from sabbatical in 1978. I was probably too wide-eyed in admiration for it, but Dad, who’d studied at Chicago, identified with the establishment of academic economics. Back then it was represented not by Milton Friedman but by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. All three were dismissive of Galbraith for not formulating his insights within the scientistic strictures of the neoclassical synthesis.
Galbraith hadn’t done that because it was impossible to explore the breadth of the concerns he had within that framework. In any event, I didn’t give this a lot of thought until reading Zac Carter’s superb book on Keynes, The Price of Peace. The bit I least looked forward to was the last third of the book which covered Keynes ideas after his death. But it was the best part for me, showing the murky world of racists and anti-New Dealers from which the neoliberal fightback was crafted. And it also showed how important Galbraith was in representing one interpretation of the spirit of Keynes — along with Joan Robinson. And how he was one of the few who had the wit to be sceptical of Samuelson and Solow’s interpretation of the Phillips Curve.
In any event, to atone for his lack of attention to Galbraith in his forthcoming economic history Slouching toward Utopia, Delong reprises a profile of Galbraith he published in Foreign Affairs in 2005.
Lots of ideas in the background of contemporary U.S. political and economic thought are Galbraith's. His work as an economist was a scattered but comprehensive attempt to think through the consequences of the transition from a nation of small farms and workshops to one of large factories and superstores. In doing so, he took on many of the questions most central to the new U.S. economic landscape: How much can advertising shape demand? In a world of passive shareholders, autonomous managers and engineers, and firm decisions that emerge out of internal bureaucratic contests, just what are the objectives that drive big firms? How does competition work when its principal dimensions are quality and marketing rather than price? And critically, how do the limits of polite discourse allow the system to hold itself together while constraining its flexibility?
Deconstructing deconstruction
I don’t really understand deconstruction, and so I didn’t follow all of this article, but I thought what I did understand made sense. It’s pretty dismissive, but from a position of considerable knowledge, as opposed to the usual cast of characters who pretty obviously had no comprehension of it, but nevertheless critique it for beliving that reality was socially constructed as if it stood for the proposition that Jupiter has as many moons as we feel like at the time.