Where does good come from? – The Boston Globe: Instapaper

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

Wilson is 81, an age at which he could be forgiven for retreating to a farm and lending his name to the occasional popular book about science. Over the past year he’s tried his hand at fiction writing, publishing a novel about ants — his scientific specialty — and landing a short story in The New Yorker. But he has also been pressing a disruptive scientific idea, one he reckons is currently in phase two of the Schopenhauer progression: outrage.

The idea is that if the group that benefits from altruism, the tribe will live to spread the genes. This “outrageous” idea by Edward O Wilson is not so silly.  Nor is it new.  It is the bread & butter of what I learned at the University of Canterbury in the 60s from Dr Bigelow.
I enjoyed his classes and book. He taught the simple idea that the unit of evolution is the “gene pool”, not the individual carrier of the genes. Amazon

Social cooperation, which leads to the Golden Rule and what we call the highest human qualities, was demanded by what we call the lowest of human qualities: the ferocity of human enemies. Shakespeare’s two opposed foes that still encamp us therefore evolved together. They were not even two different sides of the same coin, but were as intimately interdependent as our brains and hearts are. Cooperation was not substituted for conflict. Cooperation-for-conflict, considered as a single, hyphenated word, was demanded — for sheer survival.

page 7 & 8 The Dawn Warriors.

Researching this a bit more, it is evident that Wilson is adhering closely to Darwin:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1891, Vol. I: 203; italics added).

Found that quote in an interesting paper on the history of these ideas while searching for Robert Bigelow AND Edmund O Wilson: Human Evolution and the Origin of War: a Darwinian Heritage

[A fitting post for Easter Sunday!]

Daniel Ellsberg, Jeremy Scahill, etc

Original invite to meeting follows.

http://www.nationbooks.org/events/310

It’ll be interesting to see what comes from that event – April 8, 2010 I have set this to publish on that day to remind me to look.

A World Without Nuclear Weapons
Obama’s Vision, Our Mission

with

Daniel Ellsberg, whistle-blower, nuclear expert and star of the academy-nominated documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America

Jonathan Schell, bestselling author of The Fate of the Earth and The Unconquerable World, and Nuclear Weapons Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute

Kennette Benedict, Publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Moderated by Phil Donahue

“The United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.” – President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

Join our panel of leading experts in a wide-ranging and incisive conversation on the ongoing international struggle for the containment and eventual reduction of the nuclear threat, and how President Obama and the U.S. Senate can be pushed to fulfill the promise of a world without nuclear weapons. This important public conversation is occurring in the run-up to the UN’s regular review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that will take place on May 1, 2010.

Audience questions will be taken.

DATE: April 8, 2010
LOCATION: New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York City
TIME: 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

The Oscars con game | SocialistWorker.org:

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath, high on violence, in somebody else’s country, where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

I also saw the The Green Zone. It was not as bad, but bad. Strangely it was attacked and praised for being anti-American. But it’s more subtle than that. For example, (from Wikipedia)

Andrew O’Hagan in The Evening Standard called Green Zone “one of the best war films ever made” because “it does what countless newspaper articles, memoirs, government statements and public inquiries have failed to do when it comes to the war in Iraq: exposed the terrible lies that stood behind the decision of the US and Britain to prosecute the war, and it does so in a way that is dramatically brilliant, morally complex and relentlessly thrilling.”

That is true but for anyone following the actual info coming out from the UN it was always obvious that this was a lie. Did anyone in power actually believe this? I doubt they manufactured false Intel for soldiers, that would be like believing their own lies. The movie gives more credibility to the lie than it deserves, it doth protest too much. As in Avatar, who is the hero of this invasion and its so-called expose? An American boy.

The movie (probably more so the book) Wag the Dog was right onto it, what year was that? 1997

Both these movies need to be seen on the light of such stories as this one from Donna Mulhearn – who went there as a human shield. (see later post)

I listen to Democracy Now more than any other news or current affair program. I find it gives me a better picture of the world than I can get from any NZ source. Left, not liberal, not sectarian. Amy Goodman – a hero!

I wish more people would listen to it. I found myself chatting casually about the plight of Haiti over the years because US interference and people though I was espousing conspiracy theory. Ordinary left thinking New Zealanders!

I’ll post up how I listen to Podcasts. The great thing is I walk & listen, good for my body. Good for the dog. Multitasking.

Just checked: It is based on a true story. (Make that ****)

Poster follows:

Then, the following items bring a more sane perspective:
I listened to:

Democracy Now

This daily report is so valuable, and essential listening IMO for anyone wanting to know what’s happening in the world. Just excellent journalism.

I listened to Cameron Reilly doing a useful synopsis of

Haiti’s history

Looks like he will have more Podcasts coming on this theme.

I like Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine site.

Am editing this post – Monday, 8 February, 2010 – to add this link from socialistworker.org – jus reading it makes it clear how Orwellian the neoliberal language for imperialism is: re-construction, healing, reform. Yeah Right!

The “shock doctrine” for Haiti | SocialistWorker.org:

With its intervention in Haiti, the U.S. is sending a signal to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean–where masses of people have rejected neoliberalism and elected reform socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez, who aim to tame the excesses of capitalism and pass reforms to address social needs.

and read this Pilger item:

ITV – John Pilger – The kidnapping of Haiti:

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

Full item follows

The kidnapping of Haiti

28 Jan 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the “swift and crude” appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the “relief effort” and Bill Clinton the UN’s man, The Comedians, Graham Greene’s dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind. The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training. The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration. The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the “violence” and need for “security”. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.” Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. “There’s no doubt,” reported Frei in the aftermath of America’s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, “that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power.” In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup. For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the “relief effort”: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. As president, Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops. When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy… bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”. Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes. The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, “combat anti-US governments in the region”. Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama’s next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC’s reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez’s extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler. Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

This statement from Peace Action Wellington is worth supporting. Even now. They are saying they’ll be there for 5 years. Out now, IMO! Peace Action Wellington are asking for an email so you can be added to the list. I’ve just sent one.

STATEMENT: Hands off Afghanistan! Say no to SAS return to Afghanistan

We are encouraging organisations, grassroots community groups and individuals to sign on to our anti-war statement below. If you would like to add your name, simply email us at

peacewellington@hotmail.com

Full statement from their website follows:

The redeployment of Special Air Service (SAS) troops to Afghanistan is shameful. We are opposed to New Zealand’s political and military intervention in Afghanistan. Along with the spybases at Waihopai and Tangimoana, the soldiers in Afghanistan are the New Zealand government’s main contribution to the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

In three previous deployments to Afghanistan, the SAS participated in ‘direct action missions’; this translates to combat involving the death of civilians. Only a few days ago, it was revealed that the SAS handed over 50-70 prisoners to the US military in Afghanistan. The torture of prisoners by US forces in Afghanistan is well documented. In handing over these prisoners, New Zealand may in breach of the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention against Torture which prohibit signatories such as New Zealand from transferring them to countries that torture, humiliate or degrade prisoners.

The occupation of Afghanistan is a stunning disaster for the people. After eight years of war, the country is in ruins, the people of Afghanistan are being murdered on a daily basis, and political stability is as far away as ever.

We demand the withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan and support the right to self-determination for the people of Afghanistan and their right to live in peace and a decent standard of living.

I am angry, but sad because we have the same quest for world domination (he calls it leadership), disguised by the same rhetoric about “war on terror”. The really sad thing is how the bombing in Pakistan (terrorism in its own right) is fueling the anti-American sentiment. This is a war that America can’t win. But there will be many more deaths.

Weirdly it looks as if the European nations will be forced to make at least token support for American expansion. Will this stir up an anti-war movement in Europe?

Stopping American aggression, terror, murder NOW is so important. What is the state of the international anti-imperialism movement. Sadly Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas are in the forefront. Do they need our support? I can’t find that in me, though I am able to see how their plight calls for a fight.

Is there effective opposition to American imperialism anywhere? Will it come from within the USA? In Europe? In New Zealand who has troops in Afghanistan, and a new right wing government?

There is plenty of good information & opposition, from familiar sources, can an anti-imperialism movement come out of this?

Tom Hayden on Obama’s Wars
Warning of a quagmire, with a good grasp of the gloomy facts.

The ISO, on the case for getting out of Afganistan

Pulse media has an intelligent post on Obama’s murders and illegal orders. There is an exchange in the comments worth reading as well. This is where I got the Emperor Obama title for this post.

pulsemedia.org

This is the empire we’re dealing with. On Obama’s brief watch it has already murdered Pakistani civilians. In this context, I think we should talk about the idiocy rather than the audacity of hope.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hallinan.php?articleid=13242

By any measure, a military “victory” in Afghanistan is simply not possible. The only viable alternative is to begin direct negotiations with the Taliban, and to draw in regional powers with a stake in the outcome: Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, China, and India.

But to do so will require abandoning our “story” about the Afghan conflict as a “good war.” In this new millennium, there are no good wars.

Look at this link if you have a good stomach for atrocity.

Phil Goff 2005 on why we are there – he calls it Peace keeping – sounds like double talk to me. The news today about civilian deaths.

Wikipedia summary

I was hoping to find more from the Greens. Its all a bit stale, and the upshot is that our involment is a token. there is this. And Keith Lock’s original opposition to the war in 2001. And his comments on rebellion of the New Zealand SAS make interesting reading! Here, and here.

Ok, it may be that New Zealand can keep out of the worst of it, but it is there alonside an invader. The are complicit even if the SAS has rebelled. I wonder what the deeper story is – who rebelled, what do they say now?

Scoop has a recent Govt press release.

Amnesty notes torture by US

Gwynne Dyer: Afghanistan – A war won and lost London Journalist via the New Zealand Herald – also last years, but has some analysis.

At times, Earle rightly makes no attempt at subtlety at all–as with his opposition to the coming war on Iraq. “We intended to go into Iraq before September 11, and we’re gonna go into Iraq, and that’s part of this big lie,” Earle argued in a recent interview. “Iraq had fuck all to do with September 11! John Walker Lindh had fuck all to do with September 11! It’s just scapegoating, and scapegoating is always about making somebody feel more than, by making somebody else feel less than–and that’s a really dark, dangerous, malignant thing to do.