Fear leads to anger

This is an interesting quote from the movie "A Single Man." In the movie it refers to the gay population, but I think it works equally well for any persecuted minority, whether an ethnic minority in Africa targeted for genocide, or people whose minds work a little bit differently. I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but it's not much of one.

The Nazis were obviously wrong to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause… But the cause wasnʼt real. The cause was imagined. The cause was FEAR.

Letʼs leave the Jews out of this for a moment and think of another minority. One that can go unnoticed if it needs to.

There are all sorts of minorities, blondes for example, but a minority is only thought of as one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority. A real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the FEAR. And, if the minority is somehow invisible……the fear is even greater. And this FEAR is the reason the minority is persecuted. So, there always is a cause. And the cause is FEAR. Minorities are just people. People……like us.

Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need. Think about it. Fear that weʼre going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesnʼt believe in our way of life poses a threat to us. Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips.Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships… Fear of growing old and being alone. A fear that we’re useless and no one cares what we have to say.

The power of a label

But what if brown eyed people are really (scientifically proven and by their very definition) stupid wastes of space?

Also, these were the good old days, before it was considered unethical to confront people with uncomfortable truths about themselves.

Unfit for life

A reader sent me a link to this video.  Under the title "The Bermuda Triangle of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black," a very quirky gentleman criticizes a recent paper/presentation basically advocating again for eugenics with sociopaths as a target of those branches of humanity to force into extinction:


In October of 2009, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas held at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, Dr. Julian Savulescu presented a paper entitled ‘Unfit for Life: Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction,’ which appears as a couple of videos on Vimeo (vimeo.com/7515623 and vimeo.com/7681585).

Dr. Savulescu is presently a philosophy professor at Oxford University and the Director of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics. In his paper Dr. Savulescu argues that we ought ‘to consider’ taking immediate steps to engineer better human beings, human beings who, in his words, are more “Fit,” that is, “wiser and less aggressive.” We ought to consider, he claims, genetically altering human beings in order to weed out those he categorizes as the Unfit, by which he means the psychopaths and terrorists among us, as well as the ‘freeriders, fanatics, criminals, sociopaths, and, finally, the anti-social types.’ He also argues that we humans ought to consider rethinking the idea of liberal democracy, as it facilitates the existence of the Unfit among us. 

Savulescu spends more time basing his conception of who should be considered ‘Fit’ by pointing out who should be considered Unfit—of which he provides countless examples. For instance, in his response to a question after his talk, he approvingly cites the infamous Marshmallow Experiment as an indicator of who should, and who should not be considered Fit. The Marshmallow Experiment was carried out in the US in 1972 by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. A group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and then promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Approximately 30% of the children could wait, while the other 70% could not. Mischel’s research team then followed the personality development of each child into adolescence and claimed to demonstrate that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted, more dependable and smarter, that is, socially “fitter,” especially according to their parents.

Our fate

From the blog of the Lexington correspondent of the Economist.

THE other striking Supreme Court ruling yesterday concerned sex criminals. The court said the federal government could detain them indefinitely, even after their sentences end, if they are determined to be sexually dangerous.

Much of the debate turned on whether the power to detain such people properly belongs to the federal government, or to the states. Justice Clarence Thomas predictably says that Washington is over-stepping its enumerated powers.

Perhaps so. But I think the most important question is how the system will actually work. The government is claiming the power to imprison people forever, not for crimes they have been convicted of, but for crimes they might commit in the future. That's an extraordinary power. It's similar to the power both the Bush and Obama administrations claim to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely because, although there is not enough evidence to convict them in a court of law, we know they will re-join al-Qaeda if we let them go.

Neither problem is easy. But with the sex offenders, we could be looking at a much, much larger group of people. The lead petitioner in yesterday's case, Graydon Comstock, was convicted of buying child pornography and sentenced to 37 months in prison. Less than a week before he was due to be released, Alberto Gonzales (then the attorney general) declared him to be sexually dangerous.

That is, the government asserts that he:

(1) has previously "engaged or attempted to engage in sexually violent conduct or child molestation," (2) currently "suffers from a serious mental illness, abnormality, or disorder," and (3) "as a result of" that mental illness, abnormality, or disorder is "sexually dangerous to others," in that "he would have serious difficulty in refraining from sexually violent conduct or child molestation if released."

The thing is, he doesn't have to have been convicted of a sexually violent offence, or of child molestation. The standard of proof for holding Mr Comstock for the rest of his life is "clear and convincing". That is less rigorous than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard you'd need to establish to send me to jail for a few months for picking someone's pocket.

Will this kind of preventive detention be applied sparingly? Will there be adequate safeguards to prevent abuse? I have my doubts. There are more than 600,000 people on sex-offender registries in America, probably most of whom are not dangerous. Given the immense political pressure to keep our children safe, I worry that giving someone like Alberto Gonzales the power to hold people forever for crimes they have not yet committed is asking for trouble.

Sociopaths = next Holocaust target

I posted earlier this month about a new television show exploiting criminals by giving them the best day ever right before arresting them. The TV executive responsible for the show rationalized the exploitation: “If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law.” This sort of rationale is used frequently to justify persecuting sociopaths or other unpopular sub-populations. Take for instance the justifications for the horrible medical experiments practiced by the Nazis on their Jewish captives:

What underpinned this behaviour was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy - or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing - indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it. After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well?

These days, it is obvious that racial hygiene is pseudoscience, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was considered a perfectly reputable science, and indeed many universities had academic departments devoted to it, not just in Germany. Against this backdrop, with their nation engaged in total war and steeped in propaganda and ideology that proclaimed the Jews to be a "cancer" or an "infection" threatening the health of the volk, physicians and scientists really did come to believe that the enemies of the Nazi state were subhuman.

Does the term subhuman sound familiar?

Sociopath TV execs exploit their sociopath criminal brothers

Fox Television is planning a new television program tentatively titled, Smile, You’re Under Arrest. The show features law officers setting up elaborate sting operations to lure criminals with warrants:

“It is a reverse Punk’d,” says Fox President of Alternative Entertainment Mike Darnell. “Instead of the worst day of your life and then a joke at the end, this is the reverse. This is the best day of your life, and then we arrest you.”

One of three set-ups just shot in Arizona features the cops luring a criminal to a movie set with the promise of making him an extra and paying him a couple hundred dollars. An elaborate film set is staged and filming begins on a faux movie. The set-up continues as the director then gets mad at the lead actor, fires him and replaces him with the law-breaking extra.

The scene escalates with the fake director introducing the mark to a supposed studio mogul and continuing to create this dream-comes-true sequence. Finally, all the participants are revealed as officers of the law, and the criminal is apprehended (before signing waivers to let the footage be used in the show).

Other scenarios include a fake fashion shoot where the subject thinks he is about to become a supermodel and another in which the mark becomes an auto racer, a set-up which ends when a police car comes up behind him on a race track to pull him over.

“If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law,” Darnell says.

This is why people feel fine persecuting sociopaths. You can just hear someone justifying sociopath abuse: "If it were a regular person, you'd feel bad for them."