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Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude

Each spring term since 2008, Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard E. Gardner and Pforzheimer professor of teaching and learning Richard J. Light—in cooperation with the Freshman Dean’s Office and a group of facilitators—have offered “Reflecting on Your Life.” These voluntary discussions, made available to all first-year undergraduates, provide an opportunity to discuss ways to make life choices and to think about values. Last spring, Nannerl Keohane—a scholar of political theory, the past president of Wellesley College and of Duke University, and a member of the Harvard Corporation—met with a group of discussion leaders and students. She asked them to prepare for their conversation by reading “Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude,” remarks she had earlier shared with students at Stanford. This text, adapted from those remarks, bears generally on the aims of a liberal-arts education, at the outset of a new year for the entire University community, and particularly for entering members of the class of 2017.

Self-fashioning is part of the age-old purpose of higher education, particularly in the liberal arts and sciences. The key point is to be aware, sometimes, that this is happening—to deliberately engage in fashioning—not just let events and experiences sweep you along without your conscious participation.

Richard Brodhead expressed this well in his speech to the entering class as dean of Yale College in 1995: “You’ve come to one of the great fresh starts in your life, one of the few chances your life will offer to step away from the person you’ve been taken for and decide anew what you would like to become.” In this mood, students typically see college as a place where a new stage of life’s journey begins. “Incipit Vita Nova” was one motto of my alma mater, Wellesley, and it surely seemed appropriate at the time.

You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change.

by Nannerl O. Keohane, Harvard Magazine |  Read more:

Illustration: Dan Williams

Afghanistan in 1967

In 1967, Professor William Podlich (Arizona State University) took a sabbatical for two years to teach in the College of Teachers in Kabul as part of a collaboration with UNESCO. Besides his teaching activities, Podlich was a prolific photographer, and documented extensively everyday life. For the record, we are a decade before the Soviet invasion (1979).

Back to school for Afghan girls. They were also educated than boys. While in uniform, they were not allowed to wear the burqa to go to school.

Text translated from the original French at Curiosités de Titam. Galleries of the original photos are at this link. Note the Paghman Gardens photo location looks a bit different today...

[ed. h/t TYWKIWDBI]

The Hunt

What happens when someone accuses you of something you simply can't disprove, something that will ruin and condemn you the rest of your life- whether guilty or innocent.

Review: Seattle Weekly

[ed.h/t Reciprocity Failure]

Life and Death: Part 2

Darryl Kelly lives in the Bronx and has never spent a night outside New York City. Harry Shunk had photographs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and he worked with some of the great artists of the late 20th century. Mr. Kelly is a cleanup man. Mr. Shunk was a recluse and a compulsive hoarder.

Their fates crossed in 2006 under the worst of circumstances: in Mr. Shunk’s West Village apartment, where his body had decomposed for about 10 days before it was found, upside down and trapped by stacks of his accumulated possessions, with only his ankles and his feet visible.

The cleanup specialist and the hoarder — yin and yang of New York’s real estate ecology. Now, the death of one may be a fresh start for the other. (...)

When Mr. Shunk died in June 2006, there was no money for a proper burial, said Evelyne Chemouny, a former social worker at Westbeth. Mr. Kender also died in poverty, in 2009. No major American newspaper appears to have acknowledged either man’s death.

But there was stuff. The building staff had to remove the door from its hinges to get into the apartment because there was too much stuff inside to push it open. Mr. Shunk died without a will or known relatives, so the Manhattan public administrator took control of his estate. For about a week, a team of investigators removed whatever it deemed valuable. Two years later, at auction, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the bulk of Mr. Shunk’s archive, about 200,000 photographs and other items, valued at $2 million.

Mr. Russas called Mr. Kelly to haul off the rest.

“It was almost like an archaeological dig,” Mr. Russas said.

For a week, Mr. Kelly and his team removed items through a first-floor window, filling seven Dumpsters.

There were papers and portfolios, books and newspapers and boxes of meticulously rolled tube socks. As they threw things out, they noticed people grabbing them from the Dumpster.

On the last day, Mr. Kelly said, as he started to drive away, “I said, ‘Greg, back this truck up.’ ” He said they would have to be “stupid” not to take something. They grabbed what they could, about 2,000 items in all, and stored them in a closet in Mr. Kelly’s apartment, never really looking at what they had.

There the items sat, to the consternation of Mr. Kelly’s wife, he said. “She said: ‘Would you please get that stuff out of my house? It’s worthless.’ ”

by John Leland, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Life and Death: Part 1

[ed. The Kansas City Star reported that former Sports statistics editor and blogger Martin Manley was found dead in the parking lot of the Overland Park police station on August 15, 2013. The day his body was found, this web site went up, explaining in extensive detail the reasons for his suicide (and providing a eulogy of sorts with his full life story.]

I know the question you are asking. "Why did you want to die? ... or Why didn't you want to live?" Here is the answer. I didn't want to die. If I could have waved a magic wand and lived for 200 years, I would have. Unfortunately, that's not an option. Therefore, since death is inevitable, the better question is... do I want to live as long as humanly possible OR do I want to control the time and manner and circumstances of my death? That was my choice (and yours). I chose what was most appealing to me. (...)

I wish there were a different word for "suicide" because that word has become so stigmatized. But, whether I said “suicide” or “taking my life” or “ending my life” or "beginning my death" or whatever… it still amounts to the same thing.

You will rarely get any details for why a person committed suicide, but that won't be the case with me! In fact, this may be the most detailed example of a suicide letter in history - something to be entered into the Guinness Book of Records! My hope is that it is. (...)

I decided I wanted to have one of the most organized good-byes in recorded history and I think I will be successful. The key has always been to do it before it becomes impossible to accomplish what I’m doing now – because then it’s too late and I would simply be along for the ride to the inevitable cliff. And, that has always been an unacceptable conclusion to my life. I became convinced that had I waited even another few years, I would never have been able to produce this site.

by Martin Manley, My Life and Death |  Read more:

Image: Kansas City Star

James P. Blair, Sun City, Arizona.
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Should We Be Embracing Golf Carts as a Cheaper Alternative to Electric Vehicles?

[ed. This makes a lot of sense to me. We already have bicycles and scooters, why not golf carts? Secondary road use only -- no primary thoroughfares -- neighborhood roads, connecting sidestreets, parks? I think a lot of older folks would welcome this option (me included, since I could use one for the golf course, too.]

If you live in Kentucky, you may have noticed lately that a fair number of golf carts have strayed quite a bit from the course. These aren't poor golfers looking for an errant shot — at least, not exclusively. The Associated Press reports that multiple Kentucky municipalities have recently passed or are actively considering laws allowing golf carts on city streets.

The trend began back in 2008, when the state legislature awarded local governments the right to award golf carts the right to certain public roads. Initially there was a provision keeping the carts within 5 miles of a golf course, but that restriction was dropped in 2010. Now the permissible area has expanded to any road with a speed-limit of 35 miles per hour.

Kentucky is not exactly in uncharted waters here. In 1998, responding to growing concerns about golf carts on roads, the federal government created safety standards for a new class of vehicles called "low-speed vehicles." Those rules required LSVs to have basic safety equipment like headlights and seatbelts. (Oddly enough, the standards didn't apply to golf carts, since most didn't travel 20-25 m.p.h.)

Still, states had the final say where LSVs could go. While the initial idea was for this new class of vehicles to make a short trip into town, traveling primarily around communities (especially retirement communities) properly planned for LSV traffic, today all but four states allow LSVs to mix with traffic on regular roads — with relatively few restrictions: (...)

So why are so many people in Kentucky cities — and beyond — risking personal safety by cruising regular roads in golf carts and their kind? Well the simplest answer is money: the AP reports that Kentuckians have turned to golf carts as a way to avoid rising gas prices. But if that's the case, then why aren't these same people just buying full-sized electric vehicles?

by Eric Jaffe, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

A Picky Eater's Lament

The guy in the flannel shirt really wanted me to eat his crab. “Have a claw!” he said, waving a steaming pincer in my face with a two-foot pair of metal tongs. “No, thanks. I’m good. You go ahead,” I said. Really, it’s all yours. Take the claw. It’s the best part.” “No, seriously. I don’t want it.”

Something embarrassing was about to happen. I knew because I’d suffered through this gastronomic showdown a million times, from Paris to Paducah, and it always ends the same way. I turn down food I don’t want to eat. At best I offend somebody. At worst I make a new un-friend.

The crab pusher came at me last summer at a beach party in Gustavus, Alaska, a little town on the fringes of Glacier Bay National Park. An easy scene to visualize: Golden sun shining off the water. Friendly locals. Cans of Rainier on ice. Alaskan king crab pulled from the frigid Pacific just hours earlier, now boiling in a giant kettle. A big-hearted fisherman rattling his tongs in the pot, working through the steam, pulling out my prize.

“Have a claw!”

After my third refusal, the cheery offer started to sound more like a prison warden’s order to get back in line. The fisherman’s expression said, I am the executor of your once-in-a-lifetime experience. So take the goddamn claw and we’ll both walk away happy.

Now here it was, the inevitable moment when the personal capital I’d accrued was about to get squandered with a single confession: I don’t eat crab. I don’t care how much butter and garlic you soak it in, that sea spider’s gnarled clamper is not coming anywhere near my mouth.

“Don’t eat crab?” His mariner eyes narrowed. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Any seafood, actually,” I said. “I don’t eat fish. Period.”

Being a picky eater is more than a simple nuisance or emasculating badge of shame. For someone like me, who has spent most of his adult life as an international traveler in search of adventure and work, it’s a flaw that has ruined dinner parties, derailed relationships, and led to countless hungry nights.

by Chuck Thompson, Outside |  Read more:

Image: Grant Cornett

Azechi Umetaro, Talking with a Bird. 1965
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Join PRSM, the Most Social Network

Introducing a brand new way to share everything.

[ed. h/t Boing Boing]

Yiqing- Yin Couture F/W 2012
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Darin Mickey
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Fleeced: The Worst Deals in Tech

The coolest running shoes at the Nike store this year are the Nike Air Max+ 2013. They retail for $180, but when you break down the costs for the materials and the manufacturing and labor at the Chinese factory where the shoes are made, you’re looking at a product that costs less than $10 a pop. The remaining $170 covers marketing (to make you believe the shoes are worth the premium price) and a handsome profit for Nike. The company reports revenues of about $25 billion a year.

It works the same way for many products in the tech world. As gadget enthusiasts, we accept the idea that products are worth what we’re willing to pay for them, and not what they cost in terms of product development, manufacturing, and materials. Nonetheless, it’s time to name names. Here are some of most egregiously high profit margins in the world of consumer tech.

Text Messages

Average cost: $0.20 per text

Average cost to provide: virtually nothing

The cost of text messages often gets a bad rap, and for good reason. Our tiny missives—160 bytes in size, at most—typically cost us 20 cents each to send and receive (assuming you don’t have a text messaging plan or haven’t gone over your limit). They cost essentially nothing to deliver, however, making the markup for an SMS message essentially infinite.

Here’s the deal: Wireless carriers must send packets of signaling data within the wireless network to set up calls and to signal the locations of devices in relation to cell towers. Back in the mid-1980s, a very clever engineer figured out that we could use the same signaling channel to send short messages during times when real signaling information wasn’t being sent. Thus text messaging was born. Because the carrier has to maintain the signaling channel anyway, the text messages cost the carrier essentially nothing to convey. So the money the carrier charges for them is pure profit. Ka-ching.

Nonetheless, the price the customer pays for each text message has been rising, from 10 cents in 2005 to the standard 20 cents today. And despite price-fixing allegations and lawsuits aplenty, there doesn’t seem to be any chance that prices will drop in the near future. (TechCrunch calculated the cost for the user of texting on a per-megabyte basis at a whopping $1310 per megabyte.) Alternatives, thankfully, are widely available through services like iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook, and many other systems that use your data service, not the signaling packets, to send messages.

Asked to justify the cost of text messaging, the CTIA, the wireless carriers’ trade group, told TechHive, “Due to antitrust reasons, we cannot comment on prices. However, U.S. consumers have a variety of options to choose from, including unlimited text message plans.”

by Christopher Null, Tech Hive |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Beyond Blame

In an article published shortly before his death, the political scientist James Q. Wilson took on the large question of free will and moral responsibility:

Does the fact that biology determines more of our thinking and conduct than we had previously imagined undermine the notion of free will? And does this possibility in turn undermine, if not entirely destroy, our ability to hold people accountable for their actions?

Wilson’s answer was an unequivocal no.

He has lots of company, which should come as a surprise given what scientific research into the determinants of human behavior has told us over the past four decades. Most of that research, as Wilson says, points to the same conclusion: our worldviews, aspirations, temperaments, conduct, and achievements—everything we conventionally think of as “us”—are in significant part determined by accidents of biology and circumstance. The study of the brain is in its infancy; as it advances, the evidence for determinism will surely grow.

One might have expected those developments to temper enthusiasm for blame mongering. Instead, the same four decades have been boom years for blame.

Retributive penal policy, which has produced incarceration rates of unprecedented proportions in the United States, has been at the forefront of the boom. But enthusiasm for blame is not confined to punishment. Changes in public policy more broadly—the slow dismantling of the social safety net, the push to privatize social security, the deregulation of banking, the health care wars, the refusal to bail out homeowners in the wake of the 2008 housing meltdown—have all been fueled by our collective sense that if things go badly for you, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. Mortgage under water? You should have thought harder about whether you could really afford that house before you bought it. Trouble paying back your college loans? You should have looked more carefully at job prospects for sociology majors before you took out the loans. Unless of course “you” are “me,” in which case the situation tends to look a bit more complicated. (...)

In the philosophical literature, arguments in praise of blame divide into two categories, distinguished according to whether free will is regarded as compatible with determinism. Compatibilists—as the name suggests—think the answer is yes: provided certain minimal conditions of voluntariness are met (you must not have been physically coerced into acting as you did, you must have the mental capacity to comprehend your actions, etc.), your actions are freely chosen, notwithstanding that they are predetermined. Incompatibilists think the answer is no: if a person’s actions are determined by antecedent conditions, such actions are not freely chosen.

Some incompatibilists, concluding that our actions are in fact predetermined, are reluctant to assign personal responsibility and blame. I will return to these “skeptical incompatibilists” later on. The category I want to focus on now are libertarian incompatibilists. Like skeptical incompatibilists, they believe that free will is incompatible with determinism. But they arelibertarian incompatibilists because they reject determinism in favor of the view that we freely choose our actions. And, having stipulated that we are blameworthy if and only if we freely choose our actions, they conclude that we are blameworthy.

But what is the requisite sense of free will—of our actions not being determined by antecedent conditions—that makes someone blameworthy? And do we in fact have free will in that sense?

For the metaphysician, the theoretical possibility that one could have acted otherwise in some alternative world may suffice to establish free will. But if the question is whether we should hold a real-life Smith blameworthy in this world, one would think that the requisite sort of free will is not metaphysical but practical: When all is said and done, how plausible is it to think that Smithcould have acted differently?

To take an all too frequent scenario, suppose that Smith grew up in a neighborhood where drug dealing was the most common form of gainful employment. He was raised by a single mother who was a cocaine addict, and by the time he was twelve was supporting his family by selling drugs. When he was seventeen, he got caught up in a drug deal gone bad, and in the altercation that ensued, he shot and killed the buyer.

How should we think about Smith’s level of moral responsibility? Is there some magical moment at which Smith was transformed from the victim of his circumstances to the author of his own story? If so, when was it? What can we realistically expect of someone who finds himself in Smith’s circumstances with Smith’s history and biological endowments? And what is to be gained—and what lost—by adopting social policies that expect more? Given the high stakes of public blame these days, one might hope that libertarian incompatibilists would take these questions seriously. But most have simply assumed that whatever kind and degree of freedom is required for moral responsibility, all of us, except for a small class of “abnormal” people, have it once we reach seventeen years of age.

The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways?

Libertarian incompatibilism, in short, hangs profoundly consequential judgments on the insubstantial hook of an abstract possibility.

by Barbara H. Fried, Boston Review | Read more:

Image: Nelson Vargas

Erik Streufert, Mirror Lakes
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Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus

[ed. One of the best jazz albums in my collection.]

When I visited Sonny Rollins at his home in Germantown, New York, a semi-hardscrabble hamlet 100 miles up the Hudson River, the 82-year-old jazzman they call the Saxophone Colossus was doing his laundry. "Oh, man, come on in, man," Sonny said in his reedy, slightly high-pitched voice as he stuck his head out the back door of the modest house, blood-orange skullcap on his kingly, lantern-jawed head. Jumble of shirts fresh from the dryer in his arms, he led me through the cluttered kitchen to a sitting room. "Be with you in a minute," he said with a sigh.

For Sonny, certainly one of the greatest tenor-saxophone players in the history of the instrument invented by Adolphe Sax in 1841, and a key figure in jazz for more than half a century, it is a drag any time "the celestial Big Picture" is infringed upon by "the Little Picture," which the musician defines as "that day-to-day crap you have to put up with on this misbegotten planet."

Doing the laundry, while necessary, was definitely in the latter category. But the entire past few weeks had been a hassle, Sonny said. He was booked to leave on a European tour with gigs in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and "some other burgs." There would be arrangements, flights, hotels to stay in. Not that all that hadn't happened before, hundreds of times. The new thing was "the move," Rollins' then in-progress relocation across the Hudson River to a larger house near Woodstock. After living in Germantown for four decades, the last nine years by himself since the death of his wife and manager, Lucille Rollins, the shift was proving more problematic than the jazzman had expected. There was always one more box to pack, one more real estate agent to talk to. Plus, telemarketers kept ringing on the phone, the very sound of which caused Sonny to summon his innermost Buddha Nature, lest he fly off the handle. The whole thing was giving him "psychological claustrophobia," Sonny said.

Once upon a very storied time, growing up on Harlem's Sugar Hill during the 1930s and '40s, a relatively well-off son of a West Indian-born Navy chief petty officer, Sonny felt like he had all the time in the world. Already a self-taught neighborhood prodigy at 17, well-versed in the ample brawniness of his great idol Coleman Hawkins and the ethereal stylings of Lester Young, he'd go over to Minton's Playhouse or the Club Baron on Lenox Avenue, where people like Fats Waller or Thelonious Monk might be playing. Then he'd take the train downtown to 52nd Street, the famous jazz thoroughfare, and sit at the bar at Birdland, where he'd often be invited to share the bandstand with bebop immortals like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis.

"That was my life back then – I thought it would always go on like that, never change," Sonny said. Now, on "the wrong side of 81," he could feel the metronome inside his head ticking away, each instant too precious to be squandered on the puny minutiae of the day-to-day.

For instance, only that week he'd spent nearly the entire morning down in the Big Apple, making an episode of The Simpsons. Sonny played a holographic image of himself that hovers, godlike, outside the bedroom window of perhaps his best-known mainstream musical disciple, Lisa Simpson. Sonny had three lines, which he dutifully repeated over and over again, coached by a voice on a speakerphone originating 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Later, Sonny said that taking all morning to produce a hologram visible only to a TV cartoon character was "kind of strange," especially for someone who'd managed to cut albums like Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus in a few short hours on a two-track machine located in Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack, New Jersey, studio.

"Technology, man," Sonny said with a shrug. "All this little stuff interrupts my chain of thought. Consequently, I haven't been able to properly practice my horn the way I have to," he said, emerging from the laundry room in a loose-fitting khaki shirt, a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, and thick white socks stuffed into open-toe leather slippers. "If I don't get to practice, work on my embouchure and scales, then I can't play correctly, and if I can't play correctly, I can't work out my ideas, and if I can't work out my ideas, then I go crazy."

Sonny reached over and tapped the hard-shell case of the instrument resting on the table at his right. In there was the gold Selmer Mark VI with the Otto Link mouthpiece that he's played almost exclusively since the mid-1970s. "My second wife," he said, regarding the ax. "I don't sleep with it in bed. But I don't let it out of my sight." (...)

Up in Germantown that day, this was the basis for the urgency he felt, why the intrusion of "the Little Picture" was such an imposition. He was 82 – even if he kept doing yoga every day and kept his mind straight, no one lived forever. The physical body was a fleeting thing. It was impossible to ignore the decay. At a recent show in Detroit, Sonny couldn't play the way he wanted because his teeth were bothering him. A few days later in San Francisco, he had a cold, again keeping him from achieving what he set out to do.

"I don't know if the audience noticed. But I did," Sonny reported. "Others might say, 'Poor old guy; he's doing his best.' But I can't cut myself that slack."

Soon there would be more unsettling news. A few weeks after my visit, Sonny was diagnosed as experiencing what he called "some pulmonary distress." It was suggested he stop playing for a while, which caused him to cancel some gigs, which he absolutely hates to do. In a way it made sense. After all, there weren't many human beings who have ever blown for as long and as hard as Sonny Rollins. In jazz there was Wayne Shorter, 80 this year, and the 86-year-old Jimmy Heath. Both of those guys were great musicians, Sonny allowed, but neither of them blew with "my velocity." He joked about perhaps donating his lungs to medical science: "Sonny Rollins' lungs, the most blown lungs in jazz." Still, retaining his customary long view, Sonny chose to remain upbeat. Certainly it was hard to leave his horn in the case, but things happened, and then you lived through them. Soon he'd be back. This was just a bump in the road.

The drive he felt, the desperate need to get better, was no less at 82 than when he went up on the Williamsburg Bridge, Sonny said. "You see, I'm going toward this breakthrough, this piece of music that is going to explain it all to me," he declared. It could be a single note or new composition, but it was there, Sonny knew, inside of him. When he played the music, "it will matter," he said.

"You mean, like you're going to play this music and the rivers are suddenly going to run backward?" I asked, trying to be funny. After all, he was already perhaps the greatest single improviser in the history of jazz. No one had his emotional range, the ability to one moment be riffing like a musical stand-up comedian and then, abruptly, be tearing your heart out with the abject blues of the human condition. What about that fabulous opening to Monk's "Misterioso"? How about that spectacular ending to "God Bless the Child"?

This made Sonny laugh. When Sonny laughs, you know it. He bends his neck back nearly 45 degrees, casts his eyes skyward, and his mouth becomes a widening circle. Ha-ha-ha, he goes, loudly, like howling at the moon, albeit with perfect breath control.

"Don't you see, that's exactly the point," Sonny chortled as he clamped his skullcap onto to his head. "Those notes you mention, those notes have already been blown."

by Marc Jacobson, Men's Journal |  Read more:

Image: Martin Scholler

Michael Schmidt
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Bradley Manning and the Two Americas

Somewhere in the Iraqi desert in 2009 in the middle of a flailing war, a soldier committed a seemingly small crime. Private Bradley Manning didn’t kill anyone, or rape anyone, but by nabbing information from his commanders and giving it to WikiLeaks, he lit up the world, like a match discarded into a great parched forest.

Bored and depressed by army life, Manning started hanging out on the WikiLeaks IRC channel with its controversial founder, Julian Assange. It began as a simple act of communication no different in most respects from millions of casual chats that meander daily through uncounted online forums. Manning would occasionally get into conversations and debates, which he would say nourished him in a court statement years later. “[They] allowed me to feel connected to others even when alone. They helped me pass the time and keep motivated throughout the deployment.”

Manning described the WikiLeaks IRC channel as “almost academic in nature,” and Assange, years after the channel had vanished, agreed: “… the public IRC channel was filled with technical, academic, and geopolitical analysis, with many interesting people from different countries.” Assange said it wasn’t unusual for the channel to be visited by soldiers, like Manning.

The soldiers used WikiLeaks in the course of their work. “I had produced a logistics guide to understanding the U.S. military equipment purchasing system, which the Pentagon linked to in order to explain how their byzantine equipment numbering system worked,” said Assange. “We would often get soldiers coming in from far flung outposts asking us how to order a new tread for their tank.” It was easier, it seemed, to use WikiLeaks than the army’s own information services.

In the days before WikiLeaks was directly in conflict with the U.S. government, Assange seemed to have enjoyed the military company in the channel.

In short: Geeks. Not far from being Assange’s people. Years later, sitting on the stand in military court, Manning would echo this in his statement, saying that he’d used WikiLeaks material in his analysis reports to his superiors.

As long as WikiLeaks focused on African dictators and corrupt foreign bankers, everyone could pretend that a secrets-destroying project and America could get along. But America is a country run with secrets, and confrontation was only a matter of time. (...)

From the start, the American government’s response to what Manning did was extreme. Manning was brutally treated from the moment he was arrested. He was put in a cage in Kuwait, before being put into solitary and subjected to punitive measures in the Quantico Marine brig. After months in limbo, he was charged with 22 counts, including Aiding the Enemy, a euphemism for treason. This is a charge reserved specifically for spies who side with the enemies of the military, and among the worst charges a soldier can face. When Manning pled guilty to 10 of 22 charges in February, Aiding the Enemy was not among them. Ultimately, this was one of the two charges he was found not guilty of when the verdict was finally read. He now faces 90 years in prison at a sentencing hearing expected this week, three years after his arrest.

“People are scared or angry about WikiLeaks, and Bradley Manning is going to pay for people’s anxiety about WikiLeaks,” said Steve Aftergood, Director of the Federation of American Scientists project on Government Secrecy.

That anxiety, and an even larger bewilderment about the Internet has led to the diminutive and clever Manning being demonized and canonized at every turn. He’s been made out to be a pawn of Assange, a disturbed child, a latter-day Ellsberg, a depraved homosexual, the Internet’s greatest hero, a spark of the Arab Spring, and by his own government, a traitor. Beneath this weight of history is just a young geek, perhaps most remarkable for how normal he is.

“There are real questions about proportionality in this case,” said Aftergood. “I think Manning did something wrong, but do I think he’s the worst criminal in the past 10 years of war? He did not kill anybody. He violated security discipline and he has acknowledged that. It is proper that he be punished. But why is he the only name we know that’s being court-marshaled?”

by Quinn Norton, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Patrick Semansky / AP via: LA Times