[ed. Taking a short break. Enjoy the archives.] [We're back. Thanks, Max.]
Saturday, January 2, 2016
Friday, January 1, 2016
What Was Volkswagen Thinking?
One day in 1979, James Burke, the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson, summoned more than 20 of his key people into a room, jabbed his finger at an internal document, and proposed destroying it.
The document was hardly incriminating. Entitled “Our Credo,” its plainspoken list of principles—including a higher duty to “mothers, and all others who use our products”—had been a fixture on company walls since 1943. But Burke was worried that managers had come to regard it as something like the Magna Carta: an important historical document, but hardly a tool for modern decision making. “If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall,” Burke told the group, using the weight of his office to force a debate. And that is what he got: a room full of managers debating the role of moral duties in daily business, and then choosing to resuscitate the credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson & Johnson’s reaction became the gold standard of corporate crisis response. But the company’s swift decisions—to remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, publicly warn people not to consume its product, and take a $100 million loss—weren’t really decisions. They flowed more or less automatically from the signal sent three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on a plane when news of the poisoning broke. By the time he landed, employees were already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.
On the face of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find an episode less salient to the emissions-cheating scandal at Volkswagen—a company that, by contrast, seems intent on poisoning its own product, name, and future. But although the details behind VW’s installation of “defeat devices” in its vehicles are only beginning to trickle out, the decision process is very likely to resemble a bizarro version of Johnson & Johnson’s, with opposite choices every step of the way.
The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merelyacting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”The O-ring engineers were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it.
What, Gioia the professor belatedly asked, had Gioia the auto executive been thinking? The best answer, he concluded, is that he hadn’t been. Executives are bombarded with information. To ease the cognitive load, they rely on a set of unwritten scripts imported from the organization around them. You could even define corporate culture as a collection of scripts. Scripts are undoubtedly efficient. Managers don’t have to muddle through each new problem afresh, Gioia wrote, because “the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance.” But therein lies the danger. Scripts can be flawed, and grow more so over time, yet they discourage active analysis. Based on the information Gioia had at the time, the Pinto didn’t fit the criteria for recall that his team had already agreed upon (a clearly documentable pattern of failure of a specific part). No further thought necessary.
Sometimes a jarring piece of evidence does intrude, forcing a conscious reassessment. For Gioia, it was the moment he saw the charred hulk of a Pinto at a company depot known internally as “The Chamber of Horrors.” The revulsion it evoked gave him pause. He called a meeting. But nothing changed. “After the usual round of discussion about criteria and justification for recall, everyone voted against recommending recall—including me.”
The most troubling thing, says Vaughan, is the way scripts “expand like an elastic waistband” to accommodate more and more divergence. Morton-Thiokol, the NASA contractor charged with engineering the O-rings, requested a teleconference on the eve of the fatal Challenger launch. After a previous launch, its engineers had noticed O-ring damage that looked different from damage they’d seen before. Suspecting that cold was a factor, the engineers saw the near-freezing forecast and made a “no launch” recommendation—something they had never done before. But the data they faxed to NASA to buttress their case were the same data they had earlier used to argue that the space shuttle was safe to fly. NASA pounced on the inconsistency. Embarrassed and unable to overturn the script they themselves had built in the preceding years, Morton-Thiokol’s brass buckled. The “no launch” recommendation was reversed to “launch.”
“It’s like losing your virginity,” a NASA teleconference participant later told Vaughan. “Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.” If you try, you face a credibility spiral: Were you lying then or are you lying now?
The document was hardly incriminating. Entitled “Our Credo,” its plainspoken list of principles—including a higher duty to “mothers, and all others who use our products”—had been a fixture on company walls since 1943. But Burke was worried that managers had come to regard it as something like the Magna Carta: an important historical document, but hardly a tool for modern decision making. “If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall,” Burke told the group, using the weight of his office to force a debate. And that is what he got: a room full of managers debating the role of moral duties in daily business, and then choosing to resuscitate the credo as a living document.
Three years later, after reports emerged of a deadly poisoning of Tylenol capsules in Chicago-area stores, Johnson & Johnson’s reaction became the gold standard of corporate crisis response. But the company’s swift decisions—to remove every bottle of Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, publicly warn people not to consume its product, and take a $100 million loss—weren’t really decisions. They flowed more or less automatically from the signal sent three years earlier. Burke, in fact, was on a plane when news of the poisoning broke. By the time he landed, employees were already ordering Tylenol off store shelves.On the face of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find an episode less salient to the emissions-cheating scandal at Volkswagen—a company that, by contrast, seems intent on poisoning its own product, name, and future. But although the details behind VW’s installation of “defeat devices” in its vehicles are only beginning to trickle out, the decision process is very likely to resemble a bizarro version of Johnson & Johnson’s, with opposite choices every step of the way.
The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merelyacting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.
If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”The O-ring engineers were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it.
What, Gioia the professor belatedly asked, had Gioia the auto executive been thinking? The best answer, he concluded, is that he hadn’t been. Executives are bombarded with information. To ease the cognitive load, they rely on a set of unwritten scripts imported from the organization around them. You could even define corporate culture as a collection of scripts. Scripts are undoubtedly efficient. Managers don’t have to muddle through each new problem afresh, Gioia wrote, because “the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance.” But therein lies the danger. Scripts can be flawed, and grow more so over time, yet they discourage active analysis. Based on the information Gioia had at the time, the Pinto didn’t fit the criteria for recall that his team had already agreed upon (a clearly documentable pattern of failure of a specific part). No further thought necessary.
Sometimes a jarring piece of evidence does intrude, forcing a conscious reassessment. For Gioia, it was the moment he saw the charred hulk of a Pinto at a company depot known internally as “The Chamber of Horrors.” The revulsion it evoked gave him pause. He called a meeting. But nothing changed. “After the usual round of discussion about criteria and justification for recall, everyone voted against recommending recall—including me.”
The most troubling thing, says Vaughan, is the way scripts “expand like an elastic waistband” to accommodate more and more divergence. Morton-Thiokol, the NASA contractor charged with engineering the O-rings, requested a teleconference on the eve of the fatal Challenger launch. After a previous launch, its engineers had noticed O-ring damage that looked different from damage they’d seen before. Suspecting that cold was a factor, the engineers saw the near-freezing forecast and made a “no launch” recommendation—something they had never done before. But the data they faxed to NASA to buttress their case were the same data they had earlier used to argue that the space shuttle was safe to fly. NASA pounced on the inconsistency. Embarrassed and unable to overturn the script they themselves had built in the preceding years, Morton-Thiokol’s brass buckled. The “no launch” recommendation was reversed to “launch.”
“It’s like losing your virginity,” a NASA teleconference participant later told Vaughan. “Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.” If you try, you face a credibility spiral: Were you lying then or are you lying now?
by Jerry Useem, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Renteria
Eating ‘Healthy-ish’
Abstinence, we are usually told around this time of year, makes the heart grow stronger. It’s why Dry January, which started in the green and pleasantly alcoholic land of Britain a few years ago before reaching the U.S., is increasingly being touted as a good and worthy thing to do, and why so many people are currently making plans to remove whole food groups from their diet: carbs, fat, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. The key to health, books and websites and dietitians and former presidents reveal, is a process of elimination. It’s going without. It’s getting through the darkest, coldest month of the year without so much as a snifter of antioxidant-rich Cabernet.
The problem with giving things up, though, is that inevitably it creates a void in one’s diet that only Reese’s pieces and a family-sized wheel of brie can fill. Then there’s the fact that so many abstinence-espousing programs require spending money on things; on Whole 30 cookbooks and Weight Watchers memberships and $10 bottles of bone broth. For a process that supposedly involves cutting things out, there seems to be an awful lot to take in.
This, Michael Pollan posits, is the problem with food: It’s gotten extraordinarily complicated. The writer and sustainable-eating advocate has written several books on how the simple business of eating has become a minefield in which earnest Westerners try to tiptoe around gooey, genetically engineered sugar bombs without setting off an explosion of calories, corn sugar, and cancer. In Defense of Food, published in 2008, offers a “manifesto” for eaters (i.e. humans) that’s breathtaking in its seven-word simplicity: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. This mantra is repeated once more in a documentary based on the book that airs Wednesday night on PBS, and it’s felt in the January issue of Bon Appetit, which is based almost entirely around the concept of “healthy-ish” eating: “delicious, comforting home cooking that just happens to be kinda good for you.”
Healthy-ish, as a concept, isn’t new. In fact, it’s the food industry’s equivalent of your mom telling you to finish your broccoli before you dive into the Twinkies, only dressed up with a sexy hyphenated coverline and some mouthwatering photos of chicken seared in a cast-iron skillet. “Healthy-ish” shouldn’t feel revolutionary. By its very definition it’s something of a big old foodie shrug—an acknowledgment that if we can’t all subsist on steamed fish and vegetables all of the time, we can at least offset the steak dinner for having salad for lunch. It is, as per Pollan at least, a philosophy that everything is best enjoyed in moderation, including moderation.
So why does it feel so subversive?
The reason, as explained by both manifestations of In Defense of Food, is that industries upon industries, even entire religions, have been predicated on the premise that eating (certain things) is bad and will kill you. The documentary draws on years of food-related quackery to illustrate how ingrained fearing food is.
The problem with giving things up, though, is that inevitably it creates a void in one’s diet that only Reese’s pieces and a family-sized wheel of brie can fill. Then there’s the fact that so many abstinence-espousing programs require spending money on things; on Whole 30 cookbooks and Weight Watchers memberships and $10 bottles of bone broth. For a process that supposedly involves cutting things out, there seems to be an awful lot to take in.This, Michael Pollan posits, is the problem with food: It’s gotten extraordinarily complicated. The writer and sustainable-eating advocate has written several books on how the simple business of eating has become a minefield in which earnest Westerners try to tiptoe around gooey, genetically engineered sugar bombs without setting off an explosion of calories, corn sugar, and cancer. In Defense of Food, published in 2008, offers a “manifesto” for eaters (i.e. humans) that’s breathtaking in its seven-word simplicity: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. This mantra is repeated once more in a documentary based on the book that airs Wednesday night on PBS, and it’s felt in the January issue of Bon Appetit, which is based almost entirely around the concept of “healthy-ish” eating: “delicious, comforting home cooking that just happens to be kinda good for you.”
Healthy-ish, as a concept, isn’t new. In fact, it’s the food industry’s equivalent of your mom telling you to finish your broccoli before you dive into the Twinkies, only dressed up with a sexy hyphenated coverline and some mouthwatering photos of chicken seared in a cast-iron skillet. “Healthy-ish” shouldn’t feel revolutionary. By its very definition it’s something of a big old foodie shrug—an acknowledgment that if we can’t all subsist on steamed fish and vegetables all of the time, we can at least offset the steak dinner for having salad for lunch. It is, as per Pollan at least, a philosophy that everything is best enjoyed in moderation, including moderation.
So why does it feel so subversive?
The reason, as explained by both manifestations of In Defense of Food, is that industries upon industries, even entire religions, have been predicated on the premise that eating (certain things) is bad and will kill you. The documentary draws on years of food-related quackery to illustrate how ingrained fearing food is.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
The Sacred Child
[ed. I've been reposting a few things from 2015 over the last few days. Here's something from a bit earlier. Given the ubiquity of phone cameras these days it's an issue to think about.]
Goa, India, 2009. A shimmering white beach. Clear blue water, a cloudless sky. The rush of waves and a constant din from jet skis. Behind us: rust-coloured sand, skinny cows browsing among trash and dry bushes.
I'm lounging on the sun bed with a mystery novel and keeping half an eye on my three-year-old daughter, who is sitting in pink swimming pants and playing with a bucket and spade. She is blonde, blue-eyed and unbelievably cute. People here stare at her, ensorcelled, love-struck, touching her hair, pointing at her. The other day the restaurant waiter - stoned? - approached and bit her tenderly on her yummy upper arm. And above all, they want to take her picture. In this country headed headlong into the future - the little dirt track back to the hotel that we walked when we arrived a week ago has already been tarred over with asphalt - every Indian seems to have a camera phone. Often they ask me, or more rarely my wife, civilly if they may take a picture. Having been brought up on Swedish school pedagogics, I relay the question to my daughter: "Is it OK for you if they take your picture?" I guess I think it's her decision.
A well-dressed slender Indian man in white pants and shirt wanders past on the beach. He smiles and coos at the playing Swedish child and takes out his cell phone. My sister-in-law is already there, asks my daughter, who says no. The man pays no attention, takes the pictures anyway.
My daughter is clearly stressed and uneasy with the situation, the strange man who stands before her with his phone portraying her, laughing lightly. My sister in law tells him off sharply, "Please! No!". He pays no mind, takes some more pictures.
I run down to the water and confront the man. "You respect my daughter!" I yell repeatedly. He apologises, looks nervous, says something in Hindi that I don't understand and points at his phone, as if showing that hey, he just took some pictures, what's the harm? He hurries away.
One of the beach guards soon catches up with him and takes the phone, clearly in order to flip through the photo folder. The man, by now visibly sweating and piteous, explains and gesticulates to the grim guard. Apparently there is nothing on the phone to suggest that the man is a sex tourist or pedophile, as he soon gets his phone back and slips off.
I sit back heavily on the sun bed. Conflicting emotions. I feel indignant and aggrieved - dammit, I should have thrown that phone into the sea, would have served that perv right. Uncertain - OK, he shouldn't have done that, but what if he's really just an everyday Indian guy who loves to see European kids on the beach and wanted a lovely holiday souvenir? Is that really such a big deal?
No more strangers take any pictures of my daughter on the trip. I quit offering her to decide. I just say no, categorically. Her image becomes untouchable. Her likeness becomes sacred.
I should perhaps begin with the disclaimer we all seem forced to start with when we talk about this issue. To wit: I hate everything about child molestation. I hate pedophiles, child porn, all the dirt and darkness and nauseating shit those awful people do. I have two little daughters and I'm prepared to kill or die to protect them against that kind of evil.
This is not actually an essay on child pornography, at least not if we take that to mean images of children being sexually abused, images that could not exist unless children had been violated, defiled, victimised. But in 2011, in Sweden, that is not the definition of child pornography. Instead there is a boundary zone between images that are OK (legitimate though potentially provocative) and such that are a crime to produce, disseminate and possess. That gray zone raises a number of difficult questions about children, art, society and sexuality. Those questions have rarely been more topical than today, and they touch upon the most personal, forbidden and sacred of issues.
Biddick Hall, north-east England, 1976. This time the three-year-old's name is Rosie Bowdrey. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is a guest at the wealthy family's garden party, the sun beats down and he takes innumerable pictures. Rosie has been swimming and runs around in the nude; her mother hurriedly gets the child into a dress. She sits down, a little huffily, on a stone bench. Mapplethorpe takes a picture, probably using his new Hasselblad. Then the skirt comes off again.
34 years later this picture is considered the single most controversial work in Mapplethorpe's oeuvre. We're dealing with an artist who, later in life, took pictures of BDSM, of coprophagy, sexually charged images of African American men, pictures of himself with a bull whip up his posterior. But the picture where the genitals of a three-year-old can be made out is worse. Wherever "Rosie" has been shown, it has soon been taken down again, most recently in November 2010 at Bukowski's fine-arts auction house in Stockholm.
It makes no difference that Rosie's mother, Lady Beatrix Nevill, signed a release for the image, stating that she does not find it pornographic and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that Rosie Bowdrey herself, now an adult, has said that she is proud of the picture, that she can't see how anyone would find it pornographic, and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that nothing suggests that Mapplethorpe, who incidentally was gay, had any sexual interest in little girls.
Who is eroticising the child in the picture? The photographer - or the viewer?
Because at the same time: isn't there something erotic about that image? Or what? About the large luminous eyes, about the sullen mouth with its slightly drooping corners? Something like posing, provocative, that we recognise from a thousand sexually explicit or implicit pictures of adult women? Or what? What do you think?
People in art circles rarely condemn a work of art; more commonly one will encounter a "permissive" attitude to the sphere of aesthetics where anything smacking of censorship will be loudly decried. Thus it is interesting to note mystery novelist Mons Kallentoft writing on his blog that the image goes "way, way across the boundary to child porn" and noting with pleasure that this time "the alarm bells" had worked. "It's never ever right to eroticise a child, not even for the most self-aggrandising, priggish artistic purposes", he added. When I reach Kallentoft on the phone he is at first happy to develop his thoughts further.
"The girl in the picture can't choose, she's being watched. There are people on Earth who get turned on by pictures like these, and that constitutes abuse against her no matter how you shake it. Nobody has that right."
But as an adult, the girl in that picture has said that she doesn't view it as pornographic?
"It doesn't work that way. That's like saying that with consent, we're allowed to do whatever we like to each other, and we might as well sign contracts permitting others to murder us ... That picture is child porn and exhibiting it to the public is wrong! I mean sure, OK, you can keep it to yourself in your home."
So would the image be acceptable if it sat in somebody's photo album - where pictures of nude kids are pretty common?
Our interview takes a left turn here. Mons Kallentoft is very upset by my question, or by my matter-of-fact and slightly impersonal way of phrasing it. He asks me if I have experienced any sexual abuse against children. Before I can answer, he angrily declares that he isn't willing to intellectualise this issue further and abruptly ends our conversation.
I feel bad about this, like a cynical and superficial asshole. Somebody who is happy to sit in a comfy desk chair under pleasant lighting with a cup of tea and soft music in the background, writing about this issue as if it were all about aesthetics - while in fact we're talking about children's lives being ruined, children being violated and defiled in unimaginable ways. Do we even have the right to a lukewarm analytical attitude regarding an issue were the stakes are so high?
I don't want to use a fellow human being and colleague's emotional reaction as a rhetorical tool or pedagogical example, but Kallentoft's reaction really shows me how fraught, personal and painful this issue can be. And suddenly I also think I have gained a deeper understanding of how devout Christians or Muslims feel about pictures such as Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin's Ecce Homo or Lars Vilks's Mohammed cartoons. It's such a gross violation that it's impossible to speak rationally about it, a violation that can only get worse when some uncomprehending respectless bastard asks why you feel violated.
Suddenly I understand better how difficult it is to get anywhere when it comes to things that touches the depths of our souls. How much really is at stake.
by Jens Liljestrand, Aardvarcheology | Read more:
Image: via:
Repost
Goa, India, 2009. A shimmering white beach. Clear blue water, a cloudless sky. The rush of waves and a constant din from jet skis. Behind us: rust-coloured sand, skinny cows browsing among trash and dry bushes.
I'm lounging on the sun bed with a mystery novel and keeping half an eye on my three-year-old daughter, who is sitting in pink swimming pants and playing with a bucket and spade. She is blonde, blue-eyed and unbelievably cute. People here stare at her, ensorcelled, love-struck, touching her hair, pointing at her. The other day the restaurant waiter - stoned? - approached and bit her tenderly on her yummy upper arm. And above all, they want to take her picture. In this country headed headlong into the future - the little dirt track back to the hotel that we walked when we arrived a week ago has already been tarred over with asphalt - every Indian seems to have a camera phone. Often they ask me, or more rarely my wife, civilly if they may take a picture. Having been brought up on Swedish school pedagogics, I relay the question to my daughter: "Is it OK for you if they take your picture?" I guess I think it's her decision.
A well-dressed slender Indian man in white pants and shirt wanders past on the beach. He smiles and coos at the playing Swedish child and takes out his cell phone. My sister-in-law is already there, asks my daughter, who says no. The man pays no attention, takes the pictures anyway. My daughter is clearly stressed and uneasy with the situation, the strange man who stands before her with his phone portraying her, laughing lightly. My sister in law tells him off sharply, "Please! No!". He pays no mind, takes some more pictures.
I run down to the water and confront the man. "You respect my daughter!" I yell repeatedly. He apologises, looks nervous, says something in Hindi that I don't understand and points at his phone, as if showing that hey, he just took some pictures, what's the harm? He hurries away.
One of the beach guards soon catches up with him and takes the phone, clearly in order to flip through the photo folder. The man, by now visibly sweating and piteous, explains and gesticulates to the grim guard. Apparently there is nothing on the phone to suggest that the man is a sex tourist or pedophile, as he soon gets his phone back and slips off.
I sit back heavily on the sun bed. Conflicting emotions. I feel indignant and aggrieved - dammit, I should have thrown that phone into the sea, would have served that perv right. Uncertain - OK, he shouldn't have done that, but what if he's really just an everyday Indian guy who loves to see European kids on the beach and wanted a lovely holiday souvenir? Is that really such a big deal?
No more strangers take any pictures of my daughter on the trip. I quit offering her to decide. I just say no, categorically. Her image becomes untouchable. Her likeness becomes sacred.
I should perhaps begin with the disclaimer we all seem forced to start with when we talk about this issue. To wit: I hate everything about child molestation. I hate pedophiles, child porn, all the dirt and darkness and nauseating shit those awful people do. I have two little daughters and I'm prepared to kill or die to protect them against that kind of evil.
This is not actually an essay on child pornography, at least not if we take that to mean images of children being sexually abused, images that could not exist unless children had been violated, defiled, victimised. But in 2011, in Sweden, that is not the definition of child pornography. Instead there is a boundary zone between images that are OK (legitimate though potentially provocative) and such that are a crime to produce, disseminate and possess. That gray zone raises a number of difficult questions about children, art, society and sexuality. Those questions have rarely been more topical than today, and they touch upon the most personal, forbidden and sacred of issues.
Biddick Hall, north-east England, 1976. This time the three-year-old's name is Rosie Bowdrey. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is a guest at the wealthy family's garden party, the sun beats down and he takes innumerable pictures. Rosie has been swimming and runs around in the nude; her mother hurriedly gets the child into a dress. She sits down, a little huffily, on a stone bench. Mapplethorpe takes a picture, probably using his new Hasselblad. Then the skirt comes off again.
34 years later this picture is considered the single most controversial work in Mapplethorpe's oeuvre. We're dealing with an artist who, later in life, took pictures of BDSM, of coprophagy, sexually charged images of African American men, pictures of himself with a bull whip up his posterior. But the picture where the genitals of a three-year-old can be made out is worse. Wherever "Rosie" has been shown, it has soon been taken down again, most recently in November 2010 at Bukowski's fine-arts auction house in Stockholm.
It makes no difference that Rosie's mother, Lady Beatrix Nevill, signed a release for the image, stating that she does not find it pornographic and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that Rosie Bowdrey herself, now an adult, has said that she is proud of the picture, that she can't see how anyone would find it pornographic, and that she wants it to be exhibited. It makes no difference that nothing suggests that Mapplethorpe, who incidentally was gay, had any sexual interest in little girls.
Who is eroticising the child in the picture? The photographer - or the viewer?
Because at the same time: isn't there something erotic about that image? Or what? About the large luminous eyes, about the sullen mouth with its slightly drooping corners? Something like posing, provocative, that we recognise from a thousand sexually explicit or implicit pictures of adult women? Or what? What do you think?
People in art circles rarely condemn a work of art; more commonly one will encounter a "permissive" attitude to the sphere of aesthetics where anything smacking of censorship will be loudly decried. Thus it is interesting to note mystery novelist Mons Kallentoft writing on his blog that the image goes "way, way across the boundary to child porn" and noting with pleasure that this time "the alarm bells" had worked. "It's never ever right to eroticise a child, not even for the most self-aggrandising, priggish artistic purposes", he added. When I reach Kallentoft on the phone he is at first happy to develop his thoughts further.
"The girl in the picture can't choose, she's being watched. There are people on Earth who get turned on by pictures like these, and that constitutes abuse against her no matter how you shake it. Nobody has that right."
But as an adult, the girl in that picture has said that she doesn't view it as pornographic?
"It doesn't work that way. That's like saying that with consent, we're allowed to do whatever we like to each other, and we might as well sign contracts permitting others to murder us ... That picture is child porn and exhibiting it to the public is wrong! I mean sure, OK, you can keep it to yourself in your home."
So would the image be acceptable if it sat in somebody's photo album - where pictures of nude kids are pretty common?
Our interview takes a left turn here. Mons Kallentoft is very upset by my question, or by my matter-of-fact and slightly impersonal way of phrasing it. He asks me if I have experienced any sexual abuse against children. Before I can answer, he angrily declares that he isn't willing to intellectualise this issue further and abruptly ends our conversation.
I feel bad about this, like a cynical and superficial asshole. Somebody who is happy to sit in a comfy desk chair under pleasant lighting with a cup of tea and soft music in the background, writing about this issue as if it were all about aesthetics - while in fact we're talking about children's lives being ruined, children being violated and defiled in unimaginable ways. Do we even have the right to a lukewarm analytical attitude regarding an issue were the stakes are so high?
I don't want to use a fellow human being and colleague's emotional reaction as a rhetorical tool or pedagogical example, but Kallentoft's reaction really shows me how fraught, personal and painful this issue can be. And suddenly I also think I have gained a deeper understanding of how devout Christians or Muslims feel about pictures such as Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin's Ecce Homo or Lars Vilks's Mohammed cartoons. It's such a gross violation that it's impossible to speak rationally about it, a violation that can only get worse when some uncomprehending respectless bastard asks why you feel violated.
Suddenly I understand better how difficult it is to get anywhere when it comes to things that touches the depths of our souls. How much really is at stake.
by Jens Liljestrand, Aardvarcheology | Read more:
Image: via:
Repost
Bob Dylan's MusiCares Person of the Year Speech
I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.
For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once.
If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."
If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
Big Bill Broonzy had a song called "Key to the Highway." "I've got a key to the highway / I'm booked and I'm bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin' because walking is most too slow." I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write,
Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61
You'd have written that too if you'd sang "Key to the Highway" as much as me.
"Ain't no use sit 'n cry / You'll be an angel by and by / Sail away, ladies, sail away." "I'm sailing away my own true love." "Boots of Spanish Leather" -- Sheryl Crow just sung that.
"Roll the cotton down, aw, yeah, roll the cotton down / Ten dollars a day is a white man's pay / A dollar a day is the black man's pay / Roll the cotton down." If you sang that song as many times as me, you'd be writing "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," too.
I sang a lot of "come all you" songs. There's plenty of them. There's way too many to be counted. "Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my trouble on the old Chisholm Trail." Or, "Come all ye good people, listen while I tell / the fate of Floyd Collins a lad we all know well / The fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all know well."
"Come all ye fair and tender ladies / Take warning how you court your men / They're like a star on a summer morning / They first appear and then they're gone again." "If you'll gather 'round, people / A story I will tell / 'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw / Oklahoma knew him well."
If you sung all these "come all ye" songs all the time, you'd be writing, "Come gather 'round people where ever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you'll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changing."
You'd have written them too. There's nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that's all enough, and that's all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense. (...)
All these songs are connected. Don't be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It's just different, saying the same thing. I didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary.
by Bob Dylan, LA Times | Read more:
Image: YouTube
Permission to Fail
[ed. At least the title is accurate. Jeezus. I don't mean to take it out on poor Michelle here because there are so many, many, other posts like this on the internet (*cough*, Medium), she just happened to have the unfortunate luck of popping up on my screen today. I have to say, if I see one more angst-ridden, pseudo-motivational article about some young person wrestling with a new career or business (oh, sorry... "startup") I'm going to scream. Just STFU! Please. Do your job, learn what you can and leave it at that. None of this hand-holding and "be brave" posturing will get you anywhere, except maybe with your co-workers who now have a better idea about your insecurities and can act accordingly. Do you think the heavy rollers at Sequoia Capital have time for this, or even care?]
People write a lot about the emotional rollercoaster of startups. Turns out, that roller coaster doesn’t slow down after year 1, 2, or 3. I know firsthand that the metaphor doesn’t go away after you hit 100 or 500 paying customers, after you’ve been backed by Sequoia Capital, or after you’ve captured millions of dollars in revenue. The roller coaster climbs higher, making the drops all the more terrifying. Slack’s CEO sums it up pretty precisely:“Now that we’re on this crazy success trajectory, the degree of stress and the degree of doubt and the degree of second-guessing hasn’t been reduced at all,” he said. “In many respects, it’s actually worse now because there’s more at stake. […] I think I wake up every day and look in the mirror and say, ‘We’ve almost certainly fucked this up completely.‘” - Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack
One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s easy to write and to be transparent when things are going great. It’s harder when the roller coaster dips downward, when your stomach feels like it’s in freefall. Way back in January, our team experienced one of those dips. Up until this point, for 24 straight months, Keen IO’s business had grown 5-15% - every month! We were embarrassingly confident, and we felt unstoppable. It was coming off of this incredible rise that reality hit and we got to experience a little more of that roller coaster everyone was talking about.
I wrote the following company-wide memo during that time, when we got to learn what it was like to fall a little bit.
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Michelle Wetzler wrote:
Hey everybody - I hope you don’t mind me sharing a relatively raw piece of writing. It started out as a sort-of blog post, but then I realized it’s really a letter to you all. Feeling a bit brave right now and clicking send. Hope it’s helpful.
by Michelle Wetzler, Keen | Read more:
Image: Imgur
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
At Señor Frog’s in Times Square, It’s Spring Break Forever
[ed. Oh, my. Pete Wells saves his best restaurant review of the year (and maybe ever) for last.]
I was having my second Frogasm of the night when dinner got weird.
Not that this or any other night at Señor Frog’s in Times Square was ever fully conventional. In point of fact, I had already danced in a conga line wearing a three-foot-high crown of yellow and orange balloons that made me look like Simba in a production of “The Lion King” staged by balloon animals.
In further point of fact, I had also eaten a foot-long chili dog presented on a skateboard. Consider, too, that outside Señor Frog’s I had passed a sign promising that “Drinks go in, fun comes out!” (If nothing else, I was looking forward to seeing the restrooms.) The drink that was going in, a deviant margarita, came in a plastic cup that had a long, thrusting, curved, ridged shaft, ostensibly modeled on the trunk of a palm tree but impossible to grasp without thinking: “ribbed for her pleasure.” (...)
I came to Señor Frog’s later than most of its customers. Founded in Mexico in 1969, the chain thrives in Caribbean beach towns and caters to college students on spring break who will fake orgasms on stage to win a margarita. I wasn’t one of them. My most memorable spring break was whiled away in my room reading “The Sorrows of Young Werther” in German.
This did not get me invited to many orgasm contests, but I was inclined to think the time with Goethe had been well spent until Señor Frog’s opened on 42nd Street last summer. For the first time, I wished I had some memories of the chain. So when I ate there, I brought people who had gone to Señor Frog’s in their wilder years. Unfortunately, none of them recalled anything about it, either. One volunteered that he had climbed onto a giant speaker at the Cancún branch and danced furiously, a fact he knows only because witnesses later told him about it.
“I think I went on a water slide,” said a woman who had also unwound in Cancún. “But I can’t remember where it ended.”
“In jail,” her husband said.
There is no water slide at the Times Square location, which offers a more sober and family-friendly version of the Frog experience. (“Do not show underwear,” the dress code posted at the door warns.) In early evening the place is filled with children, like the two who got up to sing “Let It Go” and gamely karaoked away when a blizzard of confetti snow erupted from the foot of the stage.
Later the crowd got older, with more New Yorkers and fewer tourists than I had expected. Cocktails in embarrassing palm-tree vessels abounded, but I never saw anybody get really tanked, myself included, even after multiple Frogasms. All the mixed drinks seemed tame, and the shot that a server squirted into my open mouth when I hopped by in the conga line tasted like orange Gatorade.
Señor Frog’s is not a good restaurant by most conventional measures, including the fairly basic one of serving food. One night I got just two of the half-dozen appetizers I had asked for. Another time, the starters showed up on schedule, but after nearly two hours the main courses still had not appeared.
“What happened to our food?” we finally asked.
“That’s what I’m wondering!” our server said brightly. “Like, where is it?”
Getting just half of what you order at Señor Frog’s can be a blessing if it’s the right half. The chili, rich and chocolate-brown, does just what you want it to do for the thick, juicy hot dog or the nachos, whose chips were flaccid one night but crunchy another. Honey-sriracha wings, which ping-pong between sweet and spicy, are preferable to the Buffalo wings, which taste like a mild case of acid reflux.
The ribs meet chain-restaurant standards, and so does the pulled pork sandwich once you scrape off the questionable coleslaw. You can get far worse guacamole at far more serious restaurants. (All other restaurants are more serious than Señor Frog’s.)
The Reuben is good, for some reason.
Most other things I tried may as well have stayed in the kitchen, except the chicken enchiladas, which should have been sent back to Cancún. I thought they tasted like tuna, but a more acute observer said the flavor was like pork sprinkled with fish food.
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Kreiger
No Brainer.
For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.
It is alive but empty, with a cavernous fluid-filled space where the brain should be. A thin layer of brain tissue lines that cavity like an amniotic sac. The image hails from a 1980 review article in Science: Roger Lewin, the author, reports that the patient in question had “virtually no brain”. But that’s not what scared me; hydrocephalus is nothing new, and it takes more to creep out this ex-biologist than a picture of Ventricles Gone Wild.
What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126.
He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics. He presented normally along all social and cognitive axes. He didn’t even realize there was anything wrong with him until he went to the doctor for some unrelated malady, only to be referred to a specialist because his head seemed a bit too large.
It happens occasionally. Someone grows up to become a construction worker or a schoolteacher, before learning that they should have been a rutabaga instead. Lewin’s paper reports that one out of ten hydrocephalus cases are so extreme that cerebrospinal fluid fills 95% of the cranium. Anyone whose brain fits into the remaining 5% should be nothing short of vegetative; yet apparently, fully half have IQs over 100. (Why, here’s another example from 2007; and yet another.) Let’s call them VNBs, or “Virtual No-Brainers”.
The paper is titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”, and it seems to contradict pretty much everything we think we know about neurobiology.(...)
So on and off for the past twenty years, I’ve lain awake at night wondering how a brain the size of a poodle’s could kick my ass at advanced mathematics. I’ve wondered if these miracle freaks might actually have the same brain mass as the rest of us, but squeezed into a smaller, high-density volume by the pressure of all that cerebrospinal fluid (apparently the answer is: no). While I was writing Blindsight— having learned that cortical modules in the brains of autistic savants are relatively underconnected, forcing each to become more efficient— I wondered if some kind of network-isolation effect might be in play.
Now, it turns out the answer to that is: Maybe.
Three decades after Lewin’s paper, we have “Revisiting hydrocephalus as a model to study brain resilience” by de Oliveira et al. (actually published in 2012, although I didn’t read it until last spring). It’s a “Mini Review Article”: only four pages, no new methodologies or original findings— just a bit of background, a hypothesis, a brief “Discussion” and a conclusion calling for further research. In fact, it’s not so much a review as a challenge to the neuro community to get off its ass and study this fascinating phenomenon— so that soon, hopefully, there’ll be enough new research out there warrant a real review.
The authors advocate research into “Computational models such as the small-world and scale-free network”— networks whose nodes are clustered into highly-interconnected “cliques”, while the cliques themselves are more sparsely connected one to another. De Oliveira et al suggest that they hold the secret to the resilience of the hydrocephalic brain. Such networks result in “higher dynamical complexity, lower wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults.” This also seems reminiscent of those isolated hyper-efficient modules of autistic savants, which is unlikely to be a coincidence: networks from social to genetic to neural have all been described as “small-world”. (You might wonder— as I did— why de Oliveira et al. would credit such networks for the normal intelligence of some hydrocephalics when the same configuration is presumably ubiquitous in vegetative and normal brains as well. I can only assume they meant to suggest that small-world networking is especially well-developed among high-functioning hydrocephalics.) (In all honesty, it’s not the best-written paper I’ve ever read. Which seems to be kind of a trend on the ‘crawl lately.)
The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing.
Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?
It is alive but empty, with a cavernous fluid-filled space where the brain should be. A thin layer of brain tissue lines that cavity like an amniotic sac. The image hails from a 1980 review article in Science: Roger Lewin, the author, reports that the patient in question had “virtually no brain”. But that’s not what scared me; hydrocephalus is nothing new, and it takes more to creep out this ex-biologist than a picture of Ventricles Gone Wild.
What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126.
He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics. He presented normally along all social and cognitive axes. He didn’t even realize there was anything wrong with him until he went to the doctor for some unrelated malady, only to be referred to a specialist because his head seemed a bit too large.It happens occasionally. Someone grows up to become a construction worker or a schoolteacher, before learning that they should have been a rutabaga instead. Lewin’s paper reports that one out of ten hydrocephalus cases are so extreme that cerebrospinal fluid fills 95% of the cranium. Anyone whose brain fits into the remaining 5% should be nothing short of vegetative; yet apparently, fully half have IQs over 100. (Why, here’s another example from 2007; and yet another.) Let’s call them VNBs, or “Virtual No-Brainers”.
The paper is titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”, and it seems to contradict pretty much everything we think we know about neurobiology.(...)
So on and off for the past twenty years, I’ve lain awake at night wondering how a brain the size of a poodle’s could kick my ass at advanced mathematics. I’ve wondered if these miracle freaks might actually have the same brain mass as the rest of us, but squeezed into a smaller, high-density volume by the pressure of all that cerebrospinal fluid (apparently the answer is: no). While I was writing Blindsight— having learned that cortical modules in the brains of autistic savants are relatively underconnected, forcing each to become more efficient— I wondered if some kind of network-isolation effect might be in play.
Now, it turns out the answer to that is: Maybe.
Three decades after Lewin’s paper, we have “Revisiting hydrocephalus as a model to study brain resilience” by de Oliveira et al. (actually published in 2012, although I didn’t read it until last spring). It’s a “Mini Review Article”: only four pages, no new methodologies or original findings— just a bit of background, a hypothesis, a brief “Discussion” and a conclusion calling for further research. In fact, it’s not so much a review as a challenge to the neuro community to get off its ass and study this fascinating phenomenon— so that soon, hopefully, there’ll be enough new research out there warrant a real review.
The authors advocate research into “Computational models such as the small-world and scale-free network”— networks whose nodes are clustered into highly-interconnected “cliques”, while the cliques themselves are more sparsely connected one to another. De Oliveira et al suggest that they hold the secret to the resilience of the hydrocephalic brain. Such networks result in “higher dynamical complexity, lower wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults.” This also seems reminiscent of those isolated hyper-efficient modules of autistic savants, which is unlikely to be a coincidence: networks from social to genetic to neural have all been described as “small-world”. (You might wonder— as I did— why de Oliveira et al. would credit such networks for the normal intelligence of some hydrocephalics when the same configuration is presumably ubiquitous in vegetative and normal brains as well. I can only assume they meant to suggest that small-world networking is especially well-developed among high-functioning hydrocephalics.) (In all honesty, it’s not the best-written paper I’ve ever read. Which seems to be kind of a trend on the ‘crawl lately.)
The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing.
Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?
by Peter Watts, The Crawl | Read more:
Image: de Olivera et al
Not Lived Up To
Oriel College, Oxford, is trying to figure out what to do about its giant statue of Cecil Rhodes after students at the University of Cape Town decided they had had enough of their own Rhodes statue, which was removed from its pride of place on the UCT campus last April after a student named Chumani Maxwele flung a bucket of poop over poor closeted old Cecil, thereby igniting a series of protests that became known in the press as “Rhodes Rage.”
There have been a lot of attempts at revisionism this year, one way and another. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is changing the titles and descriptions of various exhibits with a view to eradicating racist words such as “negro,” “Moor,” “Mohammedan” and so on, changing, for example, the title of a painting from “Young negro girl” to “Young girl holding a fan.” Woodrow Wilson’s racist and segregationist beliefs were characterized as a “toxic legacy” by the New York Times Editorial Board last month, as student protesters demanded the renaming of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. (...)
Cecil Rhodes, zillionaire founder of the DeBeers diamond empire, was a fucking monster. He is a real embarrassment to anybody who would defend the patriarchy. Here he is in 1887, addressing the government on whether or not to permit “the natives” of South Africa the vote:
We don’t want to get rid of the past; what we want is to regret it. Move the statue, yes, but don’t destroy it. We must supply ourselves with plenty of buckets of poo, and never forget a thing. Oxford classicist Mary Beard made a similar point a few days go in the Independent, expressing admiration for student activism and resistance to racism, but cautioning against what she saw as a “dangerous attempt to try to erase the past.”
“Of course Rhodes was a racist,” she said. “My worries are about the narrower historical point: that history can’t be unwritten or hidden away, or erased when we change our minds. We need to face the past and our dependence on it and do better than it… that’s what the past is for.”
In other words, if we get rid of the statue, where will we even aim the poo.
There have been a lot of attempts at revisionism this year, one way and another. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is changing the titles and descriptions of various exhibits with a view to eradicating racist words such as “negro,” “Moor,” “Mohammedan” and so on, changing, for example, the title of a painting from “Young negro girl” to “Young girl holding a fan.” Woodrow Wilson’s racist and segregationist beliefs were characterized as a “toxic legacy” by the New York Times Editorial Board last month, as student protesters demanded the renaming of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. (...)Cecil Rhodes, zillionaire founder of the DeBeers diamond empire, was a fucking monster. He is a real embarrassment to anybody who would defend the patriarchy. Here he is in 1887, addressing the government on whether or not to permit “the natives” of South Africa the vote:
Does this House think it right that men in a state of pure barbarism should have the franchise and vote? The natives do not want it […] let them be a subject race, and keep the liquor from them […] We have to face the question and it must be brought home to them that in the future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour, in physical work, in manual labour.Today, black Rhodes Scholars from Africa attend Oxford. William Jefferson Clinton, also something of a monster—though substantially less of a monster than Cecil Rhodes—was a Rhodes Scholar. There are just a handful of tenured professors at the University of Cape Town who are black. Wilson was a segregationist horrorshow, and also he was the president of this country, if a weak one; a founder of the League of Nations, and a pacifist. What I mean by all this is that every institution we possess is irremediably tainted.
We don’t want to get rid of the past; what we want is to regret it. Move the statue, yes, but don’t destroy it. We must supply ourselves with plenty of buckets of poo, and never forget a thing. Oxford classicist Mary Beard made a similar point a few days go in the Independent, expressing admiration for student activism and resistance to racism, but cautioning against what she saw as a “dangerous attempt to try to erase the past.”
“Of course Rhodes was a racist,” she said. “My worries are about the narrower historical point: that history can’t be unwritten or hidden away, or erased when we change our minds. We need to face the past and our dependence on it and do better than it… that’s what the past is for.”
In other words, if we get rid of the statue, where will we even aim the poo.
by Maria Bustillos, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Star Wars
The NRA Is Actually Half Right
[ed. See also: What does gun violence really cost?]
When Hamlet debuted on the stage of the Globe Theater in May of 1600, a funny thing happened — no one went home and killed their uncle. In fact, in the weeks and months afterward, there was no rash of uncle killings throughout London. The same thing had happened over two thousand years earlier — after the debut of Oedipus Rex, thousands of Greeks (as far as we can tell) did not go home and have sex with their mothers.
With the recent spate of mass shootings — at the community college in Oregon, the Planned Parenthood in Colorado and the county building in San Bernardino — the debate has begun anew, like it has ever since the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999: do we need stricter gun laws, and do we need to decrease the violence we show in the movies and on TV, as a way to help prevent these tragedies?
There is no question that fewer guns will result in fewer gun deaths. This has been proven in every country that has decided to decrease or remove guns from civilian ownership. In the 1980s and '90s, Australia had a series of mass shootings, including an awful one at a school in Port Arthur. The conscience of the country was so moved by that slaughter — that's right, "slaughter," like the slaughter in Colorado Springs, the slaughter in San Bernardino, etc. — that Australia outlawed nearly all guns. Total number of school shootings since that law passed: zero.
Less guns also mean less successful suicides. It should be pointed out that over half of the nearly 30,000 gun deaths each year in this country are from suicide. If you want to make sure you will die by your own hand, using a gun is the tried and true way to accomplish such a task. But many who attempt suicide don't really want to die, and by using pills or even slashing their wrists there's usually a greater that 50% chance that they will live, that someone will save them. There's not much saving going on when there's a bullethole in one's head.
The other pertinent fact regarding gun-related homicides is that more than 60% of murders involve people who know each other — usually it's a domestic situation between spouses, boyfriends/girlfriends or family members. An argument breaks out and somebody "loses it" and goes and grabs the gun. If guns in these heated situations had not been so easily accessible, many deaths would have been avoided.
We will probably never be able to rid ourselves of the more than quarter-billion guns that are in our homes. But any effort to reduce this number would reduce the level of killing.
Unfortunately, even if we had stronger gun laws, we would still have a few thousand gun deaths in this country. That's because we have a problem no law can solve. Canada has strict gun laws, but they also have an estimated five million hunting rifles and shotguns in their homes — and they don't go and shoot each other on a daily basis like we do. In 2013, they had a total of 131 gun murders in a nation of 35 million people. We have nine times their population, but fifty-fives times their gun killings. How can this be?
Which brings us to Hollywood. I don't think I'm making any big revelation here when I point out that the Canadian kids (and adults) are watching the same exact violent movies, playing the same exact violent video games and watching the same exact violent TV shows as their neighbors, the Americans. So why don't their students — other than on the rare, rare occasion — continually walk into their high schools and colleges and start firing away? It's not that the Canadians don't get angry — have you even been to a hockey game? You cannot say that violent Hollywood movies somehow magically affect only American youth, but no one else. The Japanese cannot get enough of blood and gore in movies, ours and their own. Total number of gun murders in Japan in 2012: three.
So what is it about us? It's clear that the NRA is actually half-right in their slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." We just need to modify that to: "Guns don't kill people — Americans kill people."
It's not the movies or the video games or the gruesome crime scene photos on CSI that drive us Americans to kill each other. It's fear. Why would one want to own a gun in the first place? Well, fear of being robbed or assaulted or killed. Wanting to protect yourself or your family. You know, "just in case."
But in case of what? Remember, the statistics show that the most dangerous threat to you is sitting over there on the couch right now. We have nearly 123 million homes in the US. There are only about 600 home invasions here each year that result in a gun-related death. And in nearly half of those incidents, the deceased was killed by the gun that was in the house to protect... the deceased!
It's the fear of getting killed that is getting a lot of us killed. But it's also other fears that are winding us up and making a few of us go crazy enough to take off on a shooting rampage. Unlike in other civilized countries where people take care of each other — with free health care, generous compensation for the unemployed, free or nearly-free college education, strict laws on credit card debt and junk mortgages, serious help and treatment for the mentally ill, aid for aging and infirm people and the list goes on and on. From Ireland to Italy to Norway, from New Zealand to South Korea to Morocco, governments all over the world have discovered that the real way to reduce violence is to simply take care of each other.
When Hamlet debuted on the stage of the Globe Theater in May of 1600, a funny thing happened — no one went home and killed their uncle. In fact, in the weeks and months afterward, there was no rash of uncle killings throughout London. The same thing had happened over two thousand years earlier — after the debut of Oedipus Rex, thousands of Greeks (as far as we can tell) did not go home and have sex with their mothers.
With the recent spate of mass shootings — at the community college in Oregon, the Planned Parenthood in Colorado and the county building in San Bernardino — the debate has begun anew, like it has ever since the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999: do we need stricter gun laws, and do we need to decrease the violence we show in the movies and on TV, as a way to help prevent these tragedies?
There is no question that fewer guns will result in fewer gun deaths. This has been proven in every country that has decided to decrease or remove guns from civilian ownership. In the 1980s and '90s, Australia had a series of mass shootings, including an awful one at a school in Port Arthur. The conscience of the country was so moved by that slaughter — that's right, "slaughter," like the slaughter in Colorado Springs, the slaughter in San Bernardino, etc. — that Australia outlawed nearly all guns. Total number of school shootings since that law passed: zero.Less guns also mean less successful suicides. It should be pointed out that over half of the nearly 30,000 gun deaths each year in this country are from suicide. If you want to make sure you will die by your own hand, using a gun is the tried and true way to accomplish such a task. But many who attempt suicide don't really want to die, and by using pills or even slashing their wrists there's usually a greater that 50% chance that they will live, that someone will save them. There's not much saving going on when there's a bullethole in one's head.
The other pertinent fact regarding gun-related homicides is that more than 60% of murders involve people who know each other — usually it's a domestic situation between spouses, boyfriends/girlfriends or family members. An argument breaks out and somebody "loses it" and goes and grabs the gun. If guns in these heated situations had not been so easily accessible, many deaths would have been avoided.
We will probably never be able to rid ourselves of the more than quarter-billion guns that are in our homes. But any effort to reduce this number would reduce the level of killing.
Unfortunately, even if we had stronger gun laws, we would still have a few thousand gun deaths in this country. That's because we have a problem no law can solve. Canada has strict gun laws, but they also have an estimated five million hunting rifles and shotguns in their homes — and they don't go and shoot each other on a daily basis like we do. In 2013, they had a total of 131 gun murders in a nation of 35 million people. We have nine times their population, but fifty-fives times their gun killings. How can this be?
Which brings us to Hollywood. I don't think I'm making any big revelation here when I point out that the Canadian kids (and adults) are watching the same exact violent movies, playing the same exact violent video games and watching the same exact violent TV shows as their neighbors, the Americans. So why don't their students — other than on the rare, rare occasion — continually walk into their high schools and colleges and start firing away? It's not that the Canadians don't get angry — have you even been to a hockey game? You cannot say that violent Hollywood movies somehow magically affect only American youth, but no one else. The Japanese cannot get enough of blood and gore in movies, ours and their own. Total number of gun murders in Japan in 2012: three.
So what is it about us? It's clear that the NRA is actually half-right in their slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." We just need to modify that to: "Guns don't kill people — Americans kill people."
It's not the movies or the video games or the gruesome crime scene photos on CSI that drive us Americans to kill each other. It's fear. Why would one want to own a gun in the first place? Well, fear of being robbed or assaulted or killed. Wanting to protect yourself or your family. You know, "just in case."
But in case of what? Remember, the statistics show that the most dangerous threat to you is sitting over there on the couch right now. We have nearly 123 million homes in the US. There are only about 600 home invasions here each year that result in a gun-related death. And in nearly half of those incidents, the deceased was killed by the gun that was in the house to protect... the deceased!
It's the fear of getting killed that is getting a lot of us killed. But it's also other fears that are winding us up and making a few of us go crazy enough to take off on a shooting rampage. Unlike in other civilized countries where people take care of each other — with free health care, generous compensation for the unemployed, free or nearly-free college education, strict laws on credit card debt and junk mortgages, serious help and treatment for the mentally ill, aid for aging and infirm people and the list goes on and on. From Ireland to Italy to Norway, from New Zealand to South Korea to Morocco, governments all over the world have discovered that the real way to reduce violence is to simply take care of each other.
by Michael Moore, Hollywood Reporter | Read more:
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