h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"But, forarguments sake we will give you that they thought he was a Canuk. Although that alone might well have justified a beating, it does not in any way shape or form change fact #2."

I am not sure why you feel it necessary to throw that obvious taunt at me. In fact, I find it disgusting.

Nowhere did I call you a "racist" and I resent that you would make this insinuation. You did, however state that Baker should have been distinguished as not looking like "Achmed". You gave no indication on what you based this blanket statement. I could only assume that you or the soldiers responsible had the Middle-eastern equivalent to Gay-dar.

In pointing out that the prisoners in Guantanamo couldn't possible all look identical, and couldn't all be immediately differentiated from a "Baker", I was hardly calling you a racist.

I am wondering how a "Everyone got a little carried away with the role-playing and boom, training accident" could possibly account for the type and seriousness of the injuries sustained by Mr. Baker.

Zagreb,

"He is one of the vocal Americans who people like to say they think should shut up because they have "unpopular opinions". In other words, the First Amendment shouldn't apply to him. It's all right if you are calling for the dimemberment of gays or women's rights activists, but if you expose the dirty little (not-so) secrets of the President, why that is just plain wrong."

In making this statement, I was referring to the current attitude of many Americans, that people who speak out against the war or talk about Bush's dirty dealings, or speak about the war in Iraq should not have the same right to free speech as the American who profess to bleed red, white, and blue when cut.

A private company has every right to make a decision to back or not to back controversial statements made in their name. It is, however, the thin edge of the wedge when politicians put pressure on private companies in order to effectively silence dissent. This happend during the McCarthy Era, and it happened in the 60's anti-war movement, and it is happening now.

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This was an insulting, pointless and unworthy thing to say, imo.



Meanwhile, could Fahrenheit 9/11 win the American election?

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1224711,00.html


az

"We have known for years that human nature leads to abuse of power, it takes much training to overcome it. As evidenced by the infamous 1972 Philip Zambardo Jailer experiment"

the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment gets a lot of press. "Neither group received any specific training." Well, actually, they did get some specific training. This wasn't a case of "let's play guards and prisoners".

The conductors of the experiment, in their own words: "we established functional equivalents for the activities and experiences of actual prison life which were expected to produce qualitatively similar psychological reactions in our subjects—feelings of power and powerlessness, of control and oppression, of satisfaction and frustration, of arbitrary rule and resistance to authority, of status and anonymity, of machismo and emasculation." In short, they fostered abuse.
http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/frozim.html

Your post, Tamburlane, mentions that only 1/3 of the guards became aggressive and dehumanizing. How does this minority behavior in a context designed to elicit this behavior become a definition of "human nature"?

The Stanford Prison experiment gets far more attention than it deserves. It was ill-designed and has been very poorly published. The most important discovery that was made in the experiment has been almost completly overlooked: Most people don't do horrible things even when encouraged; some people (like some of the guards in the experiment) will do horrible things if encouraged to do them; it's a rare person indeed (none of the guards in the experiment) who will do horrible things simply if given the opportunity.

Another small point: suggesting that someone may deserve physical violence simply because of their nationality is in poor taste, ia a hate crime, and is certainly never a joke. But then, some of us live in societies which encourage us to hate the Other. I am immeasurably grateful that I do not live in such a society. It must be terrible to live in a place so much like the Stanford Prison Experiment.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/8764553.htm
"A U.S. Army spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that Baker suffered a head injury during the training exercise, but disputed that was the reason for his medical discharge..... Yesterday, he showed a Herald-Leader reporter a sworn statement he gave the night of the incident, and a document listing his medical diagnosis and its cause. He declined to share the rest of the investigation, but said he would once an attorney could guarantee him he would not be prosecuted for releasing the military documents."

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Ok so it was a little off color, and was only in jest. Let's not get thin skinned here folks. Sorry, but it was obviously sarcasim in the first place and your "hate crime" bit is exactly the sort of reactionary dribble I am growing to expect here. And again

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There is STILL STILL STILL no POSSIBLE way that there was a misrepresentation of who this guy was.

" am wondering how a "Everyone got a little carried away with the role-playing and boom, training accident" could possibly account for the type and seriousness of the injuries sustained by Mr. Baker."

Mudhooks, did you miss the point that people DIE in training? I have had arthritic knees since I was 24 due to jumping out of planes. It is a rough business.

As far as the Stanford experiment was ONE week long. If 33% of normal everyday college kids turn into sadistic prison guards within ONE WEEK what happens over longer time periods?

This is far from the only such experiement. Subjects administering succesively higher electrical shocks even beyond what they have been told would be lethal voltage unto other test subjects, etc. The historical precedence is huge. Look into prisons, ask one of your countrymen how a Canadian prison is. I am sure they will tell you that the guards didn't exactly say "please" and "thank you" & invite them to afternoon tea. Your country is not as morally superior as its citizens tend to feel on this site.

Why do you think phrases like "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and "his power is going to his head" are in common usage. The human animal is at his core an animal. Greater things in life are the exception, not the rule. Why do you think there are such things as laws? If murder was suddenly decriminalised what do you suppose would happen to the murder rate?

The Baker thing is bullshit. He was not assumed to be an inmate, he got hurt training and training accidents happen. Gitmo is not subject to Geneva, is not on US soil and therefore has no restrictions against anything. DISCLAIMER, that was not an endorsement simply a statement of fact. If you don't like it hurry up and get US citizenship register to vote and vote out Bush.

Abu Gahrib, is unexcusable. Bottom line. There is such a thing as personal accountablility and the people there should have had it. However, oversight is vital when giving people power. There are countless examples of power without accountability leading to heinous acts. There should have been more control. Again however, This isn't Mohammed Q. Iraqi in Abu Gahrib. These are people who have been passed up the chain many times already they are honest to goodness bad guys.

Michael Moore crys too much. To stretch an internal Disney issue into violation of first ammmendment (no matter why Disney chose as such) is an insult to people's intelligence. Again, if you don't like it stop spending your money on Disney things, and tell them why. Personaly I think the whole damn thing was enginered to increase its box-office draw.

Did I miss anything?

Maybe it wasnt just your knees that were damaged by jumping out of those planes Tamberlaine Any inverted landings

I can do sarcasm too

Your point about people getting hurt in trainning exercises sort of undercuts what you are trying to say, as far as I can see.

As you have put it these guards knew he was a US soldier but still kicked the crap out of him.

Now what do you think these guys who have had that as part of their training are oing to do when they hit the front line and meet who they are told are the real enemy?

People encouraged to do such things will be beating killing and raping faster than you can say Geneva Convetntion.

I didnt join the army because I didnt want to be turned into a psychopathic automaton.(and I dont look good in green) Which is what happens a lot, NOT the exception but this is mostly what happens. The experimant with the electric shock which you brought up proves this. Those guys were told to give the shocks not asked or left to their own devices they were following instructions. Some people are just that suggestible. Any "good" army trains its soldiers to be even more compliant to do things that are morally repulsive.


On the Michale Moore thing, I still think it is censorship by the back door Jeb Bush is leaning on Disney not to release it. With no good reason he is using and thus abusing his political power to supress the release of opinions that he does not like. Sure Moore's a fool for getting into bed with companies like Disney in the first place, I dont like them and dont give them any of my busines for the record, but that was a cultural thing before it became a business-ethics consideration.

As for the air of supperiority of Canadians, well it is more to do with the behaviour of their government than a straight Canucks are better than yanks thing, but if you are going to whine about people who think their goverment behaves better than the government of the US then its a prety big list of countries. Sadly I dont belong to one of them. Damn you Blair

one love

"Ok so it was a little off color, and was only in jest. Let's not get thin skinned here folks. Sorry, but it was obviously sarcasim in the first place and your "hate crime" bit is exactly the sort of reactionary dribble I am growing to expect here."



(did he really post that? "dribble"? "reactionary"? <areyoustilllaughing?smiley&gt

What a bleeding load of crap: "I'm sorry, your honour. I was just being sarcastic when I said "Kill the Tutsi cockroaches!' Pretty funny joke, huh? Can I go home now? Can I?"

Can I make jokes about flying planes into American buildings, Tamburlane? Is that okay? Can we have sarcasm about Yankees deserving it when they get legs ripped off by roadside bombs? Can we make jokes about Canadian soldiers being bombed and killed by American pilots? Can we all have a laugh about my Canuck parents in Manhattan on 9/11?

I won't thicken my skin, you insensitive reactionary ba$tard! How can you live with yourself? You make "sarcasm" about violence against a nationality and think it's okay. You target the nationality of people on this thread, you target the nationality of 9/11 victims. You do this with no apparent connection to the discussion, quite apparently out of nothing other than hate, and then you have the gall to ask us to get thicker skins. No, Tamburlane. You need to have your skin thinned a little so that you can have a little sensitivity to the experiences of others.

Go ahead. Joke about my country. Joke about my family. Joke about the pain of others. And then blame my country, my family, blame the pained for their pain: there certainly couldn't be anything wrong with your "joke".



And, again: It absolutely changes the validity of any arguments you make, whether you call it a "fact" or a speculation or number it from 1 to a million.

Have a good Nacht.

"Ok so it was a little off color, and was only in jest. Let's not get thin skinned here folks. Sorry, but it was obviously sarcasim in the first place and your "hate crime" bit is exactly the sort of reactionary dribble I am growing to expect here. And again"

It wasn't "off color", Flipper. It was offensive.

It appears that being offended by something which was intended to be offensive it "being thin skinned". No, I am not being thin-skinned. You are an offensive person who is trying to bait me into some sort of fight with you.

Regarding the Baker issue. Obviously, since you are a 4-star general in the US Army, you have "inside information" not available to me, you must be right.

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No, it was quite rude and insulting and an apology wouldn't have gone amiss, Tamberlaine.

I believe you mentioned before something about people caring more about the tortured prisoners than Michael Berg having his head cut off. I read a quote from Mr Berg's father yesterday - he told a US radio station that 'my son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld'.

Where did you get the idea that people can't care for *both* the prisoners and Mr Berg?

Re: Fahrenheit 9/11, didn't I read earlier on here that the US government is planning to ban it even if Moore does find a distributor?


az

oh, simulpost, Mudhooks.



az

Mind you, if I may say so, calling Tamberlaine an 'insenstive reactionary ba$tard' and an 'offensive person' is also quite rude.

Is everybody even now?

az

Sorry... let me rephrase that. He is not an offensive person. He is a person who is being offensive.

az

Mudhooks, I saw that story in our local paper the other day. I was shocked, but not surprised. The fact that they could do that to him on a training exercise, reminds me of sociological experiments, like the teacher (sometime in the 1980s) who divided his/her class into blue eyed and brown eyed kids, and set one lot over the other lot. Within a day she had to terminate the experiment, because the kids on top were beating the others! (Maybe someone remembers the precise details better than I do..)

<< dark skin and hair colouring, something plenty of WASPs also have>>

My mother being an example, Blackberry Cat, she was often taken for a Maori when we were young. (She was one of what I believe are called "the Black Scots"...

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I was listening to your Mr Ashcroft yesterday, Tamberlaine, and concluded that living in the USA would be a very dangerous thing to do! I for one, would rather stay safely where I am, ta very much...
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Not so, at all. The Red Cross report said that 90% of prisoners ("detainees" ) are people
picked up "by mistake". That is, the US went after say, Mohamed and as he wasn't home, picked us his neighbour who came out to see what was going on.

Anahaga. First and foremost, my deepest and most heartfealt apologies for having offended you, and sincereest sympathies of your loss. I posted previously that I have had family members brutaly killed by "freedom fighters." I cannot express enough how much my heart goes out to you, for what it is worth.

With that said the remark was offhand sarcasim, in no way shape or form associated with 9-11. It was made in more of the pythonesque slapstick sort of way, it was not at all intended to be directed at anyone, particuarly your parents. Although I can fully see how you would have taken it so personaly. I would like to officialy retract it if possible. There were people from every part of the globe that lost lives in the WTC. I have a tendency to try and laugh at as much as possible, and have been known to use gallow's humour whilst getting shot at. Although it does not serve to make said remark any less offensive to you Anahaga I hope it aids in your understanding...

Blicky, the US and the UK armies don't train for unwavering compliance. The main strength of the US army is the amount of empowerment of its junior officers and NCOs. It was our major advantage over the Soviets. We could adapt to changing conditions and make decisions on the battlefield. As a full time active duty soldier there were mandatory classes on how NOT to treat an EPW. Abu Gahrib was not the way they said to do it. These reservists probably never recieved such training. During force on force training there are often "civilians" on the battlefield. These are non-combatants are put there for the purpose of training us in target ID. When doing live fire room clearing training there is often a target that is marked as a non-combatant and must not be shot. Bellieve me entering a room with four people, moving about it, firing at "bad guys" accuratly and not hitting the "good guy" by mistake within only a couple of seconds is something that takes a lot of practice.

In either of the above situations if a non-combatant is fired upon there are reprecussions. People are "arrested" removed from the exercise and put through a mock courts martial. Too impress upon us the seriousness of this. Orders that break Geneva Convention or the Law of Land Warfare are illegal. If I am given one by a superior I am not only bound not to follow it but to report it. If I do follow it or if I do not report it, then the punishment can range from years of hard labor to death.

Mudhooks, I am an NCO so that probably makes mefar more knowledgeable than a four-star sitting in his office as to how the army trains. OK here is the scenario. I am assigned the role of disruptive detainee, it is your job to restrain me. You get zero training value if I just sit on my hands when you walk up. The goal here is to be as realistic as we can. You confront me. I resist you. You apply a chockhold to subdue me and I continue to struggle to get out (hence the overzealousness) we slip, I crack my head on the floor and presto, brain damage. People have died from cerebral hemorraging slipping in their bathtubs, it does not take much to damage the brain.

Adelaide. I have been a part in detaining many Iraqis. Yes, sometimes the information is bad and the wrong individual gets picked up. Not usualy a matter of Mohammed coming out to see what is going on at Achmed's house. More of Achmed doesn't like Mohammed so he tells us that he is a bad guy. Or the informant points out the wrong house. "Oh hem!!! He lives across the street!" This is usually pretty easy to sort out. If there are bomb materials and RPGs in the guy's house he was a bad guy.

The majority of people are not taken in raids but on the street. We were given a sheet of arrestable offenses with things like "public intoxication max holding time 48 hours" or "interfering with coalition forces max holding time ten days" But, most of the people we picked up on the street were because we found a bunch of weapons in his trunk. If we found a pistol we would just confiscate it and send the guy on his way, open your trunk and find a bag full of handgrenades now we have a problem.

A detainee is taken back to the compound talked to by civil affairs and a determination is made. He is either released or sent over to the MPs. The MPs do the same thing and either release him or turn him over to their next higher, so on and so forth. Abu Gahrib is the last stop on a long line of transfers, at any of which release is much more common than being sent on. They don't have the time space or resources to deal with anyone that they do not have to.

And yes if anyone has found a way to get people to stop being violent towards each other please let me know. I would be thrilled to wake up one day and find I have no job security left.

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I was listening to your Mr Ashcroft yesterday, Tamberlaine, and concluded that living in the USA would be a very dangerous thing to do! I for one, would rather stay safely where I am, ta very much...

Not saying in the least that I disagree with you on that one!!

Tamberlaine:

Thanks for the totally misplaced apologies but we have nothing in common. You made an expression of hatred. I did not take it personally. I'm sorry if you misunderstood that. You think it is a joke to suggest violence is appropriate against certain nationalities. I disagree. It doesn't much matter whether or not I've lost family members to men who hijack planes, to men who fly planes and don't know how to follow orders, or to any of a million other stupidly lethal events out there. It doesn't much matter whether I've never lost a loved one at all. If you can make a "joke" such as you made, we have nothing in common, because, no matter what I have gone through in my life or will go through in my life, I can no more make jokes about violence against a nationality than I can about violence against women or violence against the disabled. If you can make such jokes, then I am sad for you. I'm glad for you that you laugh a lot. I laugh a lot, too. I spend my days in laughter and joy. Odd. I don't find a need to make jokes based on hatred. . .

Would you still apologise if you knew the truth, that I hadn't taken your "joke" personally? How about if I said my parents had been in Saskatoon on 9/11? How about if I said I were a citizen of Vanuatu? The truth is that my parents were in Manhattan on 9/11 and I am Canadian, but, frankly, you could have made a "joke" about beating up Costa Ricans and I would have reacted the same way.

Whatever may be our similar experiences, Flipper, we have nothing in common.

P.S. You write: "the remark was offhand sarcasim, in no way shape or form associated with 9-11". What kind of absurdity is that? The thread is about Moore's film about 9/11. Your remark is associated with 9/11 by being on this thread. It is associated with 9/11 by being a remark about events in Iraq which have been directly linked to 9/11 by President Bush, among others.