Howard Zinn on the war…

Howard Zinn is dead, but the fight against war continues. Here is Howard Zinn on the “war on terror”…

Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a good end. I can see an immediate objection to this equation: They (the terrorists) deliberately kill innocent people; we (the war makers) aim at “military targets,” and civilians are killed by accident, as “collateral damage.”

Is it really an accident when civilians die under our bombs? Even if you grant that the intention is not to kill civilians, if they nevertheless become victims, again and again and again, can that be called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in bombing, it may not be deliberate, but it is not an accident, and the bombers cannot be considered innocent. They are committing murder as surely as are the terrorists.

The absurdity of claiming innocence in such cases becomes apparent when the death tolls from “collateral damage” reach figures far greater than the lists of the dead from even the most awful act of terrorism. Thus, the “collateral damage” in the Gulf War caused more people to die–hundreds of thousands, if you include the victims of our sanctions policy–than the very deliberate terrorist attack of September 11. The total of those who have died in Israel from Palestinian terrorist bombs is somewhere under 1,000. The number of dead from “collateral damage” in the bombing of Beirut during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was roughly 6,000.

We must not match the death lists–it is an ugly exercise–as if one atrocity is worse than another. No killing of innocents, whether deliberate or “accidental,” can be justified. My argument is that when children die at the hands of terrorists, or–whether intended or not–as a result of bombs dropped from airplanes, terrorism and war become equally unpardonable.

Target Women: Yogurt

Health co-op helps those in need…

In a climate where rational discussion about health care is absolutely impossible, some people are rolling up their sleeves and doing something about it…

The price for use of the co-op’s services ranges from as little as $50 a month for an establishment with a couple of employees to $400 a month for a larger restaurant.

Dr. Dave, who works as a general practitioner and sees other patients, is able to support himself because both his office and apartment are located in rent-stabilized buildings operated by the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association, a not-for-profit housing group that charges him only $800 a month for rent.

With health care currently a hot-button political issue, Dr. Dave sees this local, not-for-profit health system as a model for how national health care in America could work.

“I’m not against profit,” he says. “I just don’t think you can have a for-profit health system that provides everyone with proper health care. It’s just never going to work.”

“Greed is part of human nature!”

You may have heard this line of reasoning used against anarchists from people who are mired into the mainstream capitalist doctrine. Greed will always be with us, so the argument goes, therefore establishing a society that goes against greed is utopian. People will always want to compete and accumulate power. Any attempt at an egalitarian society is doomed to failure.

In fact, this argument is so widespread that it has led the libcoms to reject any concept of human nature outright, preferring to dump the theory of evolution and its powerful ramifications rather than even leave open the possibility that greed is natural.

But rejecting human nature altogether is not a viable answer. It demands that we follow magical thinking: that man’s personality and character somehow magically spring from his upbringing, without any mediation of the brain. Libcoms will counter this by saying that they really do believe in biological needs, instincts, and other evolutionary traits, but that they don’t believe in man’s nature being innate anyway.

This is why it is important to define exactly what we mean by “human nature.” We are not talking about people’s tastes in clothes or their choice of a job. We are talking about nothing less than that which is fundamental to being human, that which is always at the core of everything we do, starting with our basic drives (nourishment, sexuality, security, play, etc), our biological needs and our cognitive biases. While we humans express these drives in all sorts of complex ways, they exist in most social species.

There is nothing that can compel an individual to do anything without the need, drive or bias already being present within himself. This is why human nature is so important and why people seek to understand it. It’s what advertisers, movie editors and politicians’ speech writers use to “press our buttons.” Anyone who rejects the notion makes himself vulnerable to such manipulations, and they are everywhere.

At any rate, the idea of rejecting the concept of human nature itself because of misunderstandings or misrepresentations is as silly as rejecting the concept of atoms because some people (especially Christian presuppositionalists) misrepresent it. It is obviously not true that man is infinitely malleable. All throughout history, we return to the same concepts, the same drives, the same conflicts, no matter how much our societies change. The study of these constants must be part of the education of any serious student of politics.

What about greed? Greed is the desire to have more than one’s equal share, to be more than associates of each other. Greed is ultimately the desire for domination. It is therefore very much related to my previous entry on atomistic individualism, as a greedy person (within his pursuit, anyway) sees others as means to an end, not as fellow human beings.

I think this is the crux of the misconception. Capitalists believe greed is natural because they believe it is individualist. Communists cannot object because they already agree with this premise. But there’s nothing individualist about greed. Greed is the natural result of people seeking security and material possessions in a system which indoctrinates them to do so and makes the competition of all against all the precondition to that security and those material possessions. The current system is full of games conditions. The faster we eliminate them, the faster sanity will be restored to society.

Some libcoms, on the other hand, propose that greed should be seen in its entirety, as the struggle for a richer life, and that the pursuit of material wealth is only one small part of it. In that perspective, greed is not only good, but vitally necessary for the accomplishment of communist aims.

We have no doubt that people are corruptible, but we know for ourselves that there are things more tempting, more seductive, than money, capital, and Power – so much so that no genuinely greedy human being could possibly resist their allure – and it is upon this corruptibility of man that we found our hopes for revolution. Revolution is nothing other than the self-accelerating spread throughout society of this more profound corruption, of this deeper seduction. Currently, greed is always pursued and associated with isolation and privatism simply because everyone under the reign of capital is condemned to pursue greed in this narrow way. Greed doesn’t yet know its own potentiality.
We say once again: the present forms of greed lose out in the end because they turn out to be not greedy enough.

Eddie Izzard – Do you have a flag?

You’re under arrest for being bad at Wii Fit.

Soon, the Wii Fit may be used as a tool to get people under arrest at airports… (and here you thought they couldn’t come up with someone more retarded than “truth detectors”)

Popular Science reports that some passengers may be required to stand on a Nintendo Wii Fit balance board so that those who are nervous and fidgety can be identified. The idea is being tested as part of a $20-million Homeland Security project called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) that is studying how to monitor people’s physical states, like heart rate, breathing and eye movement.
…
Researchers have modified the Wii balance board to show how someone’s weight shifts and are now determining what kind of results from the balance board would warrant secondary screening.

But many argue that screening people’s physical states might not be accurate. “I haven’t seen any research that shows that those measures from the autonomic nervous system … measuring blood pressure, measuring breathing, measuring heat on the face, are at all related to intent,” Stephen Fienberg, professor of statistics and social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, told CNN.