The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?

The psychology of taboo is not completely irrational. In maintaining our most precious relationships, it is not enough to say and do the right thing. We have to show that our heart is in the right place and that we don’t weigh the costs and benefits of selling out those who trust us. If someone offers to buy your child or your spouse or your vote, the appropriate response is not to think it over or to ask how much. The appropriate response is to refuse even to consider the possibility. Anything less emphatic would betray the awful truth that you don’t understand what it means to be a genuine parent or spouse or citizen. (The logic of taboo underlies the horrific fascination of plots whose protagonists are agonized by unthinkable thoughts, such as Indecent Proposal and Sophie’s Choice.) Sacred and tabooed beliefs also work as membership badges in coalitions. To believe something with a perfect faith, to be incapable of apostasy, is a sign of fidelity to the group and loyalty to the cause. Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong.

– Stepehen Pinker

in The New Republic

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.”

Update: Link to a portion of the manifesto – read the language…

Update on Ismail Ax:

(Includes various theories: Ismail, as a reference to the email program….or a misspelling of Turkish hip-hop artist Ismail YK… the name of a character that he created for a computer game — but his roommates said he did not play games, though they did note that he liked to download and listen to music, particularly the song “Shine” by Collective Soul.

Then there is the Moby Dick theory but the problem is that the spelling of the name is different…or a character in The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper, Ishmael Bush, who clears land with an axe wherever he goes, but there is the problem again of the spelling of the name…too subtle.

Then there is the Islamic retooling of the Abraham, Isaac account…see here. There’s also about Ibrahim taking his axe to the temple idols. The thing is, it’s Ibrahim, not Ismail using the axe.

Some people are thinking it might be an anagram….and here’s more info on that.

See also this column by Frank Salvato.
Three points made in a Mirror (UK) article:

1. On page two, sandwiched between a picture of the sky and a photo of Cho in combat fatigues, he wrote: “Are you happy now that you have destroyed my life? Now that you have stolen everything you could from me?”

(I should note that there was a photo circulated on the net said to be Cho on campus in uniform. I haven’t posted it, because I couldn’t tell how authentic it was).

2. Cho made the final changes to the booklet and is thought to have filmed as least one of the video films then as well. In the clip he is seen wearing the military-style vest described by massacre witnesses.

Having finished his manifesto, Cho walked to a post office and mailed it to NBC.

3. On page 11, Cho drew two bizarre sketches. The first is a red heart with a cross and pair of eyes inside. The second is a stylised number 88 -with a caption that reads: “Number of the anti-terrorist.”

My Comment:

The number is thought to be a reference to an Indonesian police anti-terror unit named Detachment 88 in memory of the 88 Australians who died in the 2002 Bali bombings.

Again – it sounds like he is just picking up things from all over the place. He is identifying here with anti-terror, not terror, just as his references (to me) sound like identification with all victims, including the victims of 9-11.

I will try to find out more about the heart and the eyes and 88.

The Lutheran church uses the heart and cross, as does the Sacred Heart. The all seeing eye is a well known Hermetic and Masonic symbol but it is also a widely used convention in its own right. The eye set in a triangle is said to be non- Masonic. It is used on the US dollar bill as well in in DARPA as a symbol for the Total Information Awareness Program.I do not know what the eye in the heart signifies.

Update:

Aresume posted on the VT Computer Science Department website by Robert G. Ball notes grants awarded to the university by ARDA/DTO, short for Advanced
Research and Development Activity, Disruptive Technology Office. “ARDA was created in 1998 after the model of the Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency (DARPA) by the Director of Central Intelligence and the
Department of Defense, and took responsibility for funding some of DARPA’s projects,” explains Wikipedia.
“There has been speculation that the DTO is continuing research efforts started under the Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in DARPA’s
Information Awareness Office (IAO)…. Although ARDA’s budget is presumably classified as part of the intelligence budget, the New York Times quoted an unnamed former government official saying the agency spent about $100 million a year in 2003. The Associated Press reports that ARDA had a staff of only eight in 2004.” Early last year, DTO is reported to be run by John Negroponte) (need confirmation).

VT is also the site of micro air vehicle technologies research –

Micro air vehicles are airborne vehicles that are no larger than six inches in either length, width or height and perform a useful military mission at an affordable cost.

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:x3i7FHynTU4J:www.fas.org/irp/news/1997/b12121997_bt676-97.html+blacksburg+and+darpa&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a

I have read- although I can’t confirm the information – that the symbols are a mish-mash of symbols drawn from Christian identity or Aryan symbology. I can’t speak to this. Cho, as a literature student, probably put together a number of symbols in his environment in a creative way, which is why I stick with the “classic school shooter” profile.

“On page 21, Cho is pictured clutching both fists to his chest and in another photo points both his guns at the camera. Above the photo he wrote: “Let the revolution begin!”
Also interesting were comments by an expert that he showed two alternating personalities, one very impassive and zombie-like (in the clip thought to have been photographed in the interim between the two shootings), which the expert felt indicated drug usage

and the other, seen in the clips photographed prior to the shooting, very aggressive and exhibitionistic, almost play-acting, something I also observed earlier on in my posts.

It’s also reported that he wore combat fatigues (p.2) and a military vest and that the bullets were the type (hollow point), intended to expand on impact and reduce the victims’ chances of surviving. I have read that these bullets are only intended for target shooting.

From a piece by Anthony Gregory called “Real World Politics and Radical Libertarianism on Lew Rockwell.

” In short, the problem was the principled abolitionists and other radicals were too few in number, and what existed throughout the 19th century was a confused political dynamic in which no major faction appeared to favor liberty above all. The Antebellum Democrats were great on trade but not so good on war and slavery. The Hamiltonians were cautious of some wars but bad on everything else. This continues to this day, when we have one party that speaks of economic freedom (but doesn’t come through) and another that speaks of personal choice but neither that embraces the full program and philosophy of freedom.

“The reason America is not as free as it should be is there hasn’t been enough principled libertarian thought in American history, and there’s where we come in. To the extent we do have freedom, it is because of the radicals of the past. To the extent we have oppression, socialism and imperialism, it is because of insufficient radicalism of the past, an attempt to mix the libertarian instincts of the American Revolution with the statist values of corporate conservatism, centralized statism, mixed economics, policed morality and continual foreign war.”

Well said. Read the article in its entirety. What I like is it’s optimistic, even upbeat, outlook and its hopefulness about where right libertarianism is and where it could go.
I share the optimism. I think, we – right (and left) libs – are not extremists (which is how we are derided) but principled.

Still, though we are not extremists, we are at the extreme ends of the debate….

Unless your thinking is completely linear, however, the principled right and left do not have to be at the opposite ends of things.

4-23-07

An article from the History News Network that supports my previous post about the Copy-Cat Effect:

By William Marina

Mr. Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University.

I doubt that many people have ever heard of Herostratos, a Greek who lived almost 2,400 hundred years ago, but I would suggest that the similarities of Cho’s murderous rampage at Virginia Tech and Herostratos’ actions are striking. They both represent a kind of revolt against Egalitarianism, a craving to be lifted above the faceless and nameless masses, to make one’s mark on history even at the price of becoming infamous in the process.

In 356 BCE, Herostratos burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, considered one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. When asked, before his execution, why he had done such a dastardly deed, Herostratos replied that he wanted to be “famous.” Alarmed at such thinking, the Greeks attempted to blot his name from history. After Alexander the Great’s fame, it was pointed out that the Gods had caused his birth that same year to overshadow Herostartos’ act.

The Greeks were unsuccessful in their effort to purge history of Herostratos, but at least they understood his motivation—a desire for fame at any cost. This has been the prime motivation for many perverse acts in human history, especially in America.

This writer first discussed these factors some years ago in an essay, Egalitarianism and Empire, Actually, two other factors need to be included, Envy, and Equality. Alexis de Tocqueville believed that Envy was the motivating engine of what he called Democracy in America, but it is important to differentiate between Equality and Egalitarianism. The former implies an opportunity to compete, the latter a leveling distribution of results.

In the fourth century, the emerging Alexanderian Empire was an early sign of the rising tensions within Classical Civilization, which would culminate in the warfare-welfare state of the Roman Empire, to which America is increasingly compared. For men like Herostratos, God was, indeed, dead, and they had no real fear of divine retribution for their actions. Neither did Cho!

The growing sense of Egalitarianism was already evident in Jacksonian Democracy and was heightened by the Centralization prevalent after the Civil War.

In fact, the most cogent analysis of what I call the Herostratos Syndrome was offered in a New York Evening Post editorial after the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, quoted at length in Alexander Stephens’s Pictorial History of the United States (1881). Stephens had served as Vice President of the Confederacy, and also wrote a two-volume history of that conflict, focused around the ideas of “Centralization,” and Empire. In that view, he would later be joined by Oswald Spengler, who wrote about “Civilization [Empire] as Centralization unadulterated,” and Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s teacher at Georgetown, who voiced a similar outlook.

The editorialist wanted to explain what, in picturesque 19th century prose, he called, the rise of the American “Crank,” which seemed so peculiar to our society. He attributed this to a system of business that promised that everyone could succeed, as well as to a schooling system that promised the same. But the real culprit was the press, which offered instant notoriety and infamy to these Cranks, such as Charles Guiteau, the assassin of Garfield.

Since then, of course, we have endured a number of such “Cranks,” including Lee Harvey Oswald, whose “Historic Diary” repeats his failures, or Arthur Bremer, the inept attempted assassin of George Wallace, whose diary also repeats the same word, “failure,” ad nauseum. Oswald’s whole life was an effort to draw attention to himself, as a so-called Marxist, shooting himself in the leg while in the Marines, and so on. It is clear his “Historic (by whose definition?) Diary,” was written on the boat returning to America from the Soviet Union, in anticipation of a large press conference which never materialized, as he was met by a sole representative of the State Department, which had helped pay for his return. The number of his actions intended to gain fame are too numerous to describe here. He even tried to become a critic of Communism from the Right!

In all of these Herostratics, however, perhaps the epitome is James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Before Ray grasped what Oswald had instinctively understood in pleading his innocence after his capture in Dallas and before he was himself killed, Ray was asked by his attorney how he could have been so “damned dumb” as to leave a portable radio with his Missouri Prison number etched on it at the scene of the crime. Ray replied that he wanted the whole world to know he was the one who shot that “F***ing N****r.”

It is a terrible tribute to Ray’s skillful mendacity that before his death he was able to convince Mrs. Coretta King, King’s son, and Jesse Jackson, that he was the innocent victim of some larger, nefarious conspiracy. Instead of executing him, as the Greeks would have done, he remained in prison, expanding upon his fame and notoriety by proclaiming his innocence. And, there was no shortage among those in the media as well, adding to that chorus.

With attempts on the lives of both Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, the increased security has made it easier simply to kill masses of innocent people, whether earlier from a Tower at the University of Texas, or, for example, the murders at Columbine.

Now Cho has successfully joined the ranks of the Herostratics and made his name in history. Our media, unlike the flawed effort of the Greeks to wipe such names from history, has seen to that. Cho’s act of putting together a video presentation beforehand, attempting to justify his act as a protest against inequality, and then mailing that to NBC, is hardly the act of an irrational person under immediate stress. He knew exactly what he wished to accomplish and had planned accordingly.

There is also the question of what prescription drugs Cho had been taking. The police have not yet released the names of these drugs. We do know, however, that various drugs have been associated with some of the mass killings of recent years.

In Ancient Greece one of the “designer drugs” was hellebore. We will never know if Herostratos was into such drugs, which, when combined with alcohol, could give one quite a high. For a “nobody,” whose efforts to stand out had simply alienated many around him, that could be the final catalyst in tipping him toward an act of destruction or violence that would achieve the notoriety he so craved.

It is perhaps well to note the closing words of the editorialist in 1881, that our method of handling such events may have simply increased the possibility for more such Cranks.

My Comment:

I should add that I don’t know anything about the killing of King or Kennedy or anyone else and have no opinion on any of those subjects, one way or other. I just thought the analysis of centralization and the media was relevant.

I should also point out that Stephens – whose writings I am not familiar with – was an ardent supporter of slavery. In my view, that does not necessarily have a bearing on his critique of empire, any more than his owning of slaves affected his ability as a lawyer to get a black slave woman accused of murder acquitted.

I have Jewish friends who are able to listen to Wagner with equanimity…as I can read Kipling and accept that he was both a marvellous writer and an ardent colonialist and imperialist (those two things might indeed be tied together in some ways), but that to denounce (or ignore) all the good and the creative in people because some parts of their thinking is reprehensible (or indeed, in the case of slavery, almost incomprehensible to us) is I think, a shallow way of thinking that in the end impoverishes the debate and ultimately leads, as Mill noted, to the very evils we think we are battling. Our salvation lies in widening, not narrowing, the debate.