Table of content
Ahmed, Leila ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Women and Gender in Islam (1992) ............................................................................................. 1
Cuboniks, Laboria ................................................................................................................................ 3
The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018).............................................................................................. 3
Eagleton, Terry ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Why Marx was Right (2018) ........................................................................................................... 4
Fine, Cordelia ........................................................................................................................................ 8
Delusions of Gender (2010) ............................................................................................................ 8
Geuss, Raymond ................................................................................................................................. 16
Philosophy and Real Politics (2008) ........................................................................................... 16
Gould, Stephen Jay ............................................................................................................................ 17
The Mismeasure of Man (1996) ................................................................................................... 17
Hobsbawm, Eric ................................................................................................................................. 26
The Age of Revolutions (1977) ...................................................................................................... 26
Morozov, Evgeny ................................................................................................................................ 28
To Save Everything Click Here (2013) ........................................................................................ 28
Pappe, Ilan .......................................................................................................................................... 30
Ten Myths About Israel (2017) ..................................................................................................... 30
Turse, Nick .......................................................................................................................................... 30
Kill Anything That Moves (2013) ................................................................................................. 30
Ahmed, Leila
Women and Gender in Islam (1992)
Part 1: The Pre-Islamic Middle East
Mesopotamia
Women were held in high regard an even dominant positions in early Mesopotamian history.
These cultures prayed to goddesses and existed from 6000-2000 B.C.E. The subjection of
women started with the rise of urban centres. Feminists theorists believe the reason behind
this is that the “importance of increasing the population and providing labour power in early
societies led to the theft of women, whose sexuality and reproductive capacity became the
first ‘property’ that tribes competed for.” The first urban centres started appearing around
3500-3000 B.C.E. In the increasingly complex urban societies where military
competitiveness was highly valued, male dominance was entrenched which gave rise to a
rigid class structure. In turn this gave rise to the patriarchal family, designed to keep men in
control over women’s sexuality, became institutionalised. This led to the rigid demarcation
between receptacle women (wives) whose sexuality belonged to one man, and those whose
sexuality was available to any man. The decline of women’s status was mirrored in the
decline of goddess figures and embracement of the supremacy of gods. The use of the veil
was to demark which women belonged to a man (wives, concubines and daughters)—it was
also used to demark class status—and those who were deemed ‘disreputable’ e.i they were
available. This don’t mean all of women’s rights where stiped, they still maintained the right
to own property and could hold high level influential positions, although they gained their
positions by being placed there by a man in a higher position. Through becoming
priestesses(naditum) women could even inherit property like sons. Mesopotamia was
conquered by many successive kingdoms, there was a further decline of women’s status with
each kingdom, many of their rights being stiped. Worthy of note is the extreme inflation of
the number of concubines a king held, Darius and alexander owning 365. Seemingly each
kingdom took the restrictive right put on women from the last but didn’t copy their more
human laws and values. This oppression was also enshrined in religion, at the time that was
Zoroastrianism. These religious laws suggested that women where somewhere between
personhood and thingness—manifested clearly in that wife could be loaned away without
their consent.
The Mediterranean Middle East
Ahmed chooses to focus specifically on Byzantine culture in the Mediterranean. Byzantine
held lifestyles and attitudes towards women mostly associated with Muslims rather than
Christians. This would include veiling of women and segregation between women and men is
daily life. These customs came from Greek culture and not Persia or other middle eastern—or
“oriental”—cultures. This is shown best through Egyptian culture which was more egalitarian
in relation to gender norms. Women where not limited to act through male guardians like in
Greece and marriage terms where equal for both parties, as in both had equal rights to end
the marriage. Egypt was not a matriarchal society and women weren’t privileged over men,
although many sources seem to think so, they were merely equal and there was no prejudge
against them. The egalitarian conditions enjoyed by Egyptian women where in large part lost
when conquered by the Greeks, as Greek and Roman mores and laws where spread. The
misogyny was also adopted from Jewish traditions, and like earlier copied by Christian ones.
Important to note is that both Christian, or Western, and Islamic civilisation draw from the
same tradition.
Part 2: Founding Discourses
Women and the Rise of Islam
Overall the position off women fell during the rise of Islam, although they were granted some
rights, the banishment of infanticide, some rights where curtailed. They had less sexual
freedom, the participation and active involvement in practises of religion and warfare was
ended, through Islam’s patriarchal marriages as the sole legitimate form of marriage and the
patrilineal form of institutions set about a social transformation which curtailed the rights of
women. Polygamy was practised for the males in Islam, having multiple wives and
concubines was normal for those of higher class. This did not happen overnight and the first
generations of Muslims where less misogynous, and Women often where given positions of
authorities and marriage customs where more loosely interpreted, like believing that you
could be in relationships outside of the patriarchal marriage and it would not count as
adultery. This is not to suggest that pre-Islamic societies where egalitarian, there was still
patriarical norms and control over women’s sexuality. Muhammed had many wives, and in
his later life made them seclude and veil themselves from larger society, however originally
this only applied to his wives not all women. Veiling was already practised in parts of Arabia,
mostly as a signal for higher social status. Its unknown how the practise spread to include all
Muslims. After Muhammad’s death some women rebelled celebrating his death hoping to
regain some of the rights lost during his regime.
The Transitional Age
Verses in the Quran makes the moral and spiritual equality of men and women clear.
Because of this there seems to be two competing understandings of gender in Islam first the
pragmatic regulatory one (discussed in the previous chapter) and the articulation of an
ethical and equal vision. There is a debate over whether the practises implemented by
Muhammed were supposed to be viewed as a normative or that rather they were just relating
to the historical context in which they were implemented. However, those who take the
ethical and spiritual dimension have not been the ones in power, and therefore the
regulatory practises of Muhammed have largely been implemented throughout Islamic
history. Islam took over much of Mesopotamia, here there was more misogyny and control
over women and this conquest in large part shaped the future view Islam took on gender and
gender relations. Muhammad’s wives had a great deal of status after his death and where
often turned as authorities on interpreting the Quran and Muhammad’s will. Women still
retained some authority in religious practises Marriage after divorce of widowhood was
common amongst women in Arabia.
Cuboniks, Laboria
The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018)
Xenofeminism seeks to wright the wrongs of twenty first century feminism, the first element
is that we must be unapologetic in our goals. We don’t seek middle ground solutions or
reforms but the wholescale restructuring of society. We must reject nature and fight for our
own freedom. Xenofeminism rejects that there are given materialistic conditions and social
forms, everything is fluid and can be changed and XF must be able to change with it. We
fight for the right of those deemed ‘unnatural’ and reject the navalistic approach. XF is both
highly critical of and highly reliant on technology. We need to repurpose technology to
further out progressive gender political ends. But at the same time be wary of technology as
there is nothing inherently progressive about it.
To change anything, we must look at the structural level. We must be able to think past
capitalism, XF is vehemently anti-capitalist. Twenty first century feminism has failed to
bring about sustainable change. XF seeks to be able to as a collective agent transition
between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.
Queer liberation will not be found in naturalism, we must abandon arguments that relay on
‘born this way’. We will no long bow to the oppressive yolk of nature. If ‘cyberspace’ ever
promised an escape from essentialist identity categories, it has now swung sharply in the
other direction. They no longer fight oppression as it fetishizes it as it was a blessing. We do
not want clean hands or beautiful souls.
Xenofeminism is both gender and race abolitionist, this does not mean we want to reduce the
gender diversity in the world but rather that we wish to build a society in which traits
currently under assembled under the rubric of gender will be freed from the asymmetric
operation of power. Race and gender abolitionists must have the end goal of class abolition.
You’re not exploited because your poor, your poor because your exploited. We must
champion a generic universalism, not akin to the current Eurocentric universalism which
mistakes the male for the sexless, white for the raceless and cis for the real.
Nothing is sacred and nothing is supernatural. We should be able to change everything,
nothing cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.
The virtual is formed by its underlying material conditions
Eagleton, Terry
Why Marx was Right (2018)
Eagleton thoroughly dismantles many of the common criticism levied against Marxism, and
effetely argues for the necessity for Marxism in the 21st century. Marx was not an idealist
wagering an impossible revolution towards a perfect world. He was fiercely democratic,
more so than any capitalist can claim to be, and a champion of diversity and not uniformity,
we are not lost to history making our choices for us, the future is of our making. The ideal
should be leisure not labour and the highest form of human experience is through artistic
self-expression. He did not view class as a simple dichotomy. He foresaw the rise of the
middle class and put great hope in their revolutionary potential. He championed
environmental, feminist, and anti-colonialists causes and saw their involvement in a socialist
revolution to be necessary. In short Marx was right.
Marxism is irrelevant in a post-industrial west
As a baby forgets that a toy exists after it has left its vision, westerners seem to think that
they now live in a post-industrial society after it moved its industry to the underdeveloped
world. The change in perception claiming that now a Marxist revolution is impossible is not
related to any real materialistic change in the world. It’s not socialism which has become
impossible its capitalism which has become pervasive, our future is no longer a future it’s
just “the present plus more options”. This capitalist realist (Fisher, 2013) expectation is
nothing more than an illusion, capitalism is now, more than ever, showing its inner
contradictions. The supposed end of history came to an end in 2008, forever showing us that
all the benefits that capitalism claims to prove are only temporary.
In these circumstances, to claim that Marxism was finished was rather like claiming that
firefighting was out of date because arsonists were growing more crafty and resourceful
than ever.
Marxism is good in theory, but has always led to tyranny
The development of the capitalist institution was far from pacifist. Instituting capitalism had,
and has, an enormous human cost to the underdeveloped world. Stalinism and Maoism,
even in their failures, greatly improved the daily lives of its citizens through extensive social
programs in the west, even now, couldn’t dream of. The point being that yes socialism has
had its failures, but it had its successes it did work for some, and a great many more then the
people capitalism has worked for. Paradoxically rather the discrediting Marxism Stalinism
shows us that a Marxist analysis of society is the only way to understand its rise.
People in glass houses, if the supposed horrors of Stalin and Mao discredit the socialist
experiment how does the CIA torture camps for Muslims, mass poverty, intensive bombing
campaigns and horrible inequality not discredit capitalism?
Marxism represents a form of hard determinism
When Marx says that all history is the history of class struggle, he doesn’t mean class
struggle chose what you had for breakfast, rather that class struggle is the most fundamental
part of history. And history, in this context, doesn’t mean everything that has ever happen,
rather its used in the sense of the significant course of events. Marx less believed in the
inability of socialism was the failure of capitalism. People would not flock to socialism due to
some hidden historic law, but because they suffer at the whims of capitalism and its failures.
It is rather liberalism which thinks it has captured history, what else then a historical
deterministic theory is Fukuyama’s End of history. A fortune teller claims to know the future
a prophet merely warns us of its possibilities and consciences if we do not change Our ways,
Fukuyama was a fortune teller, Marx was a prophet.
Marxism is a Utopian Fantasy
A utopian is someone who imagines the world thinks they can build an impossible ideal
society, conservatives are in many ways’ utopians, however unlike most utopians their utopia
lives in the past and not the future. Marx was a fierce opponent of the utopian socialist
tradition, he did not set out to build a perfect world, he set out to remove the contradictions
preventing people to build a better future. Marx claims that we, now, live in a pre-history,
one variation of human operation after another, the first truly historic act will be human
liberation from this tradition. Socialism doesn’t predict the end of history, as neoliberalism
does, it promises the start of it. Marxism main goal it to end its own necessity, as a nationalliberation struggle becomes useless after a nation has achieved liberation, Marxism becomes
useless after the fall of capitalism. As materialists it sees no reason to imagine the ideal
society after the fall off capitalism, it couldn’t construct it if it wanted. After the fall of
capitalism people will be truly free, but that also means people will be truly unpredictable—
at least from our standpoint ignorant of their material conditions—because of this
unpredictability we truly don’t know how they will govern themselves. Eagleton uses this
excellent analogy:
Take, as an analogy, the behaviour of people in prisons. It is fairly easy to say
what prisoners get up to throughout the day because their activities are strictly
regulated. The warders can predict with some certainty where they will be at five
o’clock on a Wednesday, and if they cannot do so they might find themselves up
before the governor. Once convicts are realised back into society however, it is
much harder to keep tabs on them, unless the tabs are of an electronic kind. They
have moved, so to speak, from the “prehistory” of their incarceration to history
proper, meaning that they are now at liberty to determine their own existence,
rather than to have it determined for them by external forces. For Marx, socialism
is the point where we begin collectively to determine our own destinies. It is
democracy taken with full seriousness, rather than democracy as (for the most
part) a political charade. And the fact that people are more free means that it will
be harder to say what they will be doing at five o’clock on Wednesday.
The roots of capitalism will not be ridden of the day after the revolution, like the remands of
feudalism still haunt capitalism, however there has, over history, been radical changes in
outlooks. We now could never imagine burning a heretic at the stake, in this way people in
the future will look in horror back at the times where millions went hungry while some eat
gold flaked pizzas.
In Liberal society freedom means freedom to be at one another’s throats. Communism on the
other hand would organize society so “The free development of each becomes the condition
for the free development of all” (Marx & Engles, 1848) It clearly states the liberal
contradiction where your freedom is only won at the expense of mine. Marx however didn’t
think this would mean human perfection. With this about of freedom there was to be those
who try and abuse it. Under communism there will still be child murder, car accidents,
horrible novels, and creaky tables, it promises only one thing and that is freedom.
There will always be egoists who try and beat down others However even in liberal
democracy there are certain protections set in place to protect the rights of the individual,
there is no reason this could not be expanded under communism. You need not make people
want to stop war; you merely need take away their means.
Marx only focuses on economics
Economic factor is in many ways the basis for existence, we would not have painting if we
couldn’t proud use food. We can only learn to play music if we have our basic needs meet,
therefore all culture is a product of having these basic needs meet, which is done through
economics. And again, capitalism illustrates its own flaws in its critique of Marxism,
capitalism regards production was limited to and by economics, everything is looked at
through the lens of profit, art is reduced to a number, a prise. Marx is far from an economic
reductionist, his view on economics is far more sociological than the capitalist view on
economic. He talks of the social-relation with the means of production and social-revolution.
It’s not that Marx reduces everything to economics; it is rather that his view on economics is
larger and all-encompassing then the narrow modern view. In his mind, the social relations,
labour and art are all economic because they all happen within a socio-economic context
which shapes them.
Marx’s materialism leaves out the spiritual and leaves
everything to the material world
Materialism for Marx didn’t really care what things are made of, he paid little attention to
these large metaphysical questions, and viewed them as abstractions. Materialism for Marx
meant starting from where humans where, Humans are first and foremost a material being,
everything else about us was derived from this essence. Our identity and consciousness come
about in a material and social context; we paradoxically gain our individualism through the
social relations we have with others. Our natural needs are served through our social context.
Economics is the vital link between them, the biological and social. Furthermore, it is not
that everything is economics, but that economics is everything. The base shapes the
superstructure. Moralism abstracts the human spirit from its context and hand down a set of
moral absolutes, Marxism on the other hand refused to divide the human spirit form its
social context and sees morality as a part of this context, impossible to dissect from one
another.
Marx’s class theory is outdated due to extensive social mobility
Marx class theory, far from being dead, is more relevant than ever. There is a mass
concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands. While some billionaires earn more an
hour then the average person will ever see, 1/3 of the human population lives in slums. Marx
far from being obsessed with class wanted it gone. The mantra of social mobility is often
overplayed, you class background more than anything will define your social position. The
working class is now larger than ever, the stereotype of the white male blur-collar worker is,
and has always been, wrong. The working class has always consisted mostly of women, in
Marx time domestic workers where the largest part of the working class. Now in the
underdeveloped world sweatshops and agriculture make up the largest block, both of which
women make up the majority. In the supposed ‘developed’ world service jobs reign supreme,
also dominated by women. The is no break from the class model throughout any period of
capitalist development, from industrial to our modern, or more accurately postmodern,
capitalist state. In fact, there has been an intensification of class not the demise of it.
Marx call for revolution is at odds with democracy
Revolution is often characterised as violent in contrast with the supposed peacefulness of
reform. This of course is a false opposition; reform have often been extremely violent. The
fight for civil rights was far from peaceful, gay right wasn’t won over a cup of tea. In Latin
America many reforms were beaten back by US backed opposition which ended in genocidal
dictatorships. That socialist revolutions have been violent is not on the account of socialists,
it’s the propertied classes which rise in counter-revolution to keep the status que. Marxism
wants to use the proletarian rage which capitalism produces into a socialist revolution,
without Marxism there would still be proletarian rage, but it would full barbarism and not
socialism.
The working class is far from apathetic. Even if most workers seem to care little about
politics day-to-day, try shouting down their local hospital, close their industry down or build
an airport in their backyard and you will see that the working class is far from apathetic.
Marxism inevitably leads to authoritarianism and crushing
individualism
The liberal state is only un-authoritarian when its winning, sitting idly by until its critiques
pose a threat then all the talk of human rights, liberty and democracy go out the window.
Marx ultimate goal is to destroy the distinction between state and society, where people will
not live under democracy, but live as democracy each a vital part of democracy. Because of
this far from crushing individualism it makes the conditions where it can thrive.
The state, in liberal democracy, has two main goals firstly it’s to serve the interest of the
capitalist class, it also serves to hold together the social cohesiveness. These are most times
in line, at least in the long term, but sometimes come at conflict.
Feminism, environmentalism and postcolonialism marks a
new development in the left which has replaced the need more
Marxism
Marxism far from being in contrast with these movements in greatly improved by them, and
in turn improve them. Marxists have always been in the forefront for the fight for women’s
emancipation, and against colonialism and fascism. Marxism layer the bedrock many
feminist and anticolonial writes developed on top off. Marx has always considered sexual
reproduction an important part of historical development. Material and sexual production
are the two grand historical narratives inside Marxism, and they are greatly interlinked.
Women’s liberation cannot be completed without freeing their sexual reproduction from the
capitalist material one. Even though Marx was a European, it was in Asia and Africa his ideas
would strike through the most, Marxism has been the greatest anticolonial force in the
world.
Marx has always deeply cared for nature, and any true environmentalist cause must end
capitalism. As Engels writes
“We by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone
standing outside nature—but we, with flesh, blood and brains, belong to nature, and exist
in its midst, and all our mastery of its consists in the fact that we have the advantage over
all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws” (Engels, 1925)
Fine, Cordelia
Delusions of Gender (2010)
Part 1: Half-Changed World, Half Changed Minds
We Think, Therefore You Are
When given a piece of paper and asked to write down, according to cultural lore, what males
and females are like, you would most likely write down traits such as compassionate,
nurturing, and dependent for females and leader, analytical and competitive for men.
Interesting to note is that these traits are that of white middle class heterosexual cis men and
women. They are taken as the default and thus if not specified otherwise female traits mean
white, middle-class, and heterosexual female traits.
Even if you don’t buy into these gender stereotypes, your cultural context will pick up
patterns in media, advertising, society and so on, and create gendered associations, which
full your implicit bias. This implicit bias effect everyone, even those who hold progressive
views on gender. As an example of this, a group given biographies on famous women leaders
then tested on associations have a stronger association between women and traits such as
leadership then those not given the biographies. However, reading these biographies had no
effect on their belief on women’s leadership qualities.
Your concept of self is largely socially determined, often you reflect what you think people
think of you not some authentic self. We change your behaviour based on our environment;
we are primed by what we believe another think of us. For example, when French students
where first asked to rate the truth of gender stereotypes about math and art ability, then
asked what they scored on an important test they had two years ago, girls believed their arts
score to be higher than it really was, and their math score to be lower. Boys similarly marked
up their math scores. Even seemingly neutral primers can have an effect like the traditional
form question “Gender: Male / Female” have effects on how women and men rate their
verbal and math ability compared to those who were not gender primed.
We will often change our behaviour if we to accommodate others. In a Princeton study, one
group of women were told they would be talking to a man with more traditional view on
women, while another group where told they would be talking to men with a more modern
view on women. This changed not only their behaviour, but their self-perception. Those who
would talk to the traditionalist would adopt and internalise more traditionally feminine traits
and vis-à-vis. Your self-perception is not your own and rather shaped by the those around
you.
When given a photo of a cheerleader, professor, elderly man, and an African American man.
Two groups were asked to write about a typical day in that person’s life. One group wrote in
first person and were asked to imagine being the person, while the other wrote as an
observer in third person. Who they wrote about and how they wrote about them shaped their
self-perception. Writing of the cheerleader made them feel more attractive, the professor;
smarter, then elderly man; dependent and weak, and the African American; aggressive and
athletic. Your cultural context will both shape your implicit view of others and your selfperception.
Why You Should Cover Your Head with a Paper Bag if
You Have a Secret You Don’t Want Your Wife to Find Out
Women are generally viewed as more empathetic and people-oriented vs the cold and
analytic man. Bur is there any truth in this assertion. Well women certainly think they are
more empathetic. However, there is little to no correlation with how empathetic you think
you are and how empathetic you are. And this empathetic self-perception might drive them
to be more empathetic. The less obvious it was that its empathy that’s tested, the less of an
advantage woman have. So, on self-reports they rank themselves very empathetic, but in
unobtrusive psychological studies or facial/gestures measures of empathy they lose this
empathy.
The closer studies are to the practical use of empathy the less of an advantage woman had, in
the most practical no real differences were found. In one study two participants, one woman,
one man, where put into a room the experimenter leaves for a few minutes to replace a
projector bulb. This is where the real experiment begins. Their interaction was recorded.
When the experimenter returned, they were split up and went through the recording pausing
in moments, they recalled having a specific thought and if it was positive, neutral or negative.
They then go through it one more time now the recording stopped every time their partner
had a thought. The goal was to infer what the partner felt. The study found no differences
between men and women. In their first seven iterations. However later they found a female
advantage, the reason for this newfound empathetical advantage was that after guessing,
they were asked how accurate they thought their guess would be. For the women this would
remind them that as women they are supposed to be better at this sort of this and therefore it
further motivated them leading to better results. It was a question of motivation not ability.
This can be seen when trying to motivate men for empathy. The goal was to infer the feelings
of a women in a recording explaining her failure to get into the school she wanted. When the
study primed gender, a self-report on empathy, the women did better. However, when they
added in a monetary incentive to do well scores levelled.
In a similar study man were given some bogus science claiming that women sought after
more after men in touch with their feminine side. They then performed better at empathic
tests then a control group. When there was sex or money involved men seemed to be quite
good at empathy.
Your self-perception is a large part of your ability. In a study like one mentioned earlier, two
groups where to write about a day in the life of Paul, a Dutch student. The women that wrote
in first person would rate themselves more analytic and less emotionally sensitive. The ones
that wrote in third person saw no such effect. Men saw no such effect, probably due to them
already were male students. This did not just change their perception but their ability. In a
emotional sensitivity test given after the story writing, women did preform significantly
better, however if they were first asked to imagine themselves in as Paul for a few moments
before the test, preformed as poorly as the men.
Generally, when we don’t think of ourselves as “men” or “women” we don’t see differences in
judgement either.
Backward and in High Heels
A stereotype threat is a real-time of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a
negative stereotype about one’s group applies. People affected by negative stereotypes do
worse base of those stereotypes. When those stereotypes are removed so is the disadvantage.
In a test of spatial ability, three groups were given differing information prior to the test. One
was told that men outperform women probably to genetic reasons another was told the
opposite and a control group was not told either. Women did worse than men in both the
men-preform-better and control group. However, in the women-outperform-men group they
did as well as men. Similar test has been done in math ability and have found similar results,
where the non-threatened women even outperform the men.
A stereotype threat can be activated quite subtly, like crossing of on gender before a test,
recently watch a woman in a commercial act air-headed, have instructors or peers who,
consciously or not, hold sexist attitudes. The more subtle triggers seemingly also have the
largest effect.
The psychological reason stereotype threats make your ability worse is shown in a study
which two groups one under threat one not, where given a piece of paper before the test and
asked to write down what they here thinking. The ones under threat wrote down twice as
many negative emotions. Women put under threat actively thought about suppressing these
negative emotions, but this proved counterintuitive because one of the deciding factors on
how well you do is how focused you are on the test, actively suppressing negative emotions
takes up mental resources which would be better spent on the test and therefore they
preform worse. This effect is found in any group which is put under threat.
This effect might be part of the explanation for why there are less women at the top of their
fields in some scientific displaces like math, as they progress upwards, the less female role
models they have to look up to, there is an stronger and stronger association between math
ability and men, as the further up you go the more men there are, because of this association
women are put under a stereotype threat which worsen their performance and therefore
their advancement. There is some proof for this woman in math classes with more men have
a stronger male-math association, and having this association does worsen your math ability
I Don’t Belong Here
Male dominated workplaces and professions, although not outright discriminating towards
women, can often signal to them that they don’t really belong. This can be as simple as
having less diverse recruitment, which makes women less interested. Ads with sexist
attitudes, such as men are better at math, can change the career aspiration of women. It
doesn’t need to be direct either. If you describe the qualities needed for a job in more maleassociated terms, like risk-taking or aggressive rather than more neutral ones like creative
and well-informed will affect how interested they are in those occupations.
One strategy woman uses to blend more in into male dominated fields is simply to become
more manly. As you progress you the ranks of math, the women feel less and less interested
in traditionally feminine things like wanting children, wearing makeup esc. This was not
because those more manlike where more interested in math, but that so move forward in the
field the women jettisoned their feminine interest. Women given a paper with a stereotype
threat, boys are better at math, vs those given a neutral article. Women under threat
reported themselves less feminine than those who read the non-threating paper.
There is good reason for these women to try and jettison their femininity, as in male
dominated fields they often report being ignored, not taken seriously, assumed to be a
secretary or not knowledgeable at the topic, sheading there femininity was a way of fighting
against this.
The Glass Workplace
Given a identical CV but one with a women’s name and one with a man’s. The man is more
likely to be recommended and is given a higher salary. This discrimination is even higher
against mothers. One of the reasons why men are presumed better is that identical behaviour
between men and women is interoperated differently. Women are stuck between a rock and
a hard place if they show confidence and comfort with power necessary for the job they are
viewed as “competent but cold” if they lack these attributes they are “nice but incompetent”.
Similarly, the reason given for not hiring someone is not that they are a woman but other
qualities they have or lack. However, these qualities are not judged equally. One given two
CVs one with lots of work experience but little education and vis-à-vis, one being male and
the other being female. What was more important seemed to vary based on which one the
women had. If the women were the best educated, work experience was the most important,
if she had the more work experience education played a bigger part. And when they get into
the job they are expected to do more and a better job than the men for the same amount of
credit, for example men who go beyond there call of duty are liked for their effort, but not
disliked if they choose not to. For women if they don’t do it they are disliked, and if they do
they see no positive change in opinion. There is also a glass cliff. Women are often hired into
more difficult times for a company then men, who are hired more when the company is
doing well. This leads to women seemingly failing more, because they are putt in more risky
situations.
XX-Clusion and XXX-Clusion
We often think that gender discrimination is a thing of the past. However, is there any truth
to this? Michael Selmi makes the case that discrimination is not, yet a thing of the past and
lingering biases still shapes the way women are treated in the job marked. In a review of
class-action employment discrimination cases from the nineties to the early to thousands.
Women are kept out of high-paying jobs by management. The justification given is that
women simply prefer these kinds of jobs, although this might be hard to argue when there
suing you for that exact “preferred” treatment. Women are kept isolated for these positions
in many ways; in interviews with wall street professionals confirm that it was taken for
granted that exclusively white males were sent to make big deals, because they assumed that
their counterpart would also be a group of white men which would make things easier. They
are also not given as much insider information. This led to women generally being in
positions to make less revenue, and therefore they were passed over for promotions.
There are other less direct ways which women are kept out of important parts of the job. Lots
of negotiations, deals and important out-of-work socialisation are born not in the office but
at the golf course or the strip club. Golf courses often segregate by sex meaning that women
are excluded from this avenue, why the strip club deals putt women off doesn’t need to be
noted, however, even if they decide to push through the discomfort, they find they are often
not wanted. Being reminded that the women are in fact not purely sexual objects can put a
bummer on the whole experience.
In addition to these ways to keep women out of important elements to gain rank, they are
often given a more direct message of “you’re not welcome”. Sexual harassment in male
dominated industries is a systemic issue. Over half of women in business have been sexually
harassed at work and close to 70% of female engineers. They also find difficulty in expressing
discomfort with the sexual harassment they face, if they bring it up or complain they are
deemed as “sensitive” and “bitchy”. So, what they most often do is nothing, as it seems like
the only safe choice.
Women’s treatment at work has improved immensely over time, but seemingly we always
think that now finally we fixed the issue, then years later we look back and say “how did we
think that was equality? At least now its fixed” seemingly endlessly repeating apathy.
Gender Equality Begins (or Ends) at Home
The reason women still take up most of the homework is often justified with those men on
average make more a therefore have a better bargain position. Empirically we see this up to a
point, the closer the pay the more equal is the homework distribution. However, curiously
when the women start making more the trend flips. The successful businesswomen do more
homework than her unemployed husband.
There have been given numerus biological explanations for this, hormonal differences,
neurological differences and so on. Weirdly the biological sex differences found often seems
to justify the status que.
Gender equality 2.0?
The sociobiologist will claim that they are the ones that truly stand for equality, allowing men
and women to blossom into their biological potential, it’s the environmentalists that want to
force people to go against their nature. You should be critical of this; it only serves to justify
the status que. Preferences don’t come from a vacuum, they are formed and shaped by
society. People will want to do things that reward them, getting discriminated against,
sexually harassed, and kept down the ladder generally are not seen as rewarding. This is the
real reason for both the vertical and horizontal gender segregation.
In the republic of Armenia during the 80s and 90s the computer science class was 75%
women. This is compared to the 15% in the us. One of the reasons for this is because in
Armenia there is no cultural push to love your work, work was what you did between life, not
the other way around. Most people found happiness through their friends and family
instead. This shows how cultural factors which seemingly don’t have anything with gender to
do can have a huge effect on the gender segregated job marked.
Part 2: Neurosexism
The “Fetal Fork”
One of the vital ways men and women are different, according to sociobiologists, is pre-natal
testosterone. At six weeks male foetuses get testosterone. There have been studies showing
how this can influence the behaviour of rats or birds. However, we must be careful when
applying findings in rats to humans, even though mammals shear similarities, like males in
both do have penises and they shear a similar function, when it comes to the complexity of
behaviour a rat brain in a human body would do no good even up to scale. The amount of
brain given to high-level thinking takes up most of the human brain, but barely any in a rat.
The hypothesize is that there is a hormone-brain-behaviour connection, I stress hypothesize
as this proved hard to show empirically. There is a fair bit of connection between hormone
brain, as they have found that in male rats a part of the brain (part of the preoptic nucleus) is
larger than in female ones and giving female one’s testosterone in early life will grow this
part, and stopping male ones from getting it causes it to stay the same size. But going from
brain to behaviour proved more difficult. As Roger Gorski putt it in 1995 “We’ve been
studying this nucleus for 15 years, and we still don’t know what it does”. And a decade later
neuroendocrinologist Geert De Vries claimed they were “not an inch closer” to working it
out. Even the hormone-brain connection has come into question. Seemingly some of the
difference can be explained by differences in maternal treatment as male rats were liked
more, due to their higher testosterone levels, female rats with injected testosterone were
liked equally by the mother. If untreated female rats were given a stimulus for being liked,
they saw growth in the same bran part without any testosterone, although the growth was
not as large as the male one. The conclusion we can draw is that in the real world you often
don’t find neat x causes y causes z, and there might be many ways from early hormones to
end points of interest, often convoluted ones. The interaction between brain hormones and
environment and how that might create behaviour is extremely complex in rats, imagine how
complex it must be in humans.
In “The Darkness of The Womb” (and The First Few
Hours in The Light)
One problem with studying the effects of fetal testosterone is that very few babies are blood
tested. To then get a view into fetal testosterone levels they have to test other things that
correlate with them, like maternal testosterone levels in pregnant mothers, amniotic
testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid (the fluid that surrounds the foetus. Or digit ratio; a
measure the ratio between the fourth (ring) finger and the second (index) finger (2D:4D), in
women the index finger is of equal length or slightly longer. The idea behind this
measurement is that fetal testosterone correlates with it. It’s important to note researchers
don’t know how well or if it even correlates at all with fetal testosterone. But that doesn’t
seem to stop anyone.
In a large study by Simon Baron-Cohen, they examined the effects on amniotic testosterone
on later empathising skills. They tested empathising in multiple different ways; frequency of
eye contact with a parent during play at twelve-month-old, quality of social relationship at
four (assessed by the mother), propensity to use mental-state words, scores on the child
version of EQ (assessed by the mother), and performance in a child version of Reading the
Minds with the Eyes test. So, where there any differences found, from the start; no, not
really, not really, no, and yes. However, in that last yes, there girls and boys preformed
equally.
Some studies have tried to sow a connection between amniotic testosterone and systemising.
However, most have run into problems like a systemising questioner (filled out by the
mother) included questions like “in annoyed if this aren’t done on time” or “notices if things
in the house have been moved or changed” how this measures a mind driven to understand
the rules of a law-bound universe and not a measure on the Fussbudget quotient. A toy study
ran into similar problems as boy toys where assumed systemising while girl toys where not,
even though the neutral toys appeared more systemising than both.
Other studies on the correlation between fetal testosterone and things like math ability or
visuospatial ability have found much support for the fetal testosterone-abilities link.
Accuracy on a mental rotation test at age seven? No correlation. A four-year-olds ability to
copy a block structure, understand several facts and concepts, and counting and sorting? No
correlation, the correlation even decreases in girls. Puzzle solving? Nope. Classification
skills? No. Spatial ability? Also no. There has also been no success in finding a correlation
between digit ratio and scores on the SQ (systemizing quotient).
Simon Baron-Cohen has also tested the difference in empathising and systemising abilities of
nonatals, a study with gained quite a lot of popularity. However, the problem with it is that it
just isn’t any good. It’s fought with methodological and theoretical problems meaning
nothing of value can be learned from it. Even if this study’s finding could be taken as true, it
doesn’t seem like this innate advantage has given them well an advantage. A large study by
psychologist Elizabeth Spelke found no difference in systemising abilities between male and
female. And lastly, the thing is that we simply have no proof that interest in looking at
different things in a neonatal stage has any bearing on later abilities.
The Brain of a Boy in the Body of a Girl… or a Monkey?
Women have in larger number been entering into almost all academic fields. Their newfound
numbers in fields such as biology, psychology, medicine, forensic and veterinary science is
often explaining as it reflects the feminine propensity to nurture. However, why is the
nurture angel so important now? Is when males where the majority in the field the nurture
angel didn’t seem too important. And it there really lots of nurture in looking at cells in a
microscope. Even if the most people-oriented field of the bunch like psychology, the main
drive is to understand the rules and law of the mind—one might say the system of the mind.
If in future, we see an increasing number of women in business this will be explained away
by stating that business is a people-oriented field and therefore it attracts women. It seems
less like fields are gendered and moreso like we apply gender to them based on the male:
female ratio.
There has been some study into girls with CAH, a condition with gives them more
testosterone and the development of male external genitalia, which is often removed through
surgery. The results are mixed, they score lower on some empathising test equal on others,
have more systemising on some less on others. They generally report more interest in
traditionally male interests then other girls and as children they generally play more with
boy toys then other girls. However, the dichotomy between boy and girl toy can be somewhat
self-reinforcing, a staple boy toy a Lincoln Logs construction set had to be removed because
girls kept playing with it.
A theory by Frances Burton puts the data in a new light, it might be that hormonal changes
don’t directly predispose them for certain kinds of toys, but rather predisposes them towards
receptive to whatever behaviour happens to go with their own sex. So, it’s not that the extra
testosterone leads to more interest in toys with a systemizing stimulus, but it does lead to a
higher interest in whatever boy toys are. One apparent win for the sociobiologists is that we
find gender differences in toy preference cross-species. Monkeys show a similar gender
division in toy preferences (although it’s hard to know what attracts the monkey to the toys
as they do not have the same cultural context as they do in human society). Interestingly if
we treat monkeys pre-natally with a testosterone boost, we so no difference in their toy
preferences. Untreated males and treated males have the same preferences and untreated
females, and treated females have the same preferences. This means that testosterone don’t
bring about this toy preference. The reason for the difference can be that monkey like
humans have different gender norms, across, and even within species. Male involvement in
child rearing ranges to hands-off to intimate. This means that hormonal differences cannot
explain the differing behaviour because it’s not universal.
Fetal testosterone has become a common explanation for why there persists gender
differences in scientific fields. However, a closer look at the field shows that it too messy to
really draw anything from, you can find studies that claim that fetal testosterone increased,
is the same as or decreased systemizing. In this case such as in the many prior ones, the
grand claims of finding finally a biological difference that explains the differing gender
behaviour was vastly stronger than the actual science that’s supposed to back them up.
Sex and Premature Speculation
Access to newer neuroimage technology and brain scans do bring us a great deal of new
information. However, we must keep in mind that in the past wrapping a tape measure
around your skull was seen as the height of technology. These new technologies are useful,
but we should be careful in reading too much into them as we have previously read into skull
size.
In psychology p refers to probably and shows the chance that a difference between two
groups has appeared by chance. If the probability is 5% or less, they can publish a significant
finding. Although chance is an issue in almost all research fields its particularly relevant in
the findings of sex differences in neuroscience. The reason behind this is that neuroscientists
usually use a low sample size, because scans are expensive so. In addition to this if what
you’re studying shows no gender difference, it’s not something you mention, the title “No Sex
Difference in picture memorisation ability” isn’t too exciting. And this is no sin, after all you
probably didn’t set out to study gender differences so seeing no difference in of no interest.
So, if there’s 19 studies that don’t find any difference, they don’t mention it, but the 1 in 20
which find a difference (due to pure chance) will get a paper on sex differences published.
This creates the effect that there is seemingly a lot of studies proving a sex difference and few
seen no difference.
There is a great deal of debate within neuroscience about how exactly statistical analysis
should be done. As neuroscience seems to be prone to spurious findings, this is due to the
factors already mentioned and that neuroscience is still in its infancy. We cannot see brain
activity, only proxies for it. It can seemingly find differences in randomly created groups.
A theory supposed that doe to prenatal testosterone differences, males, developed a larger
right brain. This created the idea that men have more specialisation in the brain, left and
right work more independently and there relatively underdeveloped left side processed
language, while women use both parts in a more cooperative manner due to their larger
corpus collosum (a bundle of neutrons connecting the left and right brain). This would mean
that women would have higher language lateralization while men would rely on the left side
for their language cognition. Even though this theory of the lateralized male brain was deeply
flaw from its beginning, the emergence of neuroscience has caused a flood of research into
this theory. Iris Sommer studies all functional imaging studies of language lateralization in a
metanalysis. The first metanalysis included more than 800 participants, and the second had
more than 2000. In they found no significant sex difference in functional language
lateralization. Interestingly they also found that studies that found a sex difference had a
smaller sample size then those who didn’t, this suggest there might be the reporting bias of
spurious results. She also investigated some older ways at looking at the sex difference in
language lateralization, the right ear gives the input to the left side of the brain and vis-à-vis.
This would mean that men have a right-ear advantage in language processing. However, in a
metanalysis of over 4000 participants no difference was found. In a study of stroke victims,
one would expect that male stroke victims that suffered the stroke on the left side would be
more affected in their language lateralization, however no such difference was found. Even if
there was a difference it doesn’t seem to do men much harm, as there is no difference in
language ability.
The evidence that women think more bilaterally also seems to be on shaky ground. In a
metanalysis they found that there was no difference between sexes on the structure of the
corpus callosum. To summarize, a non-existent difference in language laterization is
mediated through a nonexcited difference in the structure of the corpus callosum are widely
believed to explain a non-existent difference in language skills.
What Does it All Mean, anyway?
Geuss, Raymond
Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)
Introduction
A popular slogan among political philosophers is “politics is applied-ethics”. There are two
possible readings of this slogan, the first being rather unproblematic that people in general
seek to do good or at least think that what they do is good. Of course, it must be noted that
people’s ideas of good are shaped by their actions, most people don’t work after a thought
through moral framework, their ideas of right and wrong are half-baked. They often don’t
know what they want or why they did something. Humans are not rational actor, and their
ideas change over time, often precisely by putting their moral ideas into practise. With that
in mind the slogan seems quite reasonable, however, often it’s meant to allude to its second
meaning. The second meaning states that we can first completely figure out ethics, find an
ideal world to aspire to then apply this theory secondly to political agents.
If we, as we should, reject this view and seek to build philosophy based on the material world
and not some ideal one, here are four thesis’s which Geuss makes the case for. Firstly,
political philosophy must be realist, this means it must first and foremost not be concerned
with how people ought to do, but rather on the social, political, and economic institutions of
a society and what really moves people to act. The second is that political philosophy must
recognise that politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about
the mere beliefs or propositions. The third thesis is that politics is historically located. This is
not an objection toward generalising, but towards excessive generalising. There are no
interesting “eternal questions” of political philosophy. It is almost impossible to construct
some universal truth about human, other than the simple such as “humans need to eat”. And
those are uninteresting to political philosophy. The fourth and final thesis is that politics is
more like an exercise of craft or art, than like traditional conceptions pf what happens when
theory is applied. It requires the development of skills and forms of judgement that cannot
easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinised, and that
do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories.
Furthermore, this essay will critique many of the well-entrenched of philosophy, the is/ought
distinction and the normative and descriptive. It seeks to do this not though attacking them
head on, but rather to cast of the limitations of these kinds of distinctions put on and view
how much more enlightening political theory can be to us.
Gould, Stephen Jay
The Mismeasure of Man (1996)
A look through the history of measuring intelligence is the best measure to fight the current
day of scientific racism, as their customs, fallacies and motives have changed little. From the
measurement of skull volume to cranial length to the misuse of the IQ test none have ever
come any closer to justifying the measurement of intelligence as one number, as the original
inventor of IQ Binet stressed, they have not shown its innateness, they have not shown its
heritability, and they have not shown its immutability. From Broca to Murry the central
problems of them theorize still stand. The consequences of them theorize have been a great
toll on humanity, the people set aside, destined for greatness, because they didn’t score high
enough on a meaningless test. The justification for colonialism and the operation of women
and the poor.
“If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great
is our sin” -Darwin
Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition: Thoughts
at Age Fifteen
The main reason for the rerelease 15 years after the original was the realise of The Bell Curve
(Murray & Herrnstein, 1994). Adding new essays responding to the claims made within the
book. The main takeaway is that in many ways the original 1980 version already in many
ways dealt with the claims made within The Bell Curve before it was ever realised. The
arguments of biological determinists have not changed much over time. Gould concludes:
We can easily get lost in the minutiae of abstract academic arguments. But we must never
forget the human meaning of lives diminished by these false arguments—and we must,
primarily for this reason, never flag in our resolve to expose the fallacies of science misused
for alien social purposes
Introduction
Gould sets out to cover all instances of biological determinism which tries to measure
intelligence in one number, this is mainly craniometry and intelligence measurements.
Phenology, although flawed in almost every way, in not included here due to its usage of
multiple intelligences.
American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks
and Indians as a Separate, Inferior Species
There was a debate within academic circles of polygenism or monogenism. Polygenism
claiming that the different races of human are in fact different species, however this never
got to popular due to its break with scripture, claiming multiple Adams. Monogamists
claimed that all races where in fact part of one species, this doesn’t mean it was in any way
less racist the polygenism, their claim has rather that the inferior races diverged from the
original Adam which was the superior white. The most popular explanation for this diversion
was climate.
Louise Agassiz was a leading spokesperson for polygeny. He was mainly a theorist and didn’t
collect much in the term off empirical data. Agassiz race model should be easy to guess,
whites at the top, Asians or ‘yellows’ in the middle and blacks at the bottom. Nothing was
more dangerous and degenerate for Agassiz as interracial marriage.
Samuel George Morton became the empiricist for polygeny, he was an avid collector of skulls
owning more than 600. Morton set out to measure the intelligence of the different races, he
did this through the volume inside of the skull. His results, not surprisingly, found that the
established racial hierarchy was based on innate ability. Gould finds in his analysis Morton
makes several fatal mistakes, importantly he does not conclude that Morton purposefully
fudged the numbers and more, so his biases played unconsciously into his measurement and
analysis. This is shown best in his exclusion of the Hindu sample in when measuring the
average for whites, due to their small skulls but the inclusion of the Inca Peruvians sample in
the Indian average even though they have smaller skulls then their other Indian
counterparts. Some of these subgroups like the Eskimos had averages above that of whites,
Morton buried these results in with lower average groups. When Gould corrects this and the
many other mistakes in Morton work, he finds that all races have similar averages of around
83-87 cubic inches.
The pre-Darwin science was flawed in many ways, numbers were gathered in very subjective
ways and other variables where completely emitted, Morton work in all ways, measurement
and analysis was deeply flawed, and yet there where cases, such as the Eskimo which he
could explain away.
Measuring Heads: Pail Broca and the Heyday of Craniology
Robert Bennett Bean tried to measure intelligence from the size of the corpus callosum—a
structure within the brain connecting the left and right hemispheres—where he
unsurprisingly found that whites where better off than blacks, also unsurprisingly the
numbers he reported where entirely wrong. The first question we should ask is why the move
away from measuring the brain itself, the reasoning was simple, when using brain size, he
found no difference and therefor it had to be wrong, he even went on to claim that the equal
size actually shows that blacks where inferior, claiming the brains from white people where
from poor whites while the brains of the black people where from differing classes. Later
when Beans experiment was repeated, by Franklin P. Mall, with the important difference
that he didn’t know which brains where from white and black people he found no difference
in brain size.
Paul Broca became one of the most influential craniologists of his time. He, unlike earlier
craniologists, was extremely careful in gathering data and the methods in which he did so.
Due to this we can mostly trusts that Broca’s numbers are correct, however his bias still came
through mainly in selecting what to measure and his analysis of his numbers. He already had
his theory and looked for the numbers to support the current racial hierarchy. He tried
multiple different measurements to justify this and dropped then if they proved to go against
his ideal racial hierarchy.
For example, brain size served as a double-edged sword as they did find that black had a
lower number then whites, but certain ‘inferior’ races proved superior through these
measurements, he then argued that brain size did somewhat correlate with intelligence,
small brains meant little intelligence, however large brains didn’t necessarily mean a large
intelligence. Also faced with the fact that Germans did have larger brains then the French he
suddenly learned the importance of relative size, age and type of death. And he then
corrected the number for these factors and found the French to be superior, he did not
extend this favour to his weighing of black and Indian brains.
The case of the foramen magnum—the hole in the base of the skull. An alternative
measurement was the find the relative position of the foramen magnum, theorising that the
more backward the more ape-like it was and therefore inferior. However, this ran into some
problems as the measurements found that blacks had a more forward position than whites.
Broca then explains that this really shows the inferiority of blacks, as they have more brain in
the back and not the front, beamed to be superior, this explained its position. Gould sums up
Broca’s carrier as follows:
I can imagine no better illustration of his method—shifting criteria to work through good
data toward desired conclusions. Heads I’m superior; tails, you’re inferior
Measuring Bodies: Two Case Studies of the Apishness of
Undesirables
Recapitulation was the concept that lesser stages of more developed species represented a
higher stage in a less developed species. This was used as a justification for white male
superiority, the idea being that the adult form of ‘inferior’ human—women, blacks and the
poor—as equivalent to that of a white male child. This idea was popular inside craniometry
and psychology. This was used as justification for imperialism, because the ‘inferior’ races
couldn’t properly use the land. The idea comes up again in the famous poem White Man’s
Burden “Half devil, half child”.
Furthermore, this theory was used to categorise so-called ‘born-criminals’—importantly not
all criminals were categorized as ‘born-criminals’ Lombroso believed them to only represent
40% of criminals. They supposedly posseted qualities alike with lesser developed animals—
note that this, for them, would include ‘inferior’ races—making them aggressive and
predisposed to commit crime, specifically Lombroso believed in atavism that traits reappear
after being lost to evolution. Lombroso was in the forefront of this movement which he called
criminal anthropology; his analysis of a criminal body went on to influence Bram Stoker’s
Dracula. Funnily enough to complete his theory, he would have to, and did, argue that
children were inherently criminal, due to their lesser development. And, like a broken
record, he also pointed to brain size, however the actual size difference was extremely small
1450cc vs 1484cc. Lombroso was extremely influential not only in academic but in the
treatment of criminals, his theories could be used as proof of criminality, although this
wasn’t too widespread. Lombroso personally argued in favour of capital punishment for
‘born criminals. Recapitulation was largely appended by later scientists not only in these
racist pseudoscience’s but in academia as a whole.
There are some modern parallels to draw, the moral panic around XYY males, who were
supposedly extremely criminal, mostly based of the logic that due to men being more
criminal and that women don’t have an Y chromosome, Y was a supposed criminal
chromosome and YY then being doubly so.
The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention
IQ was originally invented by Alfred Binet in service of the French state, its purpose was not
to measure intelligence but to identify children in French schools who needed special
education. IQ was calculated by finding the ‘mental age’ of a child, and then its subtracted
from the chronical age of the child. Children found to be behind in mental age were given
special education. Binet was extremely careful in how he interpreted the number Gould
summarises his three main principles:
1. The scores are a practical device; they do not buttress any theory of
intellect. They do not define anything innate or permanent. We may
not designate what they measure of “intelligence” or any other reified
entity.
2. The scale is a rough, empirical guide for identifying mildly retarded
and learning-disabled children who need special help. It is not a
device for ranking normal children.
3. Whatever the cause of difficulty in children identified for help,
emphasis shall be placed upon improvement through special training.
Low scores shall not be used to mark children as innately incapable.
The hereditarian fallacy: 1. The equation of heritable and inevitable—that it’s an
unchanging variable. Being near sighted is somewhat heritable, however with
glasses this heritable disadvantage is completely subverted. 2. The confusion of
within- and between-group heredity—that if hereditary explanations can explain
differences within a group, they must t be able to explain differences between
groups.
Goddard is credited with introducing the IQ test in America, he viewed IQ as an
innate and heritable intelligence. Goddard used three levels of mental deficiency.
Idiots—with a mental age under 3, imbeciles—with a mental age from 3-7 and his
own invention the moron—with the mental age of 7-12. He viewed the moron as the
most dangerous, as the idiot and imbecile would be easy to identify and deal with,
he moron, on the other hand, could live their life unidentified and propagate their
‘undesirable’ genes. Furthermore, Goddard took the Mendelian view that complex
traits could be explained by single genes. Therefore ‘feeble-mindedness’—used to
encompass all three categorize of mental deficiency—was due to one single gene.
The implication being clear, those with the ‘feeble-minded’ gene should not be
allowed to breed. This would be done through initialization and sterilisation. A In
his research he found surprisingly high levels of feeble-mindedness—mostly due to
his tests coming from people just of the boat from Europe, which had been
identified as looking like those of a feeble-mind. He later abandoned most of his
views. He claimed to have set the upper-limit for moronity far too high, and that
they needed to be institutionalized, claiming that through education they could live
useful lives to society. He even claims that “I have gone over to the enemy” totally
abandoning his work.
Lewis M. Terman created the modern IQ test called the Stanford-Binet. The test claiming to
measure innate intelligence used a variety of questions, with very strict answers not open to
other cultural interpretations and creative answers. The test was constructed so that an
‘average’ child would score 100 with a deviation of 15 depending on how far their mental age
is from there chronological age. Terman is credited with causing the mass-popularity of the
IQ test now being used widely in schooling. He believed that your IQ was an innate quality
and that it could, and should, be used to determine what work you could and couldn’t do. He
theorised that IQ would correlate with social status, he found only an extremely weak
correlation (0.4). Terman, in the face of the Great Depression, where almost all were of low
social status, abandoned his views. Not publicly but his later work scarily mention heredity
framing the reason for most differences in environmental terms.
Goddard interduce the IQ test, Terman popularized it, now all it needed was credibility in
academia, here we are introduced to Robert M. Yerkes. Yerkes started a large project, the
largest of its kind, testing army recruits. The test was done in 3 parts giving a standard grade
score A-F. Alpha, the first test, would be given to everyone, Beta—supposedly being less
reliant on literacy—to those who failed Alpha failures in Beta would be given individually. He
mostly found what he was looking for, immigrants and blacks did worse than whites. But
there was one problem the white average was only a mental age slightly above 13, he used
Goddard’s version of the scale. This would put almost half the population as morons or
worse. The reason for the low score was multiple, the test was done in horrible, and varied
between camps or even between times at the same camp, conditions. The direction given and
the general structure, although supposedly supposed to follow a strict formula, varied
greatly. Most the test, even the Beta ones, relied on some level on literacy, knowledge of
writing, numbers, and American culture due to this a lot of questions where simply not
understood by the recruits. This resulted in a great deal of zero scores on test parts, in some
part taking up 40% of the score. Yerkes found several environmental factors practically
begging to be read from his numbers—like health-condition duration of stay for immigrants,
here results improved as much as 2 and a half in short vs long term residents—however he
always found increasingly obtuse ways to get around them.
Yerkes findings had great impact on American immigration policy C. C. Brigham was in the
forefront of this change, mostly basing his theory of Yerkes numbers. Writing pop-science
book An Study of American Intelligence (Birgham, 1923), arguing for the superiority of
white, especially northern whites, and the inferiority of blacks, south Europeans and Jews.
Brigham, like Goddard and Terman before him, later changed his mind, acknowledging that
Yerkes tests where in large part based on language and cultural skills and that the Alpha and
Beta scale couldn’t be combined. This change although came too late as American
immigration policy was already changed, and many Europeans, especially Jews, fleeing a
pre-World War 2 Europe were sent back.
The Real Error of Cyril Burt: Factor Analysis and the
Reification of Intelligence
Sir Cyril Burt was extremely influential in the development of Specimens g-factor, widely
regarded and helped shape educational policy in Britain. He, however, was also a forger, all
his work after 1940 has, rightly, been discarded as he simply made up the numbers, his
earlier work seems to be honest, if still inaccurate. And this is where Gould turns his focus,
not on the obvious fakes, but on his honest flaws in his early work. To do this, we must
understand factor analysis:
Factor analysis is a mathematical technique for reducing a complex system of
correlations into fewer dimensions. It works, literally, by factoring a matrix,
usually a matrix of correlation coefficients. Geometrically, the process of factoring
amounts to placing axes through a football of points.
This can be represented diametrically where the original
measurements are represented as a vector. The cosine
between them, and them to the axes, shows their
correlation (Fig.6.4).
The picture shows eight vectors in two clusters of four,
both highly correlated with axis 1 and the other vectors
within their group. Impotent to note is that in factor
analysis some information is lost in reducing the
dimensions, however it gives us more explanatory power.
If we bring in the case of reification—meaning awarding
physical meaning to all strong principal components—
this can be done correctly, but it’s important to note that
a high correlation on its own doesn’t mean anything on
its own, you will need other data to justify reifying a
principle. This is the flaw of Charles Spearman. He found
that mental test scores, unsurprisingly, highly correlate
with one another with his first principle which he called
general intelligence or g (fig 6.6). He believed this to be
one real entity. This reification is incorrect because it
brings in no future data to support itself, it can be
interpreted as purely hereditary and purely
environmental. Futhermore there is no real justification,
mathmatical or other, for this spesific rotation of axies, if
instead of arbitrarily putting the axis between the
clusters we put the axis as close to the clusters as
possible (Fig 6.7) we find that Math correlates higly with
axis 1 and poorly with 2, and vis-a-versa for verbal.
Importently g has disappeared, without the loss or gain
of any information. This shows that both of these
interpritations cannot be proven without outside data.
Factor analysis should only be used as a tool of
simplification, it cannot on its own, with casual
relationships.
Spearman not only used factor analysis, he invented it
and its invention was to investigate the nature of
inteligence. Spearman used a two-factor explenation one,
already discussed, called g and another to explane the
information not explaned by g called specific information or s. Now happy with his concution
he theorised about the posible reification of g. He belived it to reprisent some type of ‘mental
energy’, or the cortex, s then reprisented spesific groups of neurons. After Spearman failed to
find any reification of g, he abandond that g could be reified. Spearman belived that the s
factor where the result of training, while g was inherited. He specilated that there might be
inherant inteligence diffrences between races and classes, but all in all he simpely dident pay
much mind to the political implications of his theory.
The job of connecting Spearman’s g to a hereditary reading was up to Burt. The innateness of
g was supposedly proven by Burt in his first paper in 1909. In later publications he always
cites back to this paper for proof of the innateness of g. However, when we investigate the
1909 paper, there is a series of logical and data problems with the study. The study had a
ridiculously small sample of sixty-nine—of various class backgrounds, he then had them
ranked by ‘impartial’ judges—the headmaster, teachers and two other boys. After that they
were tested, Burt found that twelve of the tests had a correlation over 0.5 with the ranking,
the ones that didn’t tested ‘lower-senses’ such as touch and feel. The upper-class boys did
better in the tests, which lead Burt to conclude that they were more intelligence, i. e had
more g. Now he went on to explain why these results much be innate. Because there was a
small monthly cost to attending school, that meant that the children all came from
environments that could afford this fee, therefore environment had no effect. Yeah, if you’re
not starving your environment will have no effect on you. He retested the boys eighteen
months later, when their environment had somewhat changed and found no real difference,
this concluded that their intelligence as innate. Now having shown that the upper-class
children had an innate larger intelligence, he went on to test its hereditariness. He did not do
this through testing the parents and comparing, but he assumed it from their profession and
class status. This argument is clearly circular, he measured the ranking of the children by
observers—this records environment, and not genetics—then he correlated that with the
tests—which was a more imperfect a measure of the same thing. And all that supposedly
proved hereditariness, furthermore the test results were often not the actual test results, they
were adjusted based on his, and other observers, assessment of their failures and successes.
That this act disproves that a single short test can show intelligence, Burt doesn’t seem to
realize that. This is what Burt cited as his proof for the rest of his carrier.
Burt made some contributions to
Spearman’s theory. He interdicted
group factors, he identified that under
Spearman’s two-factor theory there
would be no formation of sub clusters,
due to their only common variance, g,
was already accounted for. He
reasoned that g should go between sub
clusters, which he identified as group
factors. When it came to reification
Burt seemingly contradicted himself
often, at the same time warning
against the temptations and giving in
to just that temptation, like claiming
that group factors where definite areas
of the cerebral cortex. Burt’s work had a great deal of effect on British education policy, the
11+ examination was a measure of Spearman’s g and decided which schools the kid would be
sent to. 20% going to grammar school—with the possibility of higher education—and 80%
would be sent technical or second modern school, branded as unfit for higher education.
This meant that due to Burt’s work the vast majority of students couldn’t enter higher
education.
The best way to refute the g-factor, might be to illumirate an compeating theory, which is
equally as incorrect. L. L. Thurstone, developed a theory on the same basis as Spearman, the
same data, and the same method. But he came to radically different conclutions. First lets
start with his critiqe of g. Thurstone assumed that the twelve tests used by Spearman and
Burt tested three different parts of the mind A, B and C. Of the twelve eight measure C, two
measure B and two measure A Testers cant know what the underlying factor their testing is
and therefore cant acount for its effect. Because of this what g is measuring varries from test
to test (see Fig. 6.10 and was completely arbitrary. He also rejected group factors because if
they where supposed to be reified they could’t have negative value only positive or zero.
Thurstone belived that inteligence could be measured, but instead of having one axis in the
middle of all the clusters (like in Fig. 6.6) he would have multiple axis reprisenting multiple
types of inteligence (like in Fig. 6.7). His base model included seven types of inteligence—
verbal, word fluency, number computation, spatial visualization, associtative memory,
perpceptual speed and reasoning. He called this theory primal mental abilities or PMA and
went on to say that g was mearly a dilution . Spearman and Burt critiqed Thurman on the
basis that PMA measurments where equaly as arbitrary as g and that his theory diden’t show
some alternative reality but mearly a different reading of the same data. But they dident
seem to notice that their crituqe equally dismisses there own theory. Gould concludes when
comparing the two thoeies:
We are left only with the matchmatics, and therfore cannot validate either system.
Both are plauged with the conceptial error of reification. Factor analysis is a fine
descriptive tool; I do not think that it will uncover the elusive (and illusory)
factors, or vectors, of mind. Thurstone dethroned g not by being right with his
alternative system, but by being equally wrong—and thus exposing the
methological error of the entire enterprise.
Thurstone went on to develop his theory to include
correlated axis which better fit the different intelligences.
This led him to conclude that a secondary g did exist, this
has led some, Jensen, to say that he all but capitulated.
But his and Spearman’s theory vary in three important
ways 1. Spearman’s g was dominating and hierarchical.
Thurstone’s was secondary in that it came after what he
called primary abilities. In addition, Thurstone’s g
accounted for a minority of the information, Spearman’s
g accounted for over half. 2. They still help completely
different believes of the reification of g. both being
equally unsupported by biology. 3. Spearman and Burt’s
g was innate, heritable, and dominating making the
genetic intelligence of someone’s character. Thurstone did not enable such a hierarchical
view, his g was secondary and weak.
The modern theorist needs little attention, as Murry and Jensen inherited their mistake from
Spearman and Burt. They have not solved the problems with their theories, they more so
added onto these problems. Jensen was even more extreme than Spearman, he believed that
every creature could be ranked in this hierarchy from moth to pig to human to possible alien
life, all sheared the same g-factor, which shows a great ignorance of evolutionary history.
Murry and Jensen have done one, and only one, positive thing, and it is to show that all the
hereditary school have left is the rotten core of Spearman’s g, there really is nowhere else
they can turn and therefore must build their work on rotten grounds.
A Positive Conclusion
Cultural evolution goes way faster than actual evolution and therefore is of greater import to
analysing human society. That some human behaviour arouse from adaptive natural
selection r is no argument for that the specific behaviours argued by sociobiologists are due
to natural selection, because cultural evolution being much quicker in its adaption it is much
more likely the explanation for the change in behaviour. It’s important to draw a distinction
between biological potentiality and biological determinism. The former accepting the
uncontroversial view that there are biological boundaries. The disagreement lies in the
explanation of behaviours. We now recognise that there is no single gene for specific
behaviour, its influence is spread out across multiple different genes; and these genes set
limits to the range of possibilities and are not blueprints for exact replicas. For
sociobiologists this range is narrow enough to program specific behaviours as the predictable
result of possessing certain genes. Critics believe the range to be wide enough to include all
the behaviours that sociobiologists atomize as distinct traits coded by specific genes
Sociobiologists tend to focus on the wrong level if we take aggression as an example. You
could argue that humans are genetically aggressive, but due to the existence of peacetime it
could only be an innate possibility of aggression, triggered by environmental factors. When
looking for the quality of human genetics they miss the larger picture. Sociobiologists work
as if Galileo dropped a set of diverse objects of the leaning tower and then went to explain
the plunge of the cannonball due to some innate canonballness, and the slow dissent of the
feather due to some featherness. Not looking at the broader picture and seeing that gravity
and frictional resistance where the cause. If we only focus the object and seek explanations
through its own term’s means we are lost.
Critique of The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve effectively rests on 4 assumptions, all of which must be true or else the entire
argument goes belly up. Intelligence must be measurable in one number, capable of ranking
people in a linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable. Furthermore, Murry
and Herrnstein have been extremely disingenuous in multiple way, first in the contents of
the book, which they after the publication claim is not about race, and it only form a small
part of the book, this contrasts with their prior statements which frame the issue of race and
intelligence as the main motive of the book. Secondly its use of scientism is disingenuous,
they usually hide their data in the appendix, which most people will not read, the reason
behind this is because their data is extremely weak. The correlations they cite are sometimes
as low as 0.1, and they don’t show the variation around the curve in their data when its
inconvenient. When setting variables up against IQ and parental socio-economic they don’t
show variance, and this is because IQ, as they themselves admit buried in the appendix, can
only explain 20% of the variation, meaning IQ is not the explanation for the variation.
Thirdly they present their program disingenuously, they claim that they merely want to seek
out the truth in the unpopular opinions, they are not truth-seekers—which should be clear in
their use of data—they are conservative propagandists.
If we look backward into the past of intelligence testing, we can see that little other than the
overtness of their racism has changed. Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau was in many ways
the father of scientific racism, he claimed that intelligence could be measured in one single
numbers. That Africans where innately stupider, although some could rise above, and race
mixing should be avoided at all costs. This is not to draw an equivalence between Murry and
Gobineau. But if we investigate Gobineau’s assumptions you might get a feeling of déjà vu.
He had four assumptions, all must be true individually and their connections must hold true
as well or his argument goes belly up.
1. Intelligence must all rest upon a single, overarching factor of general intelligence
2. The ‘amount’ of general intelligence must be measurable into a single number
which can place people on a linear scale and this social status must correlate with
this number.
3. It must measure a highly heritable innate ability in humans.
4. The number must be stable in effectively immutable.
Three Centuries’ Perspectives on Race and Racism
Why is the white race referred to as Caucasian? It all comes down to J. F Blumenbach and
his racial categorization. He originally used a four-race model based on Carolus Linnaeus
who divided humanity into Americanus, Europenus, Asiaticus and Afer. His distinction was
based on geography and not biology. Blumenbach had an idea that all races started as one
and spread out and degraded from the original, important to note that he didn’t think this
degradation was mental—he was quite the egalitarian and believed in the equal abilities of all
races—it was based on beauty, or what Blumenbach thought of as beauty at least. But if he
wanted to create a system of degradation 4 races wouldn’t do—just think of the asymmetry!
—so he devised a five-race system adding Malayans to the list. He obviously assumed that
the white was the most beautiful and therefore the original, he then went looking within the
white race for the most beautiful people, he found the people of the Caucasus to be the most
beautiful and therefore humanity started there, giving the white race its name. Furthermore,
there was two lines of degradation from Caucasian to Malayan to African and from
Caucasian to American Indian to Oriental. Blumenbach never foresee what this
categorization would do, and he, as an egalitarian, would certainly look poorly on the
development of his theory. What this is supposed to teach us, is that the ideas we develop in
academia not only have an effect inside of our ivory towers, but they also have social
consequences, consequences we can greatly disagree with.
Gould’s case for embracing Darwin. Darwin was clearly a racist, there’s dozens of citations
throughout his work which makes this case, however Gould asks how we should judge people
in history. If we threw all the literature of anti-Semites out, we would lose most of our
literary history. Gould makes the case that we should judge historical people’s views through
their historical context, Darwin’s racism was unsurprising, and lesser then most of those
around them as he didn’t believe the inferior race were lost because of some innate limit, he
was parental in his approach and thought he could help them, we can cringe at this now, but
this and his abolitionist stance should count for something.
“If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great
is our sin” -Darwin
Hobsbawm, Eric
The Age of Revolutions (1977)
Part 1: Developments
The World in the 1780s
In the 1780s most people would be born, live, work and finally die in the same region. The
world outside their small community being mostly a mystery. Newspapers where are and if
happened upon would be useless as most were illiterate. For them the institutions of state
and church was where they got all their information. The vast majority of people lived
rurally, even in the most urbanised countries such an England it took until 1851 for the urban
population to outnumber the rural one. And even the Urban population lived in cities that
were small. Only two Cities London and Paris would register to us now as large, with a
handful of cities making up more then 100 000 people.
With agriculture being the whole life of most of the population the most important political
question was that of land, and how it was distributed and controlled. Here we can divide
Europe, or the spheres controlled by European powers, into 3.
1. That of European colonies. Where most land was feudal or slave plantations.
Here the farmer had no political control over the land or even themselves. They
produced products such as coffee, sugar and cotton which was shipped to Europe.
2. The regions in Eastern Europe, southern Italy, and Spain and much of
Scandinavia were regions of agrarian serfdom
3. Russia, Poland, and the rest of Europe peasants where serfs, who worked a large
part of the week to uphold their feudal duty
Apart from Britain. Europe was controlled buy absolute monarchies, which headed the
hierarchies of noble lords and orthodox churches and old institutions. To curb the anarchic
tendencies of these institutions they had begun to be staffed by non-aristocratic civil
servants. Additionally with the successful capitalist growth of Britain, many monarchs tried
to reform their kingdoms to better utilise their economic power.
These “enlightenment Monarchs” who tried to reform their kingdom, often ran into trouble
even for reforms which almost everyone saw as necessary, such as the abolition of serfdom,
as they ran into resistance from the nobility and the church.
The Industrial Revolutions
The Industrial revolution can’t be exactly dated, but it is beginning is in the 1780s were
productivity exploded upwards, and the economy could consistently grow itself. This
revolution was spear headed by the textile trade. The trade already has a mass-market and
opportunities for expansions were obvious. This led to the growth of the British cotton
industry which started of mostly supplying Britain but turn into a mass-exporter first to
Europe then latter to the larger colonial markets. India, who had been an exporter of cotton
prior in the years before the revolution, as deindustrialized and turned into an importer of
British cotton. The traditional relationship of the West importing from the East had been
flipped on its head. The reason cotton became the pioneering industry partially that it’s
agriculture was in the colonies which didn’t run into the European agriculturalist interest
and rather relied on African slave labour. In Britain cotton was the first industry to get the
factory or “mill” with other textile industries following suit. The growth of the industry was
so massive that cotton accounted for half of the declared value of all British exports.
One could get rich on cotton extraordinarily fast. The economy had taken on an anarchic
nature of capitalist production. But eventually the growth slowed, and the industry fell victim
to the falling rate of profit. With increasing mechanization, the profit margin shrank. To
combat this problem the industry cut wages, although there are limits to how far wages can
be cut, so they turned to lobbying government to reform the agricultural sector, as lower food
prices mean wages could be cut even more.
Need for inland transport of coal fouled the invention of the railway which toom Europe by
storm. “Rail-mania” took over and massive investment into rail were made, even though the
industry was never all that profitable, the railways greatly improved the economy in it ability
to ship goods inland which hitherto had been largely untapped markets.
For this revolution to be possible it first and foremost needed labour. This labour was found
in the agricultural sector. Which had also seen increasing productivity in large part due to
small changes (crop-rotation, lay-out farms, animal husbandry and fertilization), but due to
the scale of the industry and in ineffectiveness beforehand these small changes where
enough to push out many farmers who ended up in the cities and in industry.
The French Revolutions
While the British supplied the world with an economic blueprint which it followed, it was the
French that dominated the political. From the revolution of 1789 and to the Russian
revolution of 1917 the political arena was defined by you relation to the French revolution of
1789 and 1793, supportive or anti-revolutionary. It’s the origin point of nationalism, the
scientific and technological institutions, and the code of laws which France spread
throughout Europe and the wider world.
France was in a dire financial situation, it had been inefficient for a while, but made do but
with the cost of their support for the American revolution put it over the edge. Throughout
1774-6 were the failed reforms attempted by the first France minister Turgot, as they drove
into resistance from the local aristocracies and other vested interests. The Nobility of France
still held onto their traditional privileges, but monetarily where outcompeted by the new
middle and bourgeoise class, in turn they tried to squeeze their feudal right has hard was
possible, most often at the expense of the peasantry. For these reforms the king would have
to pay in extending the political power to the aristocracy, but this demand of representation
outgrew the aristocracy. The bourgeoise demand where layer out in the Declarations of the
rights of Man. Louise was no longer king of France, but king of the French sovereignty now
came from the people and to the king and not down from God. For there the French nation
and the concept of a nation-state is born. Attempts by the King defend his absolutism turn
sour as the Third estate not only had representatives within the National Assembly, but had
the support of the labouring poor, who were all to keen to resist the counterrevolution in the
streets and stormed the Bastille. The labouring poor pushed further then the now moderated
in the National assembly ever wanted, abolishing feudal privileges.
Morozov, Evgeny
To Save Everything Click Here (2013)
Solutionism and Its Discontents
Solutionism is defined as a tendency, born in Silicon Valley, to reduce complex social
situations into neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or transparently
self-evident possesses that can easily be optimized—only lacking the right algorithm. This is
not just a fancy term saying that for someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The problem lies more so in them defining the problems then their solutions to these
supposed problems. Their solutions often only seek to optimise the current way through
quick fixes which can undermine a larger intellectual and demanding reform. Societal
situations are extremely complex, and any tinkering will have more than one effect,
solutionism does not look further into its effects and only seeks to “solve” one problem even
if it might cause three more.
Some things should be demanding, challenging and you should fail often. Cooking is the best
example a wide variety of solutions have been proposed to revolutionise the way we cook, not
realising that failure is the main ingrediency of innovation, this is not to say we should cast
away all technology. Technology can be extremely useful in helping us cook, make food
tastier and healthier, this should be done through increasing, not decreasing the challenge,
opening new ways of experimentation. Technology is not a solution in of itself, to look at all
efficiency-deficits as failures and obstacles that we need to overcome is the solutionist
mindset, technology should be embraced on the good it can do, on how it can improve our
lives and not on this narrow-minded thinking.
The modern solutionist is not found wandering the halls of city halls and governmental
ministries they are found in Silicon Valley. Were they eagerly want to take the lessons they
learned from “the Internet” and apply them to everything under the sun. However, here
comes our second pitfall of Internet-Centrism. Why has Wikipedia become the way we
should think about government, Facebook how we think of civic engagement and yelp for
criticism. Internet-Centrism the idea that we are living in some unique revolutionary time
where conventual thinking should be abandoned and we should now base our thinking on
the vague lessons of “the Internet”.
The Nonsense of “the Internet”—and How to Stop It
The vagueness of “the Internet” means it can be applied to almost all technology. This vague
term is often combined with another even vaguer term to make one of the most meaningless
combinations “Internet Freedom”. Everything to regulation over 3D printers to rights of
dissident bloggers in Azerbaijan. Instead of debating the merits of individual technologies
and how we should form policies and regulations around those technologies we all must
surrender to the catchall term of “the Internet” and its freedom which is never to be
disputed. The idea in geek-culture is that of one singular fixed Internet which has a set
principle dictating how it works and any politician which tries to regulate it goes against the
spirit of “the Internet”.
But does “the Internet” really exist in the way its framed here? Is there much sense in
lumping together Twitter, your local universities website and yelp? All of these serve
completely different functions and therefore we should approach them differently—regulate
them different— “the Internet” is not a useful term and we should consider dropping it
entirely. Furthermore, and interesting exercise is to imagine the end of something, things
generally do end, however, doing so with the internet seems impossible—in this way it can be
compared to capitalism—a potential pitfall here to imagine the end of “the Internet” in the
way we would think of withdrawing from it now. Without “the Internet” we would still
communicate, not much of the texture of what we do would change just its form. Often our
view of the future of technology is based in the current iteration of it, could Victorians
imagine life after the steam train and the telegraph? “The Internet” has reach an end of
history, like liberal capitalism for Fukuyama, its constantly disputing but never disputed.
This is core to Internet-centrism epochalism, the idea that we are now living in an
unprecedented time of history, which “the Internet” has brought us into. “The Internet” is
seen to have some eternal nature, like gravity, one which we cannot change only adopt to.
Geeks have gone even further then just saying its futile to resist the evitability of “the
Internet”, we should also change our current institutions to work more like “the Internet”.
Such as Steven Johnson in Future Perfect or Jeff Jarvis in What Would Goggle Do? The art
should be funded like Kickstarter, NGOs should adopt Googles business philosophy, which
supposedly is one of openness and collaboration. However, many of the programs which
where once praised because of Googles ability to follow “the Internet” have now been shut
down Googles market shear began to be threatened.
Threatening Internet openness could easily be added as the eight-cardinal sin at this point.
Its openness is seen as the main force of innovation and any opposition is seen as clamping
down on innovation. Apple is often criticised for its closed app store something that
apparently goes against “the Internet” and there for innovation. But why should we care of
something goes against “the Internet”? Saying it destroys innovation is like saying that “the
Internet” destroys innovation because it goes against the telephone.
Pappe, Ilan
Ten Myths About Israel (2017)
Part 1: Fallacies of The Past
Palestine Was an Empty Land
The name “Palestine” descends from the Roman name for the then imperial province, then
the fate of the region was close tried to Rome then Byzantium, after the fall of the Byzantine
Empire its fate laid in the Arab world as it was controlled by various Muslim kingdoms.
When the Ottoman Empire annexed the province, they found a population of close to half a
million of which 87% where Sunni Muslims while only 2-5% where Jewish. The region
flourished under the Ottomans and was deeply connected with the empire through trade, as
the region was agriculturally rich. Through the reforms of the late Ottoman period the region
went through a modernization, and a religious alliance of Muslims and Christians began to
seek for national independence or a united Arab or Syrian independence. Jewish
communities where originally in this nationalistic alliance but with the introduction of
Zionism instead sought independence from both Ottoman, and later British rule without the
Muslims and Christians of the region.
The Jews Were a People Without Land
Zionism was first born out of a Cristian Anti-Semitic wish to rid their nations of Jews, which
they though could not assimilate into their nation’s “culture”. And throughout both the
French and the British saw the creation of a Jewish “homeland” as benefitable to their
geopolitical interests. These ideas to ship the Jews away to Palestine grew popular especially
in protestant communities which started to lobby their governments for the support of
Jewish restoration. Through this lobbying the governments of Europe began to recognize
this movement and help along Jews who wished to settle in Palestine. Zionism began then to
be adopted by Jewish communities who took this opportunity for resettlement.
Turse, Nick
Kill Anything That Moves (2013)
Introduction: An Operation, Not An Aberration
Turse sets out to tell the real history of the Vietnam war, where American war crimes are not
limited to only Mai Lai but is a daily occurrence. Mai Lai and its coverup was a horrific
crime—the name of the book comes from Captain Ernest Medina, who told his infantry men
going into Mai Lai “Kill everything that moves”. March 15, 1968, Americans entered the town
of Mai Lai with one clear mission anything breathing shouldn’t. Problem being Mai Lai was
no military encampment, it was composed of civilians, women, children, and old men. Over
the course of the next four hours the Charlie Company methodically murdered over five
hundred civilians, making sure they fouled their drinking water, burned their homes,
mutilated their dead and raped the women and girls. This was not one company gone mad,
American officers and helicopters where perfectly able to see the growing pile of civilian
bodies. General William Westmoreland sent a telegram praising the operation as landing a
‘‘heavy blow’’ on the enemy, praising especially the ‘‘aggressiveness’’ of the Charlie Company.
The massacre would remain an American military victory to the outside world for more than
a year. The Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour carefully gathered testimony from Americans
how had been there that day, Ones he came back to America he exposed the massacre for
what it was. The military had a predictable respond, minimising the event and finding a lowranking officer to take the blame. An army inquiry found thirty individuals had committed
criminal misconduct during Mai Lai and its cover up. Charlie Company’s Lieutenant William
Calley, was the only one ever convicted, sentenced to life in prison—he however only served
forty months, most of it in home arrest, at the behest of Richard Nixon. The public responds
mostly followed the official one: a one of event where one Lieutenant went crazy and killed a
bunch of people. But Ridenhour makes clear Mai Lai was an operation, not an aberration.
To understand the Vietnam war, we must understand its historical context. Vietnam, and
neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, where colonized by the French, they were used for rubber
production. This was so profitable that the latex oozing from rubber trees was called ‘’white
gold’’ by the French, the plantation workers knew it by a different name ‘’white blood’’.
During the Japanese invasion an anticolonial organization was formed, mostly know by the
name Viet Minh with Ho Chi Minh as its leader. They then launched a guerrilla war against
the Japanese and French. After the war Ho proclaimed an independent Vietnam. The U.S,
through the administration of Harry Truman then supported France reconquest of
Indochina. The U.S even footed 80% of the bill. The French where eventually beaten back
and withdrew from the region. In the peace treaty Vietnam was split in two with a planned
unification after a general election in 1956, this election never took place. The U.S was afraid
that Ho Chi Minh would win the election because he was widely popular, they therefore
armed the south who then created the Republic of Vietnam, under the leadership of Ngo
Dinh Diem. Throughout the years their support and the number of American troops
expanded, especially under Kennedy, switching from an adversarial role to being directly
involved in the fighting. Under Lyndon Johnson the fiction of ‘’advisers’’ was finally dropped
and war was officially declared in 1965.
The operation peaked in 1969 when there were over 540 000 American troops in Vietnam.
Throughout the war more than 3 million Americans would be deployed. In addition, there
was more from the so called ‘’Free World Forces’’ including soldiers from Australia, New
Zealand, South Korea, and more. The army of the Republic of Vietnam had ballooned to 1
million strong. The war officially ended in 1973, but the U.S continued to support the
Republic until its fall in 1975.
The U.S through that there were two distinct groups, the North Vietnamese army, and
indigenous South Vietnamese fighters loyal to the National Liberation Front (NLF), officially
known as the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). These were given the name Viet
Cong. America never really gained a good diagnosis of who their enemy was, as many
guerrilla groups were merely nationalists and not communists, in addition many didn’t fight
for any broader ideology but to resist foreign invasion.
The United States lost 58 000 military personnel in Southeast Asia. More than 304 000
American were wounded 75 000 of which were left severely disabled. However, the American
loses where small in comparisons to that of the Republic of Vietnam who had 254 000 killed
and 783 000 wounded. The casualties of the revolutionary forces were even greater
estimates put it at 1.7 million. The civilian’s death was even greater the that, newer estimates
put the death toll at 3.8 million. With 5.3 million wounded.
Turse started his investigation when he happened upon an archive from the Vietnam War
crimes Working group, a secret Pentagon task force assembled after Mai Lai to ensure that
the military was never caught off guard by major war crime scandals. The archives
documented over 300 proven and 500 unproven allegations of war crimes. These
documented the everyday occurrence of war crimes in Vietnam: a lieutenant capturing and
killing a 2-3- and 7–8-year-old, 10 civilians killed by claymore the soldiers claiming they
were enemy combatants and when investigated and found that they killed 10 civilians, they
faced no repercussion, and it was covered up, claiming they were in a ‘’free-fire zone’’
although there is no documentation of the area being designated as such. In the archives a
massacre of twenty women on February 8th, 1968, in a hamlet in the Quang Nam Province is
noted, but its location is not very specified, so Turse had only a general location to go by.
When trying to locate the place in Vietnam he first came about a momentum to a 1968
massacre, but this massacre happened on the 9th of January, not February. He went on and
found another momentum with commemorating thirty-three locals who died in three
separate massacres, however none of the on February the 8th. He was led to another small
hamlet, where farmers claimed that there had been a massacre, but this massacre happened
in August and was carried out by marines. Turse concludes this failed quest to find the
massacre as follows:
I’d thought that I was looking for a needle in a haystack; what I found was a
veritable haystack of needles
Turse also found that documentations on war crimes in the marines often went up missing.
The Massacre at Trieu Ai
Recruits, through their training, are indoctrinated into a culture of violence and brutality,
emphasizing their readiness to kill without compunction. Many of those interviewed recalled
specifically being made to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!”. This was a part of a larger dehumanizing of
the enemy. Vietnamese where always referred to by racial slurs, and comparisons to animals.
Even though official policy stated otherwise, when soldiers arrived in the country, they were
told that all Vietnamese where not to be trusted, including women and children. The
distinction between civilian and guerrillas was not clear for the troops, some saying that
everyone in a conical hat or the clothes the Americans called “black pyjamas” was a potential
adversary. There was a striking contrast between the formal instructions to kill only military
adversaries and the informal massages to kill just about everyone. Most soldiers and officers
had the vaguest idea about the Geneva Conventions. Many stating that they were allowed to,
or would do, things in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
On October 21, 1967, members of Company B found themselves outside Trieu Ai. A wellliked marine was killed by a booby trap. After a briefing Lieutenant Baily then goes on to tell
his platoon “Search-and-destroy everything in that village”.
Trieu Ari was one of the many framing villages regularly blasted by bombs and artillery fire.
Only a few days before the arrival of Company B surviving villagers were relocated South
Vietnamese concentration camps. They were allowed to go back to travel back to retrieve
anything they could. Ones arriving back, they went to sleep in the only place left standing,
the underground tunnels they used for protection for the frequent bombings. For civilians
the time spent in the tunnels where the scariest, they were in a life-or-death situation trying
to figure out when to leave, if they left to early, they would be caught in the crossfire, if they
left to late the Americans would indiscriminatory throw grandees down the tunnels, you and
your family’s life where up to which second you choose to come out.
The Americans descended upon the village, firing their rifles, and setting fire to the few
remaining buildings. Shooting those who came up of the tunnels, including women and
children, and throwing grenades down the tunnels with people still inn them. In the end
twelve civilians lay dead. We only know about this massacre due to one marine, Lance
Corporal Olaf Skibsrub, coming forward about the event. The Captain Lance Corporal Diener
was court-marshalled for his involvement. But he was only found as fault for failing to report
the incident properly, he was charged with murder, but was found not guilty. Like much of
the documentation of American war crimes, this has also disappeared. The massacre of Trieu
Ai is little known mostly because its lack of uniqueness, events like this was not the exception
in Vietnam but the rule. Most massacres never left the participants and where not recorded
by anyone else then the Vietnamese who lost loved ones.
A System of Suffering
At the time of the Vietnam war America operated under a system which sociologist James
William Gibson calls “technowar”. The philosophy behind it being that the combination of
American technological and economic prowess with sophisticated managerial capacities
would guarantee military victory on the battlefield. This meant the introduction of
technological decision-making in war. They would increasingly base themselves of stats and
try to make a science of war. In Vietnam is went on to the notion of reaching a “crossoverpoint”: which means that American soldiers would kill more enemies than their Vietnamese
opponents could replace. To measure if they were at the “crossover-point” they used body
count. Therefore, enemies KIA would be the main measure for military success. This meant
there was a large pressure on reaching a high body count which went down the chain of
command from the top officials to the low-ranking officer to the grunts. Robertson Peterson
remembered “It seemed that securing or pacifying an area was secondary to ‘getting some
kills. Essentially a killing-quota was established. Failure to achieve this quota would result in
fewer comforts such as airlifts. This was also true for the grunts as higher kill rates would be
rewarded with R&R (rest and recreation) passes, medals, extra food, and light duty at base
camp. Now imagine that a nineteen-year-old kid sent to war and not only told its ok to kill,
but he will be rewarded for killing, what does that do to his psyche? There where lists at base
camp of which person was leading in number of kills and completions between units.
This led to an inflation of body-count. Four limbs were counted as four kills. But more
importantly the inclusion of civilian dead greatly inflated the body count as well. When they
descended on rise farmers, they would count the kills as VC. Prisoners were also the victims
of body-count, surrendering would often mean immediate death, as you were more valuable
dead than alive. As Captain John Kapranopoulous replied to a lieutenant when reporting a
wounded and surrendered VC “Dammit, I don’t care about prisoners, I want body count”.
The murder of civilians and their inclusion into the body count became so pervasive the
phrase: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, its VC” was one of the most common of the war.
But even though Vietnamese civilians in small groups could be killed with impunity and
reported as body count. In cases where there were to many civilians killed and no friendly
dead or few weapons captured would raise eyebrows, for example in Mai Lai, there were 500
killed but only 128 reported as KIA. There was a common practise to carry around extra AKs
and Chinese grenades to put on the dead, any cache found could be redistributed to the dead
civilians to justify their designation as VC. To justify the civilian slaughter racism was used,
Vietnamese where often referred to as gooks. And the “mere-gook rule”—or MGR—said that
all Vietnamese, north, south, women, men, children and sick where all little more than
animals who could be killed and abused at will.
Search and destroy where the most common type of operation, composing 86% of their time
on such operation by 1967. Trying to find the revolutionaries and engage them in open battle,
which would be easy for the us to win. However, Vietnamese forces saw right through this
and wouldn’t engage in a large-scale battle, more so attacking battalions roaming around the
jungle and pulling back before they had a chance to counterattack. “Search-and-Destroy”
missions were merely a shorthand for the systematic destruction of hamlets and the people
inside them. The rules of engagement (ROE). Where set to protect civilians, but in practise
they served at the justification for their killing. Villagers were expected to be able to eject
guerrillas from their village, and if they couldn’t they had to abandon their village. If they
failed to do so they were seen as legitimate targets. There was a platter of regulations given to
the villagers to prove that they were not VC, they had to walk in a certain way, couldn’t run,
had to wear ID badges display lights at night, or not display any lights, keep within certain
zones—whose borders were not always clear—and a failure to comply with any one of these
could result in your death. With free-fire zones their facade of distinguishing civilians and
military targets apart was dropped. If there were villages inside the free-fire zones they
would kill without justification. A U.S Senate study found that more then 300 000 civilians
had been killed in free-fire zones. 40% of South Vietnam was considered under VC control
meaning there was little limits to attacking anything within those zones.
These policies where integral in the goal of driving villagers out of territory controlled by
NLF. Mao once said “the people are like water and the army is like fish” the U.S then set out
to drain the water out from under the fish. They were purposefully creating refugees. These
were then driven into South Vietnamese concentration camps which lacked food, water,
medicine, and proper housing. A vast majority claiming that life ion the refugee camps where
worse than those in war zones, where their homes where bombed and burned on a weekly
basis. If they refused to go to these camps U.S troops would burn their houses and kill their
livestock or in many cases just kill the villagers.
Overkill
The United States at the time of the Vietnam war had more killing power, destructive force
and advanced technology than any other military in the world. Their bomber, rifles, tanks,
explosives and so on would seem like sci-fi tech to the Vietnamese which mostly relied on
their Ak-47ens and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The U.S used the opportunity of
Vietnam to test out new weapons, General Maxwell Taylor once called it a “laboratory”. In
line with the technowar policy the U.S implemented a policy of overkill. In other words, a
sound from a treeline was meat with Machin gunfire, sniper fire from a hamlet with a
napalm strike, a hunch of enemy location with a plaster of artillery. North Vietnam was
almost the most bombed country ever to exist, only beaten by South Vietnam, Americas Ally.
Some areas like the Quang Tri were bombed to oblivion 3,000 bombs per square kilometre.
Many of these bombs hit villages, like Lang Vei where more than 100 civilians were killed
and 175 wounded. And it was far from the exception of the province 3,500 villages, only 11
did not get bombed.
There was also a common use of napalm an estimated 400,000 tonnes were dropped in
Southeast Asia. Condemning most of what it touches to a painful death. If you were lucky
enough to survive you would be scarred for life your nose, eyelids, lips, and nipples would
melt of. White phosphorus was also used, it explodes in the air sticks to skin and clothes and
burns until its oxygen supply is cut off. A small chunk of it could melt through your body. It
couldn’t be stopped by water and would just continue burning, the only way was to suffocate
the flame with mud, which would often infect the wound. In 1969 alone more than 379
million white prosperous grandees where purchased. The Guava bomb was filled with 640 to
670 bomblets each with 300 steel pellets, when dropped more than 200 000 pellets were
thrown in every direction killing people through thousands of tiny cuts. The U.S bought
approximately 285 of such bombs nearly seven for each man, women and child in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia combined. If you managed to survive the bombing runs you still had the
strafing runs right after which would be as indiscriminate in the distinction between VC and
civilian. The complete destruction of hamlets was commonplace, In February 1968 a proSaigon village was bombed by “accident” which killed over 200 and wounded more than 70,
August 8, 1968, 72 killed and more the 200 wounded. John Pail Vann, one of the three topranking Americans in the country claimed that in most of these hamlet destructions there
was any evidence of damage to the enemies. The most iconic image of Vietnam is probably
that of the Huey helicopter, swooping down throughout Vietnam. There were extensive use
helicopter missions, there were more than 4000 helicopters in the country at its peak.
District senior adviser Louis Janowski categorized these missions as “non-selective
terrorism” any enemies killed where purely by chance. “[I] firmly believe that the percentage
of Viet Cong killed by supported assets is roughly equal to the percentage of Viet Cong in the
population. That is, if 8% of the population [of] an area is VC about 8% of the people we
killed are VC”. In addition, the fear of air strikes, helicopter runs and ground troops. There
was a constant omnipresence of artillery fire. Over the course of the war almost 15 billion
pounds of artillery shells where dispensed into Vietnam. There was a policy of using artillery
for “harassment an interdiction” (H&I). While it was supposed to be based of intelligence of
enemy movements, it often amounted to shelling random areas to keep the enemy in a state
of unease. The general policy was like one U.S general coined “waste ammunition like a
millionaire and lives like a miser”. Artillery was fired at regular intervals regardless of any
military justification. Over 30 billion pounds of munitions were dropped over the war. Not
only killing large parts of the population and destroying their homes but killing the
environments. It killed their agriculture, wildlife, their valuable rubber trees and timber
practically killing most of their industry. Put the environments went through more than just
bombing. America dropped more than 70 million litters of herbicidal agents—most notably
agent orange. The herbicide would kill all plants it encountered overnight, crops which the
Vietnamese relied on for food, would dry up and die. It also killed most of the wildlife and
livestock. “Only you can prevent forests” a play on the Smokey the Bear slogan became a
dark motto for the troops who carried out ecocide. In addition to the environmental
destruction as many as 4,8 million Vietnamese were sprayed with the toxic defoliants, this
would immediately cause nausea, cramps and diarrhea. But that was only the start, it was
also associated with higher rates of stillbirths and a variety of illnesses, including cancer and
birth defects. Children are still being born with birth defects caused by these herbicidal
agents today. The destruction of Vietnamese rice fields, the lifeblood of rural Vietnamese life,
became so large that Vietnam went from a rice exporter to a rice importer. Although the goal
was to deny VC rice, a 1967 analysis by the RAND Corporation—even with its strong military
ties—found that over 500 civilians experienced crop loss for every ton of rice denied to the
VC. The fires started by Americans reportedly wiped out more then 100 000 acres of forest.
The use of bulldozers to flatten land tore op as much as 2% of the entire landmass of South
Vietnam.
Some of the villagers would move into the cities after their homes were burned down by
American GIs. The population of Saigon nearly tripled after the American assault on the
countryside began. Life in the cities was safe from the bombing, shells, and helicopter
gunships, although random killing by Americans did still occur. This changed after the VC
offensive of January 31 of 1968, during the eve of Tet—the Vietnamese lunar new year, a
holiday so important that South and North usually declared a cease-fire for the festivals. The
offensive was a huge success for the VC, they took control of large parts of the cities around
Vietnam including Saigon—and briefly the new U.S embassy. The Tet counter offensive was
one of the bloodiest this already bloody war had seen. John Singlaub, the commander of a
clandestine U.S special operation force known as MACV-SOG, summed up the
counteroffensive as follows “I’ve never seen so many dead people stacked up”. The city was
secured not through careful pacification of each building, but the wholescale destruction of
entire neighbourhoods. In Saigon more then 6 300 civilians were killed, 19 000 dwellings
retuned to dust, 125 000 where left homeless and it created 206 000 refugees. In Hue where
the offensive was most successful, had a strong guerrilla presence. When Lieutenant Colonial
Ernie Cheetham was asked what happened to the innocents trapped between them and the
guerrillas, he answered “I’m pretty sure they are civilians that we would consider bad guys
right now”. 3 800 civilians were killed in hue and 116 000 were made homeless. It’s
estimated that in the Tet offensive 14 000 civilians killed, 24 were wounded and 627 000
were left homeless.
A Litany of Atrocities
Because of the share number of atrocities, a list of all the hamlets burned or civilians killed
would be far too large, take the provinces of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai as a window into
the day-today reality of the Vietnam War. Both being NLF strongholds, 8 083 American
troops were killed in Quang Nam alone, more than any other of the forty-three provinces.
On March 17, 1965, the village of Hoa Thuan, in Quang Nam, dared to fly the NLF flag, the
village was then bombed, killing 44 civilians, mostly children as the bomb hit a school. The
American practice of burning down civilian homes was turned up to eleven in Quang Nam,
by 1968 more then 238 000 were crammed into government run camps in the province
alone. On February 7, 1968, Company B entered a small nameless hamlet with the normal
orders for up high “kill anything that moves”. The hamlet only had civilians in them. They
rounded up 19 civilians and radioed in to see what to do with them, Captain Donald Reh
simply said that he should follow the order already given “kill anything that moves” at least
50 civilians were killed that day by Company B. These where not isolated incidents, Heonik
Kwon, an expert on war crimes in the region notes that “at least six large scale killings”
where carried out by the allied forces in the first three months of 1968. Communist cells
reported 19 mass killings in Quang Nam during the same period. Korean soldiers were
known for their brutality during the war, gangrape and mass murders where everyday events
for Korean forces. In 1966 alone Korean forces committed fourteen massacres in the
province of Quang Ngai one of these massacres killed more than 200 civilians. In the Binh
Son District of Quang Ngai 70-80% of all the houses had been destroyed. The estimated
death toll of the Quang Ngai provinces lies at 50 000 civilians killed each year.
Unbounded Misery
The Vietnamese who survived the American assault did not face a prosperous life in front of
them, due to the policy of burning down hamlets and villages to deny them to the VC there
was many refuges. Many of these refuges ended up in shantytowns in Saigon. The
0population of Saigon went from 1.4 million before the war to 4 million having the world’s
highest population density of any city, almost twice that of its closest neighbour Tokyo.
Saigon became the home of the landless, jobless refuge. Struggling to gain the means of for
survival. This proved increasingly difficult, the price of rice, the sample of a Vietnamese diet,
went up 1000%. Finding food was so difficult that the city had no problem finding volunteers
to collect Saigon’s garbage, hoping to find something salvageable food.
Over 500 000 women had turned to sex work, and many more maid their money of
scamming American GIs to buy them overpriced drinks which the bar owner would split the
profits of. Many of the refuges where children left without parents by the war. Estimates put
the number at 100 000 orphans South Vietnam. The U.S did have a system of compensatory
payment to the families of the civilians killed by them, although most Vietnamese either had
no knowledge or way to use this system. However, some compensation was paid out and the
rate of an adult Vietnamese was thirty-three dollars, half that for children. Another large
killer of Vietnamese where the extreme number of traffic ‘accidents’ caused by the
Americans. Mostly due to recklessness and a lack of care if they hit any Vietnamese.
Purposefully hitting Vietnamese civilians or vehicles was commonplace. Like the GIs in the
countryside would burn down hamlets and kill with impunity, the GIs in the city could run
down anything or anyone and never see any consciences.
American troops would often collect souvenirs; ears, noses and dicks being the most
common. They also served out death card, generally an ace of spades or a custom business
card. One of these, which would be dropped from their gun ship said “Congratulations. You
have been killed through the courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther 20” on the other
side it said “the lord giveth and the 20mm taketh away. Killing is our business and business
is good.”
Sexual violence was also commonplace under the war. So much so that brothels operated
within the confides of basecamp. These brothels cared little of the sex worker was of age or
not, some having girls as young as six. Maids inside basecamps where equally as sexualised,
constantly being pressured into sexual acts, or threatened with blackmail if they did not
comply. Although most rape did take place in the countryside it was not uncommon at
basecamp. As well murder and assault of sex workers was not unheard of. Rape was virtually
standard practice among the GIs, to assert dominance or try to gain information. One
member of the American division claims that after witnessing one first hand, he could
recognize the sound of rape and would do so every third day over a two-month period.
Torture of prisoners or suspected VC happened often. The U.S and South Vietnamese
military arrested or imprisoned as several hundred thousand civilians and members of
revolutionary forces. Although American troops often participated in the torture directly the
most common tactic was to give prisoners over to the South Vietnamese authorities where
they could claim that they had no knowledge of the torture, even though they had been
thought torture techniques by the CIA and they had repeatedly been warned by the red cross
that the South Vietnamese authorities constantly violated the Geneva Conventions. Green
Beret Master Sargent Donald Ducan, who trained American in torture techniques recalls how
it was standard practice to turn prisoners over to South Vietnamese authorities for execution
“We were continuously told ‘You don’t have to kill them yourself—let your indigenous
counterpart do that’”.
The conditions in South Vietnamese prisons where horrid, the famous Con Son Prison
housed more then 10 000 prisoners, mostly political prisoners found guilty in a kangaroo
court. They lived in what was call “tiger cages” these where five by nine feet and housed three
to five prisoners, prisoners where often shackled to the ground. After conditions in these
prisons were made public South Vietnamese authorities were forced to do away with the
tiger cages, however, their replacement was not any better. The American company Brown &
Root—now called KBR—where commissioned to build the new prison cells, which ended up
being two square feet smaller than the original tiger cages.
The Bummer, The “Gook-Hunting” General and the Butcher of
The Delta
Sargent Roy Bumgarner of the army’s 1st Cavalry Division then the 173rd Airborne Brigade in
Binh Dinh Province reportedly amassed and body count of more than 1 500 enemies KIA.
His six-man “wildcat” team sometimes logged more kills than the rest of his 500-man
battalion combined. Many of these supposed VC had little or most commonly no connection
to VC at all. First-hand accounts from a Private Arthur Williams state that he personally
witnessed multiple incidents of Bumgarner killing civilians for seemingly no reason. Several
other sources claim to have seen the same things, killing of civilians, the planting of weapons
on their bodies and them being counted at enemies KIA. Bumgarner’s cold-blooded murder
of civilians and practice of counting them as enemies KIA was common knowledge, his
reputation presided him. Bumgarner has had a long military history and an equally as long
history of committing war crimes, he had already been court-martialled several times busted
down in rank and served confinement several times for his crimes. He was court-martialled
again in Vietnam and, even with several general and captains lining up in praising the man,
was found guilty. But he was only found guilty of unpremeditated murder, and did not serve
a day in prison, he never left the field during the proceedings and stayed after being found
guilty, he was one of the last American troops to leave Vietnam.
While Bumgarner was building his body count in Binh Dinh, Colonial John Donaldson was
embarking on his own killing spree in the neighbouring province of Quang Ngai. Donaldson
was obsessed with having a good kill ratio, and it was common knowledge that he made this
happen through killing civilians and marking them as VC so much so that he was known as
“the gook-hunter. He was also involved in the cover-up of Mai Lai; documents of the event
went mysteriously missing after he had requested them. Donaldson was charged with 13
separate killing of civilians. However, charges were dropped after witnesses were pressured
into changing their story.
However, the crimes of Bumgarner and Donaldson pale in comparison to Julian Ewell. The
then two-star general was given control over the Mekong Delta region one of the most
populous in Vietnam. The region was no stranger to war crimes before the arrival of Ewell,
the mass murder of civilians and burning of hamlets whereas common place they’re as the
rest of Vietnam. However, after his arrival these were turned up to eleven. He stated that his
goal was to kill 4000 the first month 6 000 the next and so on. Ewell was obsessed with body
count and was known for his outburst at anyone he though where not doing enough killing.
Later we would state “To say body count permeated everything in operations is not an
exaggeration”. The 9th Infantry division is a good example of the changes Ewell implemented,
the division had a k/d ration of 8/1 before Ewell almost immediately this jumped to 14/1 and
that was just the start. Ewell implemented operation “Speedy Express” with could have U.S
ground, naval and air forces work together this operation would run from December 1968 to
May 1969. The first month of the operation the 9th divisions k/d jumped to 24/1 soared to
64/1 by march and 134/1 in April. As usual the civilian population was the one who bearded
the heavy cost. The operation filled hospitals all over the region with wounded civilians. The
main killer was the practise of shooting anyone that ran. An article from the Nation
demonstrated the large civilian cost on the operation the title being “A Mai Lai a month”.
The 9th division reportedly killed 10 899 enemies, but only recovered 748 weapons. One
week in April they killed 699 guerrillas at the cost of only one American life and only
recovered 9 weapons. The estimated death toll puts the civilian dead on 5 000- 7 000.
Where have all the War Crimes gone?
Getting these war crimes into the public record proved difficult, whistle blowers had a hard
time finding anyone that would publish their stories. Mai Lai did almost fade into obscurity
because if just this, both Life and Look passed on the story, and it ended up being published
first in a small left-leaning newspaper. War crimes were ignored if they did not gain press
coverage, which was relatively rare, and even then, charges where only filled on low ranklingscapegoats. These charges where often dropped was the press had moved on from the
stories, and the few guilty verdicts that were found severely undercut the real death count
and left the charged off with a light sentence. Reporter Kevin Burkley with the aid of
Alexander Shimkin uncovered the horrors of Speedy Express. They wrote a long expose of
the event and sent in to be published in Newsweek, however, they rejected it and demanded
that it be radically shortened and any links to Mai Lai be expunged, there focus should be on
individual war crimes and not the American way of war. After several drafts the article was
wound down to a 1 800-word issue in Newsweek, with many key witnesses removed and the
mention of Ewell expunged. This serves as an example of how these war crimes were handled
in the press. In the end, we don’t know how many war crimes were committed, many never
left the hamlets in which they were committed, many died in the military bureaucracy, and
many lay in the rejected stories of major newspapers. We will never truly understand the
true horror of the Vietnam War, and that we now 45 years after the fall of Saigon there is
much we don’t know. This can serve as a lesson for the current conflicts America participates
in, what we hear is just the tip of the iceberg that makes it through the military and press
bureaucracy, as we now still don’t know the horrors of Vietnam, exposes like the one by
Burkley, of horrors in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and so on are probably still to be written and
widdled down by the U.S friendly press.