Never doubt that one person cannot start a firestorm. On 1-16 Glenn Greenwald posted a small paragraph on The Authoritarians that was picked up by Mary on dkos on January 20. Then on 2-26 on kos robertdfineman . Jimmyjack on kos put up this diary on 3-1. By then I had read the intro and first three chapters and had emailed Dr. Bob. I suggested to him that since the book club (where I posted a thread on it) had asked me to do his book I wanted him to be here to check it out. He volunteered to be here for the comments and to ask John Dean to be here also. I started putting up diaries for each chapter and emailed every front pager to help (Thanks McJoan) and posting all night some nights in threads of other diaries discussing the issues of authoritarianism, fascism, Nazism here in the US and so we were on our way.
Well, here we are./I'm not afraid. (These are dialogue lines from a very old movie from the 30's where the lovers enter a haunted house to escape the rain.) And the sociopathic faux cons have created a haunted house for us to be sure.
I think by now almost everyone who has read the book and the comments these past two weeks is aware of the importance of this book. I have said many times that it is a magnificent tool for us to confront them. It's a new tool, so how do we learn to use it? I am going to stumble my way through my first try here with you. Although Altemeyer has not overtly said much about psychopathology or identifying sociopathic behavior, I, as a former clinician, am inserting that almost certain fact into this body of work. I saw a documentary on corporations and corporate behavior that likened their behavior to sociopathic behavior ( please a link because I forget) and I am quite certain that Altemeyer has given us a series of measurement scales to identify, quantify and label sociopathic (social groups) behavior before it has occurred in all its elemental force. In other words to see, define and label the individual pieces. It is crucial that we not cooperate with it in any of its forms! The high RWA's do not. They boycott Christmas, Easter, Ford, films, etc with all their virulence and fanaticism because their leaders encourage and abet it. We must do the same with a cool, rational, scientific appraisal of the behavior whether it be TV, film, or whatever. By boycott I do not mean to use our purchasing power necessarily although that is an option we can leverage as we did with Coulter's advertisers. Or what Obama did with the FOX debates in NV, marginalizing them as bona fide news purveyers. In other words as Conceptual Guerilla points out so succinctly, we must frame the issues. (CG has recently reorganized the site so my link on this article no longer works. Someone please help here.) CG are you here?
So here I go with Jane Mayer's Feb 19,2007 article Whatever It Takes in The New Yorker magazine in its Feb 19 & 26,2007 issue.
Whatever It Takes-the politics of the man behind "24" Joel Surnow . Mayer is writing in The New Yorker a liberal, art oriented, progressively political magazine. She has written an artcle on Joel Surnow that, armed with Altemeyer's research is absolutely damning.
Altemeyer explains the Social Dominance Scale this way with three items:
This country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people are.
Some groups of people are simply not the equals of others.
Some people are just more worthy than others.
These items are from the Social Dominance Orientation scale, and if you want the job of Dictator For Life you’ll agree with them, coming out foursquare against equality.
Then he goes on to talk about power and the desire for it. He has developed the The Personal Power, Meanness and Dominance Scale and the SD Scale correlates highly with this PowerMad Scale. Use the link to refer to some quotes in the article above.
The Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty Scale
You know that most people are out to “screw” you, so you have to get them first when you get the chance.(Agree)
Whatever It Takes, right?
Here's another.
One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly. (Agree)
Actually this is an attribute of a High Machievellian
And:
One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear. (Agree)
There are more equally as immoral.
Jane Mayer has interviewed and gotten quotes the likes of which I have not seen since Orianna Falacci wrote Interviews With History. Henry Kissinger has said giving her an interview was one of the dumbest mistakes of his life. So here is a quote from Surnow:
The military loves our show. People in the administration love the series,too. It's a patriotic show. They should love it.
And from Mayer:
Each season of “24,” which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer—a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland—must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process—allowing a terrorist plot to proceed—or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.
And all this goes on within the plot cliche of"the ticking time bomb,"which almost never happens. Mayer says "24" is clearly a fantasy drama, winning last year's Emmy Award for best drama series and is outlandish and improbable.
Nevertheless, the show obviously plays off the anxieties that have beset the country since September 11th, and it sends a political message. The series, Surnow told me, is “ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people’s fears are—their paranoia that we’re going to be attacked,” and it “makes people look at what we’re dealing with” in terms of threats to national security. “There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,” he said, adding, “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He’s a patriot.”
But wait! Hasn't Altemeyer repeatedly said that his measurement scales apply only to groups and not to the individual. Only how the individual will most likely respond in a group situation. So let's go way up to take a bird's eye view of Surnow and the people he hangs with.
He is very friendly with Rush Limbaugh who often comes to his wood burled cigar smoking room at the studio for "24".
Last March, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, joined Surnow and Howard Gordon,the show's lead writer, for private dinner at Rush Limbaugh’s Florida home. The gathering inspired Virginia Thomas—who works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank—to organize a panel discussion on “24". The symposium, sponsored by the foundation and held in June, was entitled “ ‘24' and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact Fiction, or Does It Matter?” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who participated in the discussion, praised the show’s depiction of the war on terrorism as “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options.” He went on, “Frankly, it reflects real life. Chertoff, who is a devoted viewer of “24,” subsequently began an e-mail correspondence with Gordon, and the two have since socialized in Los Angeles.
Surnow is best friends with Nowrasteh who wrote and produced The Path to 9/11.He says Surnow found LA a stultifying,stifling place growing up. They worked together in 1985 on The Equalizer.
Nowrasteh, whose father was a deposed advisor to the Shah of Iran,says,
Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business....It's a deep,dark ugly world out there. Maybe this was what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business-even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.
“It’s been very heady,” Gordon said of Washington’s enthusiasm for the show Roger Director, Surnow’s friend, joked that the conservative writers at “24” have become “like a Hollywood television annex to the White House. It’s like an auxiliary wing.
The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show. (The event was not publicized.) Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, Surnow said, is “an extreme ‘24’ fan.” After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office.
Surnow is friends with Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, who told him she watched "24" while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.
"It was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists,and I felt better." Surnow joked back, "We love to torture terrorists-it's good for you."
"We've had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say,'You don't realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.' "They say torture doesn't work. But I don't believe that."
And he doesn't believe global warming either. And his favorite bumper sticker is Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.
I have tried to give you the network, all of whom would go off the top of Altemeyer's scale and then laugh about it.
Mayer writes that this past November U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point went to the set of "24" with three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country. They came to voice their concern that the show had affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.They emphasized that torture only produced already known information, that a ticking clock would enhance the victim's ability to hold out as they want and expect torture to be martyred.
What I focussed on was the inability of these men to realize that they were talking to sociopaths. Joe Navarro is one of the F.B.I.'s top experts in questioning techniques, was there. On the character of Bauer, who has been compared to Surnow by his friends, he said,
"Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don't want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems."
So we know he knows something about the mental makeup of a psychopath. When the delegation of interrogators, whom Surnow refused to meet with, left, they felt that the show would be changed little, if at all. And Navarro says,
"It shows they have a social conscience that they'd even meet with us at all. They were receptive. But they have a format that works. They have won a lot of awards. Why would they want to play with a No. 1 show?"
So the ability to lie, to pretend to go along with what someone is saying, to look them straight in the eyes, to be receptive to their ideas and meet with them is just typical PowerMad scale item agreement. And the experts are taken in. They are unable to question the premises and the base of the capitalist system. So we can say their belief structure is confused. And Sutherland is ambivalent and worried about the influence of his character as he indicated in a recent Charlie Rose show.
So we have a rather large and influential group of psychopaths engaged in sociopathic behavior. I ache for Altemeyer and Dean who have seen this way long ago. We at kos are aware of it but focus on the hypocrisy of the individuals. Their inconsistencies. We behave like children saying "But Mommy you said not to lie and you just told a lie on the telephone. You said you weren't here this morning, and you were here." Well we have got to do something different.
Altemeyer has done something different. He has put out an ebook he could have made a lot of money from. But how long would it have taken to go from proofs, to publishing, and then all those book tours to promote it while we are in the middle of an election. He has said in effect, Take it and run with it!
I was amazed at my grasp of the entire torture scenario, how it developed, how it was sold to the American public, who all the players are, the power Surnow must feel at manipulating the entire American TV viewing audience, the White House, and the behavior of the military. Probably enjoying the helplessness of the interrogation experts to teach the techniques that work to their classes who have watched "24", and do it the "24" way over in Iraq. "Like stamping out an anthill," said Gary Solis, who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point.
So now we can see the structure of the network. The unconscious collusion of the liberals who breathlessly watch the show and root against the terrorist. Mayer says that Clinton and Barbra Streisand admire the show.
What to do? What comes to my mind is to link the video of Daniel Pearl's beheading to the video of the use of torture by our military. What we know of their torturing is just a tip of the iceberg. It is endemic I fear.
So Finnegan, Lagouranis, Navarro, Danzig need to see how they were duped. They need Altemyer's book to study carefully. The scales need to be given to our military to weed out the psychopaths. And we need to be crystal clear about whom we are dealing with. And so do the dems in Congress. Each one of them needs this ebook. And we need to lobby. Our country is being run by a group of sociopaths.
I'm supposed to add these links for the book club.
http://www.publiclibraries.com/
http://www.powellsbooks.com/
http://www.dailykos.com/...
All bold emphases are mine.