FALSE DIVISIONS 2: CORRUPTION VS. LAW’N’ORDER
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu
September 9, 2009
A major excuse for Anglo-American military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan has emerged: corruption among the occupied people. In 1992 the journal Crime, Law, and Social Change published my reflections on what I had learned about “Corruption, Bribery, and Patriarchy in Tanzania.” There I argued that violence in the United States was just more veiled and genteel than violence in and around the Dar es Salaam neighborhood where I had been a guest for 5 months. In Dar I learned that “corruption” boiled down to taking care of those who had taken care of one’s own, whether through campaign contributions or getting a judge to rule your client’s way. I came back from East Africa in 1990 to find that every bit of vice and violence l confronted in Tanzania was right back in my home “heartland” of the US, just more glossed and covered over. I have come to believe that the more energetically “we” focus on “their” problems, the more energetically we are talking about ourselves.
Today as I write, the US supreme court is rehearing the issue of whether all restraints on corporate funding of political ads should be lifted. Afghan votes for president are being subjected to recount on charges of corruption of the voting process. I recall “our” furor that in 2000—under a voting system Jimmy Carter has said would never even qualify for international election monitoring, let alone qualify to be evaluated as in Afghanistan--the US supreme court chose “our” president.
Any political group’s leadership habitually blames others for its own social problems. That may draw “us” together, but I doubt that our hypocrisy is lost on peoples “we” now occupy. I keep being reminded of comic strip Walt Kelley’s Pogo the possum’s 1950s Cold War refrain: “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.”
A major hazard for all of our self-deceiving US global democracy/anti-corruption/anti-drug efforts is that militarily occupied people know their occupiers’ hypocrisy with crystal, personal and historical clarity. Who are we in the US to kid ourselves that we are qualified to tell “those people” how to govern themselves?
I think the only way for US to gain global security is to withdraw and eat humble pie. The US is a young nation where for several centuries greed and global conquest have run rampant. A little repentance wouldn’t hurt anyone’s global security.
I have hung out around legal and political machinations at home too long to believe that “my” people have anything to teach anyone else about being honest and democratic. I think a lot of folks outside the US would sigh in relief and let go of hurting US folks if “we” let go of telling “those people” what to do for their own good. The time has come for Euro-Americans to give up the colonial habit of embarrassing claims that “their” governments are inferior to “ours,” especially when they are our collaborators…a little ungrateful to say the least. Love and peace--hal
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
re BBC interview with Alan Greenspan, re human nature
0920 EDT 090909:
Would that Mr. Greenspan had paid attention to Adam Smith's observation that the greatest threat to a free market was incorporation - giving otherwise unconnected investors to license by limiting liability for corporate sins to strive to oligopolize markets. For profit limitation of liability unleashes excesses of power Mr. Greenspan now discovers the principle of human nature that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hal Pepinsky, Worthington, Ohio USA
Would that Mr. Greenspan had paid attention to Adam Smith's observation that the greatest threat to a free market was incorporation - giving otherwise unconnected investors to license by limiting liability for corporate sins to strive to oligopolize markets. For profit limitation of liability unleashes excesses of power Mr. Greenspan now discovers the principle of human nature that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hal Pepinsky, Worthington, Ohio USA
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Teaching w/o grading: Response on Assoc of Humanist Soc listserv
you can post back to humanistsociology.org listserv at ahs-talk@primatix.com Here's today's message to humanist sociology list folks, on what I have labeled "grading without grading":
First, thanks to our forebears who share ahs folk history with us.
I am saddened and hurt by the second wave of messages claiming that one's low grades are a threshold criterion for having one's teaching taken seriously. My position is clear. I don't believe in grades, and because I took my own input in class seriously, believe (former) students who say that my buddhist-sounding attempts to grade students by not grading was a personal and political highlight of their time at Indiana U.
I have never known what anyone else, let alone one of my students, needed to know. I don't believe in grading eggs, let alone people. A career as a criminologist has only helped cure the conceit that I know how publicly to grade other beings.
From the first two jobs I was genteelly fired from on, colleagues have dismissed my teaching on grounds that I have become popular with students (which has not always been true).
Somehow, I ended up with enviable formal educational credentials, and yet even in professorial retirement, I can't dream of being qualified to rate a student I scarcely know for evaluators of the student's academic record I will never know. I'm arrogant enough to believe that if I am unqualified to grade or otherwise pass judgment on students, no one else is either.
Taking grading seriously saddens me most because of the pessimistic message that in one's own immediate relations that matter, I become a better teacher the more my students fail to learn.
I'll post this at my blog: http://pepinsky.blogspot.com
First, thanks to our forebears who share ahs folk history with us.
I am saddened and hurt by the second wave of messages claiming that one's low grades are a threshold criterion for having one's teaching taken seriously. My position is clear. I don't believe in grades, and because I took my own input in class seriously, believe (former) students who say that my buddhist-sounding attempts to grade students by not grading was a personal and political highlight of their time at Indiana U.
I have never known what anyone else, let alone one of my students, needed to know. I don't believe in grading eggs, let alone people. A career as a criminologist has only helped cure the conceit that I know how publicly to grade other beings.
From the first two jobs I was genteelly fired from on, colleagues have dismissed my teaching on grounds that I have become popular with students (which has not always been true).
Somehow, I ended up with enviable formal educational credentials, and yet even in professorial retirement, I can't dream of being qualified to rate a student I scarcely know for evaluators of the student's academic record I will never know. I'm arrogant enough to believe that if I am unqualified to grade or otherwise pass judgment on students, no one else is either.
Taking grading seriously saddens me most because of the pessimistic message that in one's own immediate relations that matter, I become a better teacher the more my students fail to learn.
I'll post this at my blog: http://pepinsky.blogspot.com
Monday, September 7, 2009
Resistance to Obama talking to students; let's call a spade a spade
LET’S CALL A SPADE A SPADE
Hal Pepinsky
September 7. 2009
Let’s own up: If our US father figure in Washington were white, there would be no question of all students watching our president tomorrow, as our students have routinely done with presidents before him, without incident.
In hard times especially, fear of foreigners heats up, including fear of people right here at home whom we regard as outsiders, as intruders on our turf. Whether criminalized or even worshiped, this is the logic of gang turf battles, especially when racialized. On September 8, 2009, for a presidential moment in US history, many a US school promises to re-institute jim crow. So blatant, so sad. Love and peace, hal
Hal Pepinsky
September 7. 2009
Let’s own up: If our US father figure in Washington were white, there would be no question of all students watching our president tomorrow, as our students have routinely done with presidents before him, without incident.
In hard times especially, fear of foreigners heats up, including fear of people right here at home whom we regard as outsiders, as intruders on our turf. Whether criminalized or even worshiped, this is the logic of gang turf battles, especially when racialized. On September 8, 2009, for a presidential moment in US history, many a US school promises to re-institute jim crow. So blatant, so sad. Love and peace, hal
False debate: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Learning
FALSE DEBATES 1: QUANTITATIVE VS. QUALITATIVE LEARNING
Hal Pepinsky
September 7, 2009
My eighteen-month-old granddaughter Mila keeps driving home to me how fundamental yeses and noes are to human communication. Mila used sign language for no by the time she said ma. Not long after, as I kept shaking my head back and said the y word while Mila vigorously shook her head in squealing delight, she also learned to say “yes!”
When I was with her in Durango a week ago, Mila kept asking new words for things and stringing two and three words together--a voracious listener, looker and talker. Inadvertently in one moment, I played into what theoretical physicists might call a critical experiment: I said “no” to Mila’s face when I thought she was about to swing a picture off the wall over her head. Thinking back, all I needed to have done, as pretty much all the adults in her life I had seen do, was to pull her hand gently and firmly away, by sign and word said something like “hurts,” and distracted her. When instead I said “no,” Mila virtually collapsed in tears and wander off to be by herself.
In this one incident, an infant taught a retired criminologist a socially significant lesson in how NOT to achieve social control, and led me reconsider data on how I had seen Mila treated in similar circumstances, thereby to recognize how Mila had openly and yet with personal dignity been redirected without noes. All this from an “n of 1”as social methodologists might say about my data set. In many journal reviews I have received, especially early on when I was reporting a significant finding like the lesson Mila just taught me, a primary ground for rejection of my research reports was that I was merely anecdotal. Yes I was, yes I am.
I keep on learning from and sharing essentially anecdotal data because whether the stories are mine or others’, from the personal to the historical, stories have yielded far and away the most reliable (in statisticians’ terms merely “nominal”) empirical data I have in my storehouse of knowledge of how in the real world to get what I want and avoid what I don’t want from efforts at social control. Time and again, I use stories to guide me to look elsewhere, as to significance of other numbers (e.g., at a simple level, comparing when I told Mila no to what happened in other encounters with her I had witnessed). I keep finding that stories informants tell about their own experiences are more reliable and significant than stories social scientists tell about “them” (as in my own case, about prisoners and ritual abuse survivors). The lingering lawyer in me deeply respects my preference for personal over hearsay evidence. Feminists have taught me that in some social scientific circles, this preference is called “the narrative method.” Whatever people call it, that’s my research method--how I truly learn what is socially significant.
Back to the fundamental limit of all human knowledge: yeses and noes. When we try to reproduce language, as in the computer software I am using, language is fundamentally binary, a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no. At root, all our communication are binary, quantitative.
Decades ago, a grad student told me a story of his encounter with a noted quantitative sociologist, who presented a best-fitting path model of something or other. My acquaintance pointed to a particular path in the diagram, and asked, “What is the social significance of [a particular statistically significant path in the model)?” The presenter was baffled; after all, the path was significant at the .05 level.
I have noticed that self-identified quantitative criminologists share the struggle that any dedicated would-be social scientist including me faces, to reach findings that are socially and politically significant. I don’t have a clue as to what most reported research data mean to the informants, let alone figuring out what their data mean to me. I think I know what Mila meant to tell me. She wasn’t lying or trying to put on airs. By contrast, I don’t know for instance why I should accept at face value whether anyone who does or does not self-report victimizing or report being victimizated ought to be trusted, let alone understood.
A further problem I have with standard social research multivariate analyses is about claims of knowing that since a relationship is not statistically significant, the relationship makes no difference, let alone generalizing from group results to expectations of individuals. Statistically, the probability of any sample, let alone single case, having no effect on or being like what shows up in the best-fitting statistical model, IS ZERO (called “the fallacy of affirming the null hypothesis” at the beginning of chapter 1 of my graduate statistics textbook). Statistics only attach probabilities to what is NOT, NOT to what IS. After my late friend, co-instructor, and mentor Leslie T. Wilkins won a British Royal Statistical Society award for his work predicting which detained juvenile offenders would land back in the system after release, Les pointed out to me and countless others that prediction research is statistically bankrupt. (So much for profiling, period.)
As a criminologist in particular I’m brought back to a basic issue of yes or no in my field: whether to take each report of whether crime or criminality has occurred, or more generally of whether social control has been gained or lost, at face value. I can’t get past that methodological issue. Neither could people in 1986 in the Oslo criminology seminar I was invited in on, when we discussed a self-report crime survey, in this case of students in an introductory psychology class. An echo went round the room - How unscientific: the researchers didn’t know the students; how then could the researchers possibly know what the students know by students’ questionnaire responses?
I’ll spare you a separate “false debates” post on the topic of scientific vs. unscientific learning by declaring here and now that that I wish we self-styled social researchers would give up trying to prove who the better, truer, more elegant scientist is, and instead just trade notes on how and what plainly works and doesn’t in our social lives. False debates like that on quantitative vs. qualitative inquiry are beside any socially significant point of research, of socially meaningful learning. Transcending false debates is in my view where peacemaking discourse begins. I expect to follow up this essay with others on false debates that distract from accomplishing accountable, responsible, well informed management of our social problems. Love and peace—hal
Hal Pepinsky
September 7, 2009
My eighteen-month-old granddaughter Mila keeps driving home to me how fundamental yeses and noes are to human communication. Mila used sign language for no by the time she said ma. Not long after, as I kept shaking my head back and said the y word while Mila vigorously shook her head in squealing delight, she also learned to say “yes!”
When I was with her in Durango a week ago, Mila kept asking new words for things and stringing two and three words together--a voracious listener, looker and talker. Inadvertently in one moment, I played into what theoretical physicists might call a critical experiment: I said “no” to Mila’s face when I thought she was about to swing a picture off the wall over her head. Thinking back, all I needed to have done, as pretty much all the adults in her life I had seen do, was to pull her hand gently and firmly away, by sign and word said something like “hurts,” and distracted her. When instead I said “no,” Mila virtually collapsed in tears and wander off to be by herself.
In this one incident, an infant taught a retired criminologist a socially significant lesson in how NOT to achieve social control, and led me reconsider data on how I had seen Mila treated in similar circumstances, thereby to recognize how Mila had openly and yet with personal dignity been redirected without noes. All this from an “n of 1”as social methodologists might say about my data set. In many journal reviews I have received, especially early on when I was reporting a significant finding like the lesson Mila just taught me, a primary ground for rejection of my research reports was that I was merely anecdotal. Yes I was, yes I am.
I keep on learning from and sharing essentially anecdotal data because whether the stories are mine or others’, from the personal to the historical, stories have yielded far and away the most reliable (in statisticians’ terms merely “nominal”) empirical data I have in my storehouse of knowledge of how in the real world to get what I want and avoid what I don’t want from efforts at social control. Time and again, I use stories to guide me to look elsewhere, as to significance of other numbers (e.g., at a simple level, comparing when I told Mila no to what happened in other encounters with her I had witnessed). I keep finding that stories informants tell about their own experiences are more reliable and significant than stories social scientists tell about “them” (as in my own case, about prisoners and ritual abuse survivors). The lingering lawyer in me deeply respects my preference for personal over hearsay evidence. Feminists have taught me that in some social scientific circles, this preference is called “the narrative method.” Whatever people call it, that’s my research method--how I truly learn what is socially significant.
Back to the fundamental limit of all human knowledge: yeses and noes. When we try to reproduce language, as in the computer software I am using, language is fundamentally binary, a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no. At root, all our communication are binary, quantitative.
Decades ago, a grad student told me a story of his encounter with a noted quantitative sociologist, who presented a best-fitting path model of something or other. My acquaintance pointed to a particular path in the diagram, and asked, “What is the social significance of [a particular statistically significant path in the model)?” The presenter was baffled; after all, the path was significant at the .05 level.
I have noticed that self-identified quantitative criminologists share the struggle that any dedicated would-be social scientist including me faces, to reach findings that are socially and politically significant. I don’t have a clue as to what most reported research data mean to the informants, let alone figuring out what their data mean to me. I think I know what Mila meant to tell me. She wasn’t lying or trying to put on airs. By contrast, I don’t know for instance why I should accept at face value whether anyone who does or does not self-report victimizing or report being victimizated ought to be trusted, let alone understood.
A further problem I have with standard social research multivariate analyses is about claims of knowing that since a relationship is not statistically significant, the relationship makes no difference, let alone generalizing from group results to expectations of individuals. Statistically, the probability of any sample, let alone single case, having no effect on or being like what shows up in the best-fitting statistical model, IS ZERO (called “the fallacy of affirming the null hypothesis” at the beginning of chapter 1 of my graduate statistics textbook). Statistics only attach probabilities to what is NOT, NOT to what IS. After my late friend, co-instructor, and mentor Leslie T. Wilkins won a British Royal Statistical Society award for his work predicting which detained juvenile offenders would land back in the system after release, Les pointed out to me and countless others that prediction research is statistically bankrupt. (So much for profiling, period.)
As a criminologist in particular I’m brought back to a basic issue of yes or no in my field: whether to take each report of whether crime or criminality has occurred, or more generally of whether social control has been gained or lost, at face value. I can’t get past that methodological issue. Neither could people in 1986 in the Oslo criminology seminar I was invited in on, when we discussed a self-report crime survey, in this case of students in an introductory psychology class. An echo went round the room - How unscientific: the researchers didn’t know the students; how then could the researchers possibly know what the students know by students’ questionnaire responses?
I’ll spare you a separate “false debates” post on the topic of scientific vs. unscientific learning by declaring here and now that that I wish we self-styled social researchers would give up trying to prove who the better, truer, more elegant scientist is, and instead just trade notes on how and what plainly works and doesn’t in our social lives. False debates like that on quantitative vs. qualitative inquiry are beside any socially significant point of research, of socially meaningful learning. Transcending false debates is in my view where peacemaking discourse begins. I expect to follow up this essay with others on false debates that distract from accomplishing accountable, responsible, well informed management of our social problems. Love and peace—hal
Friday, September 4, 2009
The End of Airpower
THE END OF AIRPOWER
Hal Pepinsky
September 4, 2009
The Anglo-American military legend continues—that the most overtly globalized “hot” war in human history was won decisively by airpower in 1945. And now NATO clings to the romantic notion that air superiority makes military defeat inexcusable.
Last night in Afghanistan “the Taliban” (our words, who among us knows the words the residents use?) hijacked two U.S. gasoline tankers (which I can only imagine would be seen by residents as fuel for foreign invaders).
I have just turned off BBC after hearing an interviewer explore dangers that all that fuel in enemy hands could have done to our cause, whatever our “mission” (catch the religious connotation of that military word) ever has been. The BBC interviewer inquired whether tankers had been used in previous suicide attacks, and whether fuel was used in other suicide bombs, and implicitly, whether this or that might have justified a military commander’s hasty decision to keep the fuel out of enemy hands.
Give me a break. If I had just hijacked two tankers from an enemy force that could spot them from the air by satellite any time, would I try to hang onto the trucks, or give the fuel to local residents to win their hearts and minds?
Milgram and Zimbardo have among many others found that absolute power corrupts. The only explanation other than nostalgia I can see for Anglo-US reliance on airpower is that we almost never get shot down, and hence our constituents don’t have so many “friendly” casualties to complain about. Noblesse oblige in warfare. At the same time, we strive to count Afghans as enemy casualties. A friend who was a point guard late in the Vietnam War told me he used to shoot monkeys out of trees to make enemy body counts. Those of us who drop bombs and fire rockets are more likely to claim native bodies as trophies than as victims.
We have already well begun to blame the Iraqis and Afghanis for how corrupt their native governments are, telling ourselves that if only they had straightened up and flown right, or if our own constituents had had the will to keep committing more troops and to fighting on, military glory would have been snatched from the jaws of defeat. I long for continuing Anglo-American popular awakening to the reality that military success, karmically, eventually reaches its limits, and as with the Soviet Union, defeats itself. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky
September 4, 2009
The Anglo-American military legend continues—that the most overtly globalized “hot” war in human history was won decisively by airpower in 1945. And now NATO clings to the romantic notion that air superiority makes military defeat inexcusable.
Last night in Afghanistan “the Taliban” (our words, who among us knows the words the residents use?) hijacked two U.S. gasoline tankers (which I can only imagine would be seen by residents as fuel for foreign invaders).
I have just turned off BBC after hearing an interviewer explore dangers that all that fuel in enemy hands could have done to our cause, whatever our “mission” (catch the religious connotation of that military word) ever has been. The BBC interviewer inquired whether tankers had been used in previous suicide attacks, and whether fuel was used in other suicide bombs, and implicitly, whether this or that might have justified a military commander’s hasty decision to keep the fuel out of enemy hands.
Give me a break. If I had just hijacked two tankers from an enemy force that could spot them from the air by satellite any time, would I try to hang onto the trucks, or give the fuel to local residents to win their hearts and minds?
Milgram and Zimbardo have among many others found that absolute power corrupts. The only explanation other than nostalgia I can see for Anglo-US reliance on airpower is that we almost never get shot down, and hence our constituents don’t have so many “friendly” casualties to complain about. Noblesse oblige in warfare. At the same time, we strive to count Afghans as enemy casualties. A friend who was a point guard late in the Vietnam War told me he used to shoot monkeys out of trees to make enemy body counts. Those of us who drop bombs and fire rockets are more likely to claim native bodies as trophies than as victims.
We have already well begun to blame the Iraqis and Afghanis for how corrupt their native governments are, telling ourselves that if only they had straightened up and flown right, or if our own constituents had had the will to keep committing more troops and to fighting on, military glory would have been snatched from the jaws of defeat. I long for continuing Anglo-American popular awakening to the reality that military success, karmically, eventually reaches its limits, and as with the Soviet Union, defeats itself. Love and peace--hal
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Letter to Editor, Durango Telegraph: jailing
To the Editor: Freedom from Fear in Durango,
My wife and I spent last weekend in Durango with our children and 18-month-old granddaughter. There I encountered a controversy over whether the La Plata district attorney’s office is excessively moving to dismiss offenses described in Durango police arrest reports.
I retired this year after 39 years as a criminal justice professor. My son-in-law is with the La Plata prosecutorial team, which he tells me has consciously moved toward what I call “peacemaking.” (Google “hal pepinsky” for starters to see what I mean by that.)
I am told that the new county jail space is about empty. Wow! Normally if you build it you will fill it. I’ll be spreading the word among criminologists that La Plata is one county where criminal justice change really is something new and better.
In the classroom, on the streets, in everyday life, I have spent well over half my life among law enforcement professionals. I know the dedication of criminal justice professionals across the system. There is no reason that the people of La Plata County can’t continue to support and celebrate the countless quiet ways criminal justice professionals serve public safety besides locking people up.
As I understand recently published comments by the Durango police chief, he figures his officers have been disrespected by prosecutors’ moves to dismiss arrest charges marginally more often than under the previous prosecutor.
I also find credible reports that line police officers tell prosecutors that they see no greater community danger under a newly elected reform district attorney, and even feel relieved of making nuisance arrests.
Congratulations to the folks of La Plata County for having elected a reform district attorney who truly promotes community safety over jailing excess expense and nonsense. Here’s to supporting unsung ways criminal justice professionals serve without requiring them to bust people to demonstrate their worth.
Thanks to all that makes my family’s community in and around Durango safer and saner—Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, 614-433-7386
My wife and I spent last weekend in Durango with our children and 18-month-old granddaughter. There I encountered a controversy over whether the La Plata district attorney’s office is excessively moving to dismiss offenses described in Durango police arrest reports.
I retired this year after 39 years as a criminal justice professor. My son-in-law is with the La Plata prosecutorial team, which he tells me has consciously moved toward what I call “peacemaking.” (Google “hal pepinsky” for starters to see what I mean by that.)
I am told that the new county jail space is about empty. Wow! Normally if you build it you will fill it. I’ll be spreading the word among criminologists that La Plata is one county where criminal justice change really is something new and better.
In the classroom, on the streets, in everyday life, I have spent well over half my life among law enforcement professionals. I know the dedication of criminal justice professionals across the system. There is no reason that the people of La Plata County can’t continue to support and celebrate the countless quiet ways criminal justice professionals serve public safety besides locking people up.
As I understand recently published comments by the Durango police chief, he figures his officers have been disrespected by prosecutors’ moves to dismiss arrest charges marginally more often than under the previous prosecutor.
I also find credible reports that line police officers tell prosecutors that they see no greater community danger under a newly elected reform district attorney, and even feel relieved of making nuisance arrests.
Congratulations to the folks of La Plata County for having elected a reform district attorney who truly promotes community safety over jailing excess expense and nonsense. Here’s to supporting unsung ways criminal justice professionals serve without requiring them to bust people to demonstrate their worth.
Thanks to all that makes my family’s community in and around Durango safer and saner—Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, 614-433-7386
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