An Oxford University researcher and author specializing in neuroscience has suggested that one day religious fundamentalism may be treated as a curable mental illness.
“Someone who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” Taylor said. “In many ways it could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage.”
The author went on to say she wasn’t just referring to the “obvious candidates like radical Islam,” but also meant such beliefs as the idea that beating children is acceptable.
Taylor was not immediately available for comment.
This is not the first time Taylor has explored the mind processes of a radical. In 2006, she wrote a book about mind control called Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, which explored the science behind the persuasive tactics of such groups as cults and al Qaeda.
“We all change our beliefs of course,” Taylor said in a YouTube video about the book. “We all persuade each other to do things; we all watch advertising; we all get educated and experience [religions.] Brainwashing, if you like, is the extreme end of that; it’s the coercive, forceful, psychological torture type.”
Taylor also noted that brainwashing, though extreme, is part of a the “much more widespread phenomenon” of persuasion. That is, “how we make people think things that might not be good for them, that they might not otherwise have chosen to think.”
“Technologies which directly scan or manipulate brains cannot be neutral tools, as open to commercial exploitation as any new gadget,” Taylor wrote in a blog post for The Huffington Post in 2012. “The brain supremacy offers chances to improve human dignity, but it also risks abuse.”
PBS NewsHour: Examining torture in “Zero Dark Thirty”
FILM/ SOURCE FOR THIS ITEM: PBS NEWSHOUR Thursday on the NewsHour: Examining Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ With appendix by Jonathan Kim’s ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture
Posted by Anne Davenport , January 10, 2013
Academy Award nominations came out Thursday, and “Zero Dark Thirty” claimed five of them, including for best picture, adding to a number of other recent accolades. The movie hasn’t opened around the country yet, but chances are you’ve heard a lot about it.
Jessica Chastain, nominated for best actress, plays the role of a young, tireless CIA analyst named Maya, who is obsessed with finding Osama bin Laden. The film sweeps from the haunting days of 9/11 straight through to the successful raid on his compound in Pakistan in May 2011.
Behind the film is the team of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. Their 2009 film “The Hurt Locker” won six Oscars, including for best picture, best director for Bigelow — the first woman to win that award — and best original screenplay for Boal.
“Zero Dark Thirty” is also a very difficult film to watch, and that’s where the controversy begins.
Critics argue that the film’s graphic and gritty depictions of torture — and the role it played in America’s anti-terror policy — distort the truth and imply that the CIA’s use of aggressive, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including water boarding, produced information that lead directly to the discovery of bin Laden’s whereabouts — and his death.
There’s been considerable controversy — from both sides of the political aisle — in Congress.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Senate Armed Service Committee ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., and others sent two letters recently to the acting CIA director seeking information provided to the filmmakers and have subsequently begun a review of their own.
At a screening in Washington, D.C., Tuesday night, protesters, including some aligned with Amnesty International, showed their objections, while inside the filmmakers told the PBS NewsHour they stood by their work of the last five years:
On Thursday’s NewsHour, we get two views from a pair of journalists who have written extensively about the 10-year-hunt for bin Laden:
Jane Mayer is with the New Yorker and is the author of “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.”
Mark Bowden wrote the book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.” He is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and teaches journalism at the University of Delaware.
Watch their discussion with Jeffrey Brown here or below:
Jonathan KimFilm Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show ReThink Review: Zero Dark Thirty – Yes, It Endorses Torture
Posted: 01/11/2013 9:31 am
I was dreading the announcement of the 2013 Oscars nominees, in large part because it felt like Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the manhunt to find Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, was peaking at the right time and had emerged as the frontrunner in a fairly unsettled Oscar race. The source of my dread was what ZD30 says about torture (more on that below), and it both saddened and infuriated me that a film that attempts to rewrite history and validate one of the darkest sins of America’s recent history might be given the world’s highest storytelling honors.
ZD30 ended up nabbing five Oscar nominations, including one for best picture — a major achievement by any measure. However, I was delighted to learn that Bigelow had not been nominated for best director. Normally, I wouldn’t take pleasure in something like that, especially since I greatly admired Bigelow’s Oscar-winning bomb-defuser film The Hurt Locker, but I was very glad that the Academy members who voted for Best Director were informed enough to realize that Bigelow was ultimately responsible for the three enormous, destructive lies ZD30 asserts: that torture is an effective way to gather information, that it was instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden, and that America should have never stopped doing it. Watch my ReThink Review of Zero Dark Thirty below (transcript following).
Transcript:
The makers of Zero Dark Thirty clearly want it to be the definitive film about the ten-year manhunt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, claiming the film is “faithful to the facts,” “truthful,” “journalistic,” and “living history.” But if that’s their claim, how come the first 30 to 40 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty are about how torture was instrumental in locating the courier who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden, despite the fact that the acting director of the CIA and the chairmen of both the Senate Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committees have publicly stated the opposite? And should the film’s seeming endorsement of torture disqualify it from awards consideration?
The film stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a hard-charging young CIA agent who has devoted her professional life to finding bin Laden. It’s Maya who believes that the path to finding bin Laden is through the courier who helps deliver his messages to Al Qaeda leaders and the media, since bin Laden would be too wary of surveillance to use phones or the internet. Maya and her colleagues attempt to locate this courier, an eight-year odyssey that involves surveillance, battles for resources, frustrating delays, life-threatening risks, and old-fashioned detective work. When the courier is finally located and leads to a suspicious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Maya is convinced that this must be bin Laden’s hideout.
Based on a real person, Maya is a fascinating character that Chastain handles wonderfully, both because of and in spite of the fact that we know so little about her, she isn’t the most likable person, and her single-minded dedication to her mission increasingly borders on obsession. The supporting cast — including Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, James Gandolfini, Chris Pratt, and Harold Perrineau — are all good and reflect the hundreds of people and the multiple organizations involved in finding and killing bin Laden. The film’s natural lighting, verité shooting style, and attention to detail successfully builds tension while also showing the often unglamorous nature of intelligence work. And when the Navy SEAL raid to get bin Laden finally occurs, it happens in almost real-time over 40 gripping minutes in a carefully reconstructed replica of the actual Abbottabad compound.
But it’s this attention to detail that makes the torture aspect of Zero Dark Thirty so baffling, infuriating, and unforgivable. It’s been accepted for decades within the intelligence and interrogation communities that torture simply doesn’t work and mostly leads to false confessions; strained relations with allies; prisoners made belligerent, insane, or useless; and victims’ families, friends, and sympathizers turned into sworn enemies. At one point, Maya says that getting bin Laden would protect the homeland. But after Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq, and the photos from Abu Ghraib, no one needed an order from bin Laden to justify attacking Americans or our allies.
Some critics have claimed that the torture scenes in the film reflect the “moral ambiguity” of the torture debate. But since the torture in Zero Dark Thirty is shown to be so effective, with one prisoner actually saying “I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question and I will answer it,” and we’re shown none of the many downsides to torture, the “moral ambiguity” amounts to “torture is ugly… but it works.” For way too many people, that’s not morally ambiguous at all, and is instead seen as the dirty but necessary work of war.
But it’s a claim as factually wrong and repulsive as saying, “Rape is horrible…but some girls are asking for it.” In reality, there is no debate and no “moral ambiguity” about torture. Not only is it illegal, immoral, and counterproductive, IT DOES NOT WORK. But Zero Dark Thirty, like the TV series 24, claims that torture does work, or at the very least, revives the myth that the jury is still out on torture, just as oil companies and republicans want you to think the science of global warming is inconclusive. Zero Dark Thirty works as a crime procedural, but its irresponsible, destructive, dishonest stance on torture absolutely ruined it for me, and I feel Zero Dark Thirty should not be on any best-of-the-year lists, nor is it deserving of Oscar consideration.
The devil wears pretty
By Patrice Greanville
The devil may wear Prada, sometimes, but it almost always wears a pretty face. Fools the masses more easily that way. I’m referring, of course, to the battalions of Republican women whose looks remind us more of Barbie dolls, beauty queens, models or tv announcers than political operatives for the vilest political party ever to disgrace this benighted land. (Male specimens also abound of this political disease.)
Boundless ambition and a sense of entitlement, a sociopathic lack of moral principles and compassion, and a flat, self-complacent intellect characterize them. And plenty of hypocrisy, the indispensable career glue for any run-of-the-mill American politician or public figure.
For under those movie-star looks and gleaming, multimillion-dollar smiles, beats the great contradiction: a heart largely devoid of kindness, a moral flaw these people sport (or brag about) among their peers with the banal abandon of someone insulated from real criticism, let alone introspection. Meanwhile, the corporate courtesan media, alternatively cowardly, dull, or outright celebratory of such types, shows no intellectual curiosity to even broach these subjects.
Well, let’s face it: It’s probably a class question. We’re talking about the face of privilege or good fortune, a golden journey that usually starts with a big win on the genetic and birth lottery. Regarding that cold heart, just check the addendum story and video below. It speaks volumes about why these people deserve public rebuke and opprobrium instead of praise and admiration.
A case in point
In the astral sweepstakes, and for sheer internal ugliness, few specimens crawling up the stinking, greasy pole of American power can hold a candle to Sarah Steelman, an eager-beaver Republican purebred who served as Missouri State Treasurer from 2005 to 2009, then tried for Governor (and thankfully failed) and is currently stumping around the state in a run for the US Senate. Her pedigree in the GOP mob is impeccable: Steelman is the second wife of David Steelman, a former Republican Leader in the Missouri House. Her father, John Hearne, is a senior partner in the Jefferson City law firm of Hearne and Green. And her father-in-law is the late Dorman Steelman, a former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party.
But here’s a truly frightening newsbit guaranteed to send chills up and down the spine of any thinking American: The New York Times cited her as among the seventeen women most likely to become the first female President of the United States.
Who said that the outside envelope—plus connections— didn’t help?
Sarah Steelman, John Brunner Battle Over Farm Animal Ad In Missouri Senate Race The Huffington Post | By Michael McAuliff
A pair of Missouri Republican Senate candidates are in something of a barnyard fight over an ad that accuses one of them of donating to a farm animal rights group. The candidate, businessman John Brunner, calls the ad an attack on his family because the donation really came from his daughter.
The ad, aired by the campaign of state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, accuses Brunner of giving $10,000 to an “extreme animal rights group that was founded to give farm animals rights.”
The spot goes on to say that the group, the Humane Farming Association, worries about the animals’ feelings, and asks, “What’s next, therapy?”
It then segues without warning to Steelman saying she opposes partial-birth abortion and gay marriage and that she “love[s] to hunt.” WATCH the ad:
Brunner hammered the ad Monday, saying Steelman was taking pot shots at his family. His problem, his campaign said in a statement, is that the donation actually came from his daughter, Ginny Becker.
According to the campaign, the Brunner household’s Christmas tradition is to donate to military families through the Brunner family foundation. But some years the kids have been allowed to choose their own charity, and once Becker chose Humane Farming, which says its goals are “to protect farm animals from cruelty and abuse, to protect the public from the misuse of antibiotics, hormones, and other chemicals used on factory farms, and to protect the environment from the impacts of industrialized animal factories.”
Brunner’s campaign didn’t quibble over the Steelman camp’s description of the group, but did release a statement from Becker owning up to the donation. “My charitable donation has nothing to do with a political race, and in my opinion, there are more significant issues to discuss today,” Becker said.
Brunner’s campaign wants Steelman to pull the ad and apologize.
“The latest ad from Sarah Steelman is a despicable attack on John Brunner’s family and is completely outside the bounds of a political campaign,” said Brunner spokesman Todd Abrajano. “Sarah Steelman should be ashamed of herself for putting this ad on the air and I call on her to apologize to John Brunner’s family immediately.”
Steelman’s campaign on Monday showed no signs of doing so.
UPDATE: 4:15 p.m. — The Steelman campaign stood by its charge that Brunner and his wife tried to aid farm animals, sending along the Brunner Foundation’s 990 report to the IRS from 2008, when the donation was made. The report shows that Brunner and his wife are the only trustees, and that they gave away $359,000 in 2008. Much went to educational, religious and veterans’ institutions, but the Brunners did appear to care about animal welfare, also donating to the Humane Society of Missouri and the St. Louis Zoo.
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The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith
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