Bayes rule, Occam’s Razor, and predicting threats from understanding “bad guys”

Imagine you are on a train, looking at the people around you, and you decide to do a game to pass the time. You construct imaginary pasts for the people you see. That old oriental lady there? – She was a celebrity singer in her youth back in Thailand. That heavyset man over there? He’s a Mafia enforcer on his way to do a “hit”. That middle-aged man over there? He’s wracked with internal pains from a car-accident. And so forth.

Now here is the point. The probability that you would be correct on any of these people is very, very, low. But it’s not zero. In fact, you could be correct about the entire group.

And this is because “probability” is a kind of odd concept. It’s often an expression of human ignorance, and assumptions, some of them faulty.
Its easy to understand probability when it applies to true randomness. For instance, you can never predict exactly when a radioactive atom will decay, but you can predict an average decay time for a group of atoms.
But we use probability often to predict events in our world that are unpredictable only to the extent that we lack information about their causes.

One area where people are woefully ignorant is what motivates bad people. By “bad people”, I mean people who most of us agree do bad things.
An interesting example of this was in the town of Sighet, Hungary, in World War II. Here, the Jewish villagers were warned, by an eye-witness to a Nazi massacre, that the Nazis would kill them, once the German armies reached Sighet. Instead of believing the eye-witness, the villagers decided he was crazy.

Some of the villager rationalizations were interesting. One argument was that perhaps the Nazis would hate rich Jews, but the Jews of Sighet were poor and inoffensive. Another argument was that in previous encounters with German soldiers, (in World War I), the Germans behaved fairly decently, and there was no reason to think they would be different this time.

Now lets examine this, but first take a note of “Bayes Rule”. Don’t be afraid of the math, there is just one equation.
P(H|E) = P(E|H) * P(H) / P(E)
E = evidence, H = Hypothesis, ‘|’ means “given”
P(H|E) = the probability of a hypothesis, given evidence
P(E|H) = the probability of the evidence being true, given the hypothesis
P(H) = the probability of the hypothesis being true, before you know about the evidence
P(E) = the probability of encountering the evidence

So if the hypothesis that you are considering is “The Nazis want to kill all the Jews”, and the new evidence (E) is the testimony of a eye-witness to a Nazi massacre of Jews, you should calculate the hypothesis probability taking into account the probability that the hypothesis is true even without you encountering the evidence, as well as the probability of a Nazi massacre happening irrespective of whether they want to kill the Jews or not.
That’s the theory.

So what happened in practice?

Well first of all, the Jews of Sighet put p(H) very low. That’s the probability, prior to hearing from Moshe (the witness) that the German soldiers would kill them. Secondly, they put p(E) very low, and its interesting to know why. They realized that P(H|E) (probability that if Moshe really saw Nazis massacring Jews in Poland that the same Nazis would then try to massacre the all Jews anywhere) was rather high. And since they simply didn’t believe P(H), they had to not believe P(E).
So how could E be invalid? Well, if Moshe was insane, then E would be invalid.
And that brings up another famous rule, which unlike Bayes Rule, is just heuristic, or general principle that sometimes works.
And that is Occams razor.

According to Wikipedia Occam’s razor:

is a principle of parsimony, economy, or succinctness used in logic and problem-solving. It states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Now let’s think about this for the Jews of Sighet.

To believe that the Germans had changed radically from WW-I to WW-II, you would have to assume many things. It would help to know how the great monetary inflation of the Weimar government wiped out the incomes of many Germans, you might have to understand how ideology transforms people, you might have to understand what the Nazi ideology preaches, its antecedents, why it caught hold, and many other things, that even now, we can’t know.
On the other hand, assuming that Moshe was crazy just required one assumption.

Obviously making just one assumption is simpler than making many.

So does that mean that Occam’s razor is invalid, at least some of the time?

Or that Bayes theorem, while accurate, is often a waste of time, because the probability estimates that people make are based on incomplete information, and a mix of incorrect and correct assumptions and beliefs about the world that they live in? There is a saying about computers “garbage in leads to garbage out.”

I think that part of the answer is that what seems to be the simplest explanation based on your current knowledge, may not be the simplest explanation at all once you have more knowledge.

Think of the Melanesian islanders in the years during and after World War II. (From Wikipedia:)

A small population of indigenous peoples observed, often right in front of their dwellings, the largest war ever fought. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of supplies and later the Allied forces did likewise…
After the war, in attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. … The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways..In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of aeroplanes out of straw and cut new military-style landing strips out of the jungle, hoping to attract more aeroplanes. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

Now from the viewpoint of these peoples, who did not understand technology, and had not even met foreigners before the war, the simplest explanation for all these riches was supernatural. The hypothesis that the Gods were responsible seems reasonable, if you don’t have alternatives.

And that’s another reason people get things wrong. They can’t imagine the alternatives to a hypothesis, or they discount those alternatives.

So now lets talk about evil in a little more depth.
Recently, a famous American movie actor and producer, Robert Redford, made a fictional movie that tries to make its audience sympathetic to a sixties radical group. His main character kills a policeman and goes into hiding.

But a person who actually interviewed the real sixties American radical group, the “Weathermen”, which killed policemen and planned bombings says that “The Weatherman’s real intent was centered on a future in which the communist nations of Cuba, North Korea, China and the Soviet Union would occupy various parts of the U.S., with “re-education centers” established in the Southwest to prevent counter-revolution. These concentration camps were to be for re-educating die-hard capitalists.” The interviewer asked them what would happen to those couldn’t be re-educated, and was told they would have to be eliminated. “And when I say ‘eliminate,’ that meant ‘kill….twenty-five million people.”

My point is that a fairly ignorant, naive, but widespread view of such radicals is that they were young, passionate, and caring, and they cared so much about injustice that they resorted to violence. In fact, if I remember correctly, one of these people was treated leniently by a jury because of an argument that she was trying to stand up for oppressed black people.

So lets suppose that you read what I just wrote and dismiss it as “right-wing lies” and so forth. Your estimates of various probabilities of events will start diverging from mine. I will predict people behave in certain ways, and you will predict differently.

Take Salon contributor and syndicated columnist David Sirota, who wrote, after various people were blown to bits, or had their legs fly off their bodies in the Boston Marathon bombing, an article with the headline “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The reason he wrote that is that he thought if it were a white person, it would be dismissed as an isolated incident, while if it were a Moslem, then

it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing Boston as a reason to block immigration reform, defense spending cuts, and the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other encroachments on civil liberties.

Sirotta also quotes author Tim Wise.

White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.

Interestingly, the people I hang out with, who are conservatives, and very aware of Jihad, immediately assumed the bomber was a Moslem. And we turned out to be correct. It did occur to me that some anti-government extremist might blow something up, but if he did, I assumed it would be a government building, and not a marathon.

Sirota, with his talk of “white privilege,” lives in a different world of motives, and therefore probabilities of certain actions occurring  than I do. To me, Jihad is not about whites or browns, or blacks at all. If you look at what is happening in Nigeria right now, with Muslims descending on Christian villages and killing civilians at random, you see black-skinned people killing black-skinned people. It is unlikely that the jihad-inspired bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, would have selected a black basketball game in the inner city as a target, but that was not because of racial solidarity – they were actually Caucasians.  One commentator thought that the motive of the bombers was halfway between those of Columbine type killers and Jihadists, but one difference is that the Columbine high school massacre was perpetrated by people who felt they were bullied.  Dzhokhar, at least, was actually popular in his prestigious Cambridge high school.  Tamerlan had become a true believer in Islam, and probably despised his past episodes taking Marijuana with Americans.   Whatever problems Tamerlan had in his life, I believe that without the doctrine of Jihad he and his brother would not have done what they did.

But I could be wrong.  Dzhokhar left a note claiming that the attack was revenge for American attacks on Moslem countries.  If America can kill Moslems as “collateral damage”, then the Boston victims were also “collateral damage”.  But that raises questions too.  When Osama bin Laden’s hijackers killed thousands of Americans in the space of a few hours, what was that in revenge for?  America was not fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time.  In fact, American money was going to pay the Afghans not to grow crops that could be used to make drugs.

Centuries ago, when the Moslem religion took over Christian North Africa by force, and made it Moslem, what was that in revenge for?  When the Moslem invaders of India killed vast numbers of Hindus, what was that in revenge for?  Why didn’t Dzhokar and his brother feel upset at what Arabs recently did in Sudan or about slavery still practiced by some Moslems in Africa?

I just don’t understand how, if you have spent high school years as a popular, accepted student in the US, and if you walk among the spectators at the marathon, men, women, and children, all friendly, all happy, none of them victimizing you, that you would let loose supersonic nail and ball-bearing missiles at them.

And when something like that happens, I’m going to draw some conclusions that Mr. Sirota doesn’t want me to draw.

Not what about the situation where P(E) is very low?  Unusual things do happen, they could happen to you, and in fact statistically, they are bound to happen:

I once read of an Asian victim escaping from a serial killer, (the killer was Jeff Dahmer) The victim headed down the street, naked, dazed and confused. He met two women who were inclined to help him, but then two policemen saw him, and handed him back to Dahmer who had run after him, and who told them that the Asian, who could not speak English, was his gay lover.  Dahmer took the victim home, and promptly murdered him.

The policemen, who were totally clueless, made jokes about the day’s encounter with the “gay lovers” later.

They did not realize that their routine day had been disrupted by an encounter with a mass murderer. After all, what is the probability of encountering a mass-murderer on any-given day? Probably very low.

Let me close with one quote, and an experience I had.
In the preface to his book “The Gathering Storm”, Winston Churchill said that World War II should have been called the “unnecessary war”. “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle (World War I)”

At the end of World War I, Western armies had defeated Germany. Only twenty years later, a fully rebuilt German military nearly took over the world. Why? Basically the exhausted West made endless mistakes, including not understanding Hitler or human motivations in general.

I had an experience in some ways similar to Moshe (mentioned earlier).

I claim that I was the victim of some remarkably bad people. I will not go into the details except to say that right off the bat, there seemed to be problems with my story. First of all, one could ask, why should any bad people bother with me? Secondly, my evidence was subjective. I lacked witnesses, I had nothing on tape, or on film. Finally, if bad people wanted to victimize me, then why was I walking around the neighborhood, presumably untouched?
One policeman did say to me the following:

Nobody is going to believe your story. It’s like a movie! But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You need to collect evidence. I recommend you get yourself a hidden camera.

In other words, he was saying to increase P(E), in such an unmistakable way, that P(H|E) would be large enough to take seriously.

That raises another point though. What is “subjective experience”? On the one hand, we know it can be completely wrong.  And yet, sometimes subjective experience is all we have. Think of Moshe in the story above. Should he have been ignored just because he lacked two witnesses equipped with cameras? Or, as a second example, suppose you suddenly develop a pain in your chest. You go to the doctor. The Doctor gives you an x-ray. He is doing this based on your subjective experience (of a pain) and trying to convert it to objective evidence.

I also think that in life you do occasionally have a series of events below the surface that suddenly erupt into the open in some way, often involving a victim, and the police then have the choice of believing the victim, with the implications that there is long and involved story, and potentially serious crime-scene to uncover, or to simply believe the victim is exaggerating, or seeking attention, or delusional, or whatever. Occams Razor may say the testimony should be ignored. Bayes Rule, if you strongly discount P(H), and therefore discount P(E|H), may also indicate its a waste of time to follow-up.
But as evidence accumulates, Occams Razor can point to a different conclusion, as might Bayes Rule.

The best way to understand the motivations of bad people is to be them, for a few minutes. We can’t do that.  In my experience, sometimes bad guys drop the mask briefly, and then you get a glimpse of malice that can really shake you up.  But in general, that doesn’t happen.

But the main point of this blog post is that there is a story behind everything, and often we have only bits and pieces of the story.  We may be drastically wrong about the probability of something – even experts believed the Titanic was unsinkable for instance.  Once we have enough pieces of the story, the probabilities change.   But at least we should evaluate evidence honestly, and without wishful thinking.

Sources:

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel (Oct 22, 1996) – (for the story on Sighet)
The Weatherman interviewer quote is at: http://www.infowars.com/obama-mentor-wanted-americans-put-in-re-education-camps/ but there is also a book: Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen by Larry Grathwohl published in 2013. Amazon’s blurb says:

Time Magazine called him “the only FBI informant known to have successfully penetrated the Weather Underground.”  In 1969, Larry Grathwohl stepped out of his life and into the role of an informant for the FBI. For a year, Grathwohl ran with America’s most dangerous radicals. He planned bombings, murders, and political assassinations. He saw, up close, a gang of thugs dedicated to bringing down America.

 Note: I say at the top that “true probability” is something as simple as the decay of radioactive atoms, but the June 2013 Scientific American says that there is a new theory called QBism that finds Bayesian rules behind all “Quantum Weirdness”, and as I recall, radioactive decay is a quantum phenomenon.

The ideology that caused the avoidable Irish Famine of 1846.

I thought I understood the Irish famine of 1846. I knew that the population was dependent for sustenance on the potato and when a disease hit the potato crop, the Irish starved. I had also read of Irish produce being exported to England while this was going on, but that was about the extent of what I knew.

The truth was more interesting. It wasn’t just greedy Englishmen and a plant disease that caused the problem. There was an ideology at work.

A very influential English professor, Thomas Malthus, argued that there were limits on how many humans could exist, since there were limited resources in nature. So the population had to be kept down. So

“instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.”

Before we look at Malthus as a monster, we should realize that from his point of view, the poor would die anyway, by over-reproducing until there was not enough food to support them, and the death from famine would be quite horrible. So why not encourage them to die in more humane ways, before the inevitable resource crunch?

Malthus was thinking of his fellow Englishmen when he said this, but he also wrote

“The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.”

Malthus was also against those “benevolent, but much mistaken men who have thought they were doing a service to mankind” (by seeking cures for diseases).

Before I go on, I should say this material was gathered by Robert Zubrin, in his new book (of which more below), and he shows the problems with Malthus’s ideas. Malthus’s beliefs did have plausibility – if population constantly grows on a finite planet, you would expect crisis at some point.

(You might be shocked to know that John Holdren, a science advisor to President Obama, is an admirer of Malthus)

Back to Ireland:
Ireland was underpopulated in 1846. 1846 was the height of the famine, and in that year Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain.
The reason the Irish themselves ate potatoes was because their land had been taken, they paid merciless taxes and ‘rack-rents’, and they were denied the opportunity to acquire income through manufactures and other means.
So they ate what they could afford.
Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure.
Was this the fault of Malthus?
Well, the head of the British government, Lord John Russell, refused to aid Ireland, and one biographer says that he was motivated by a “Malthusian fear about the long-term effect of relief,”, while the government’s representative in Ireland, Lord Clarendon, argued that “doling out food merely to keep people alive would do nobody any permanent good.” So Charles Trevelyan, who had Malthus as a professor, was put in charge of managing the famine. This man said that the famine was a “direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” The idea was that it was God’s way of redressing an imbalance between population and resources.
So as a result, as Zubrin says, there were “scenes of incredible horror the like of which would not be matched in Europe for another century…”

In India, three decades later, the British again contributed to the causes of a famine, and then used Malthusian reasoning not to try to stop it. They talked of overpopulation, and Zubrin says that “As Indian peasants, driven from their land by taxation, a collapsing currency, and crop failure, began to roam the country searching for food..” they were rounded up and put in hard labor camps and limited to rations of one pound of rice a day, with no meat, fish, fruit or vegetables. This daily dole of 1,630 calories was actually less than the 1,750 calories per day provided by the Nazis to the inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Many millions died in this catastrophe.

Before the reader gets too angry at the British, he should know that the British community of Madras was outraged at all this, and attempted to raise private funds to save the Indians from starvation, but Viceroy Lytton stopped them.

Red Cross founder Florence Nightingale called on her nation’s government to suspend its merciless taxation of India, but she was likewise rebuffed by Lytton. A British officer is on record as saying that reducing taxes on the Indians would encourage overpopulation.

So what are we to make of the deaths of millions? Is this a “laissez faire” ideology gone mad? Is it racism?

It is valid to question the value of charity in certain circumstances. The United States, for example, despite being in debt by trillions of dollars (and if you count unfunded liabilities, by a hundred trillion), gives foreign aid to many countries. The United States basically borrows money from China to give charity to other countries.
China, on the other hand, invests in Africa and many other continents. A sample article on that topic is “A Pacific Island Prefers Chinese Investment to U.S. Welfare” in the April 2 2013 Wall Street Journal.
If somebody asked me to drive fifteen miles away to a slum and give money at random to poor individuals, I would tell him that the money would be wasted, it would be like throwing it down a well.

Malthusian ideology is different though. For the greater good of humanity, much of humanity must die. It’s not exactly racism, because Malthus applied it to his fellow Englishmen too.

The book that Zubrin wrote where this all appears is about environmentalists (who often believe both in limited natural resources and a negative human impact on our green planet). I read it on the recommendation of someone who had just used it for a quote, and then got fascinated by the section on Malthus, and then Darwin, and then eugenicists, and then the Nazis. (The Nazis were not just bigots, they were extreme eugenicists).

In my view, Zubrin goes overboard in applying his thesis, for instance its not really relevant that a believer in population control was also involved in running the war against Vietnam, and he overplays his hand when talking about the environmental movement in general. But sometimes, such as when he talks about China’s ‘one-child’ policy, he hits the ball right out of the park.

Source:
Merchants of Despair – by Robert Zubrin (2013)

Environmentalists destroy the Heartland

When I passed the book “EcoFascists” (author Elizabeth Nickson) on the new book shelf in the bookstore, my reaction was a little embarrassed.  I mean isn’t “fascist” a strong word for people who mean well?  After all environmentalists are concerned about ecosystems, and biodiversity, and creating corridors between wildlife areas surrounded by encroaching suburbia.  And they help the salmon reach their spawning grounds, and they are against pollution in our air and water.  And they want to preserve the rain-forest that is getting demolished in the third world.  Who could argue with that?

I bought the book.

I read it.

She’s right.

The problem is that when the environmentalists (some in advocacy groups, some in government), decide that land must be preserved, the land happens to be inhabited by people who make their living off it.  Take the third world: Mark Dowie, a former publisher of Mother Jones, found, after two years of travel into far-flung jungle, upland forest, and bottomland, that more than 14 million indigenous people had been cleared from their ancestral lands by conservationists. One victim of this described “Men in uniforms, showing guns, tell people that they now live in a national park. ” Mac Chapin wrote in World Watch magazine that a “CI [Conservation International] biologist…told me: “Quite frankly, I don’t care what the Indians want.  We have to work to conserve the biodiversity.”

But this couldn’t happen in America, could it?

Take the town of Del Norte, California:

“Once upon a time, Del Norte didn’t need help.  It was a largely ignored logging and fishing county…life was lived mostly outside.  Even though 22 percent dropped out of high school and one-third couldn’t read, the smart kids, the ones who wanted it badly enough, were sent to college.  Retirements were paid for.  There was security in this town for ordinary people….then Redwood National Park was created.”  Immediately there were job losses in forestry and the secondary jobs of providing the workers with restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, or whatever else.  Then the park expanded.  More than 25 percent of Del Norte County’s population was now out of work, and these were family-wage jobs, not Mcjobs.  Every year, more and more acreage was slid into the park, and more jobs vanished.  Today, 31 percent of the children live below the poverty line.

Promised jobs in tourism did not materialize.

Another example: Since 1988, when the war of the woods began, the job losses in milling and logging industries in the West exceed fifty thousand. In Eureka, Montana, county commissioner Marian Roose said “We have a new eight-million-dollar school and we have no idea how we’ll pay for it now.  Who is going to contribute to our local charities?  Who is going to contribute to Little League?  Who is going to buy the children’s stock at our annual fair 4-H sale?”

Of a county in Washington state, Nickson says: “It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest.  And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.

When jobs disappear from rural communities, poverty goes up, families break up, and often crime goes up as does use of drugs like methamphetamine.

One strategy the environmentalists use is to get the water rights to an area.  Since every rancher, farmer, etc. depends on water, they now can be forced out.  In the Lahontan valley, where water rights were removed, “…one rancher, the day after signing all the papers that transferred the rights to his ranch to the Nature Conservancy, went out on his back porch, a check in his pocket that meant he could live anywhere he wanted, and shot himself.”

The townspeople of Lander Wyoming were told by the BLM and ‘Fish and Wildlife’ that they have 85 percent of the threatened sage grouse habitat territory and must restrict farming, ranching, and mining.  Linda Platt (from Montana) says “you see, what the sage grouse is about is, they want to stop drilling in beautiful Wyoming.  That’s the hidden agenda.  These people are from Chicago, L.A. Atlanta.  They won’t even drive through Wyoming, but they want to think of Wyoming as beautiful.” Similarly, another Montanan, Terry Anderson, says “One of the people instrumental in shutting down the forests told me that ‘if the spotted owl hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent it.’  The goal was to stop logging, and the supposedly endangered owl was a tool to achieve this.

The government has its own utopians: According to Chuck Leaf, who was an engineer for the U.S. Forest Service, he was told in meetings in D.C to get as much land out of the hands of private owners as possible.

The government has re-introduced wolves into parts of the west, with the result that “in some rural communities of New Mexico, school bus stops look like cages” (there have been cases of wolves killing humans.)

Well what about those salmon who are being rescued?  Surely we can applaud that? Well, one set of dams recently targeted for removal provide local, renewable hydroelectric power to more than 70,000 homes and businesses in Oregon and California.  If you get rid of the dams, then you have to supply the energy from a much dirtier source of burning fuel.

(Though I read recently that a majority of Harvard University students are against burning any fossil fuels at all!)

Well at least we can say that all this is good for the environment right? Well, not really.  There are human activities that actually benefit the environment.

“Because thinning, salvage harvesting, cleaning up deadfall et cetera are expressly forbidden by environmentalists, between 90 and 200 million acres of Western forest is considered by the Forest Service itself to be in immediate danger of exploding in a fire that would burn so hot that not only would the seeds in the soil die, but also the dirt itself would be burned to dust.”

and

“The elk and antelope are gone from forests in central Idaho.  The dense forests, without meadows created by natural fires or logging, are in late succession and beginning to die. Despite the propaganda, nothing thrives in an old-growth forest.”

Even sheep grazing keeps down noxious weeds and brush.

Environmental theory says that ecosystems are in balance, and you can’t remove a species without causing trouble.  But thinning a forest actually results in bigger, healthier trees, assuming you don’t cut them wholesale.

Environmentalists also have the idea that any human presence or economic activity is bad for the environment, and that is not true.  (Some activities of course are.)  One report listed the following things as unsustainable: private property, single-family homes, paved roads, ski runs, golf courses, logging, plowing, hunting, dams, and more.

Various methods can be used for stopping economic activity.  For instance ”the BLM goes onto a rancher’s land to count the heads of cattle, then sends outrageous bills for cattle counting, and because the rancher can’t pay the BLM, they take the cattle…They’re cleaning the west out, that’s what they’re doing.”

Naturally rural folk who face daily incursions by the feds feel they are under a tyranny.   And since  their property rights and livelihoods are removed by unelected bureaucrats and organizations, maybe they are correct.  Not all tyrannies are ushered in by masses of marching men chanting “Sieg Heil”.  Though like the Nazi tyranny, many are ushered in by utopians of some kind.

Elizabeth Nickson says that the word “evil” may not appeal to modern sensibilities, but what else do you call something that destroys everything it touches?

In general, it strikes me that whatever your agenda, if you are trampling on people’s property rights in the name of nature, or trampling on their free speech rights because they might offend somebody, or in general infringing on their “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” for some greater good, you should do some serious thinking about what you are doing.

Is evil irrational?

Is evil irrational?  Tens of millions of people died under the rule of a Russian communist dictator named Stalin. Some were worked to death in the freezing wastes of northern Siberia, some were tortured horribly, some were starved to death, etc. And it was all for what? For an ideology called Communism, that was an arbitrary concoction of two men, Marx and Engels, that interpreted the world in terms that are simply not correct, and made predictions that have been consistently disproven, and which has failed miserably whenever implemented.
All that evil – all that suffering, and for what?
Even more people died under Mao of China than under Stalin. And again, unto what purpose?
Religion has killed vast numbers of people too. Most recently we see what Islamic believers did to the people in two high rises in New York city, and we see suicide bombers blowing up both infidels and their fellow Moslems quite often, in the name of Islam.
Christians also had major wars of religion – between Protestants and Catholics, for example.
And again, we can ask – for what?
And try arguing with any of these ideologues.  Their victims sometimes do, but it doesn’t work.
In Cambodia, a Communist dictator named Pol Pot decided that the cities were bad for society, so he emptied the cities and had people do arduous rural work instead. His utopian and very murderous followers caused the death of about two million Cambodians. Imagine being one of the expellees in a rice field, lifting up your head from your toil and telling your Guard that “This whole enterprise you are part of is a complete illusion. Communism is nonsense, you have just ruined the Cambodian economy, caused vast amounts of unneeded suffering, horror, and death to your fellow Cambodians, and you really should redeem yourself by killing Pol Pot.”
You would be lucky, in that case, to have a quick death. But everything you would be saying would be correct.
Interestingly, many Russians today think positively about Stalin, and the Chinese government hides the truth about Mao from its population. I would call that evil.
Was Nazism rational? After all, if it had succeeded, the German people would have owned vast lands, would have dominated slave peoples or killed them, and used eugenics to breed a race of physical supermen.  It’s true that free-thought, free speech, and criticism of the leaders, would have been a thing of the past, but if all truth comes from the supreme leader, who knows best, then there is no need to think for yourself.

Personally, I would think that I would not want to be a indoctrinated ideologue who was taught that it was right and proper to dominate others or slaughter them for the Volk.

Turkey is a Moslem country that committed genocide against its Christian Armenian minority.  Their fate was truly horrible.  Turkey will not admit to it, even now, but the leader does say that “Zionism is a crime against humanity.”
Is it rational to ignore what your people did to the Armenians, and concentrate on what the Israeli Jews did to the Palestinians, when the first was genocide, and the second was the aftermath of a defensive war that resulted in Palestinian refugees being forbidden to return?

Is criminality rational? Does crime pay? Well for some people it definitely does. I have read more than once of people who switched from law-abiding occupations to criminal ones, for the excitement and other benefits.

Likewise aggressive war pays off for some people – even today in some parts of the world the predatory warriors get loot, women, slaves, etc.

Of course if we were all criminals, then our society would collapse.

Our goals are often not rational, but our actions to achieve those goals may be very rational. Intelligent scientists built nuclear bombs for North Korea, biological weapons for the Soviet Union, and so forth. Intelligence is not incompatible with evil goals, or with being deluded enough to work for a regime with evil goals.

I was targeted by a vigilante mafia that felt that it was in the interests of justice and the rightful order of things that I be “kept down” (in their words) or “annihilated” (also in their words). If you find this hard to believe, it was even harder for me to believe. It seemed so irrational to be attacked so viciously, over a prolonged period of time.  It is true that in the past I’ve done things that I wish I hadn’t, but, I said to myself, other people have done much worse things and not attracted this kind of attack.

My experience made me think that reality is more shaped by sociopaths and psychopaths than most people think.  In my own, minor case, my career was derailed, my physical health was damaged, even my appearance was changed from being very handsome to looking old and wrecked.   In a more conventional example, I read of a local popular eatery and bar that had to close down, because its owner would not pay extortion to the local organized crime organization   So in these very minor cases, the appearance of things changes, whether it’s the nature of the stores that you see in Elmsford, NY, or the look of that prematurely aged individual walking down the street of Elmsford, NY.  And in both cases, it’s because of bad people.  And those bad people won’t shout from the rooftops what they’ve done, quite the contrary.  (though in the example of the restaurant above, the truth came out due to the courage of the owner).

Political groups that have goals that would not look good to the general public also generally hide those goals until they get into power.

But when these groups get power, like Pol Pot, and then are defeated, you get evidence (see photo below) of their willingness to use methods that horrify us, for goals that were irrational to begin with.

El Narco – having no compassion is useful when killing people

Gonzalo was a man who stormed into homes and dragged away men from crying wives and mothers.  He duct-taped victims to chairs and starved and beat them for days.  He hacked their skulls with machetes while they were still living.  And then he became a Christian.

But back then, he enjoyed power, he could pay for houses in cash, he had four wives and children scattered all over.   He smoked cocaine and drank whiskey every day.

How do we explain the psychology of Gonzalo?   He says: “In those days, I had no fear.  I felt nothing.  I had no compassion for anybody.”

And that makes sense.  If Gonzalo had been just like us, he wouldn’t have done all these horrible things.  Something was missing in his emotional makeup.

Gonzalo spent seventeen years working as a kidnapper, murderer and soldier for Mexican drug gangs.  He killed many people.   Mexico has thousands of people like him.

Gonzalo also says:

When you belong to organized crime, you have to change.  You could be the best person in the world, but the people you live with change you completely.

The author of El Narco, Ioan Grillo, interviewed Gonzalo, and says that he was friendly and well-mannered.  Ioan also says

I have known angry violent men in my home country (England); hooligans who smash bottles into people’s faces or stab people at soccer games.  On the surface, those men seem more hateful and intimidating than Gonzalo…Yet they have killed nobody.

Gonzalo says: “You learn a lot of forms of torture.  To a point you enjoy carrying them out.  We laughed at people’s pain–at the way we tortured them.”

One interesting fact about many Salvadoran gangbangers are that their fathers were communist guerrillas.  The fathers killed people for the ideals of Che Guevara, and the sons kill people for money and power.

In four years, cartel gunmen slew more than twenty-two hundred policemen, two hundred soldiers, judges, mayors, etc.   They are a major threat to their society.

In another post, I’ll go into the rest of Ioan’s book.  He talks about the causes of all of this crime, which were a long time in the making.   Among the causes: the drug trade has lifted the descendants of cannibal tribes, bandits, and displaced peasants out of wretched poverty.  And the radical changes of the Sixties in America created a huge market for drugs north of the border.  It’s ironic to think that the U.S. movement that created hippies who put flowers in the guns of American guardsmen is at least partly responsible for a huge amount of gun deaths south of the border.

It’s also horrifying that heroic ballads are written about the drug traffickers.

Some Mexicans have taken the law into their own hands, and are successfully standing up to the criminals.  But vigilantism has its own problems, such as a lack of legal protections for the innocent.  Still, they are succeeding sometimes where the Mexican state has failed.

Gonzalo did repent, but that was after he was put in jail.  He also blames his actions in part on the cocaine and alcohol he was taking, but it was his decision to take the drugs, it was his decision to keep company with criminals and be a criminal.  I believe that repentance and redemption are possible, but sometimes it takes a total change of scene (like a jail cell) to make a criminal start thinking.

Source:
El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency - by Ioan Grillo (2011)

The Muslim immigrant’s dilemma

In her book A God Who Hates, Wafa Sultan, born in Syria, talks about Muslim immigrants she has met in the United States.   These immigrants have a dilemma. For instance, Islam says they should not work for infidels, but they do.  This causes a big frustration.

She has spoken to immigrants who hate America, but (in one case) fool their employer into thinking they love America.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born a Muslim in Somalia, talks about Muslim immigrants too, this time in Holland.  Her book Infidel, is disturbing. Originally religious, she noticed that this infidel country, that Muslims should reject, made for better lives and was better run than the places “we came from.”  She says

We were all facing the same confusion.  We had always been sure that we, as Muslims and Somalis, were superior to unbelievers, and here we were, not superior at all.  In day-to-day life, we didn’t know how the cash machines worked or that you had to push a button to order the bus to stop.. Many people’s….reaction was to create a fantasy that they as Somalis knew better about everything than these inferior white people…”His breath smells of pig.  He’s only a bus driver.  How dare he think he can tell me how to behave.”

Ayaan had seen the same defensive, arrogant attitude in people who immigrated to the city from the rural areas in Africa.  “here in Holland, the claim was always that we were held back by racism.”  (though one Muslim told her that “if you tell a Dutch person it’s racist he will give you whatever you want.”)

Ayaan earned money as a translator for Muslim immigrants to social service organizations.  She heard some terrible stories, for instance, the story of a raped woman, whose resulting child was thrown into the fire by a Hawiye soldier, who forced this woman to watch the baby burn.  She translated for all sorts of people, including a man who had been a torturer back in Africa.

Ayaan says that Dutch tolerance of immigrant ways resulted in cruelty.  She said “little children were excised on kitchen tables…Girls who chose their own boyfriends…were beaten half to death or even killed.”

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks on America, Ayaan saw news footage of Dutch Muslim kids celebrating.  This disturbed her greatly.  She says that Mohammed Atta, the hijacker’s leader, used the prayer every Muslim utters when he is dying: he asks Allah to stand by him as he comes to Him.  “I read it and I recognized it…This was not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.  Mohammed Atta believed  that he was giving his life for Allah.”  She says that many Muslims feel the way he did, and if they had the courage to do what he did, they would have written the same letter.  Even she might have, at an earlier period of her life.

She says that “Infuriatingly stupid analysts” wrote reams of commentary on the attacks.  Islam was supposedly a religion of peace.  “These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.”  Analysts wrote about poverty causing extremism, or Western decadence offending Muslim immigrants, or colonialism etc.  They also blamed the blind support of America for Israel.  But Ayaan says of this explanation:

I myself, as a teenager, might have cheered the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the Palestinian dispute was completely abstract to me in Nairobi.  If the hijackers had been nineteen Palestinian men, then I might have given this argument more weight, but they weren’t.  None of them was poor.  None of them left a letter saying there would be more attacks until Palestine was liberated.  This was belief, I thought.  Not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel: it was about…a one-way ticket to heaven.

Ayaan spoke out, and eventually, Somalis from Italy, from Scandinavia, and from Holland were phoning her father and warning “Hirsi, if you don’t do something fast to rein in your daughter, she is going to be killed.”

Reading all this, it is interesting to see Obama nominate Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, a person who tends to believe that our problems with Muslims have to do with support of Israel.  Even President Shimon Peres of Israel came here and said the 9/11 attacks were about Israel.  Many people think this way, some of them quite influential and powerful.  But Ayaan Ali shows, they are wrong, they miss the problem.

As for the religion of peace idea, there is the story of American Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who was prosecuting a terrorist in the US, and decided to read the Koran to show the man how wrong he was about his own religion.  To McCarthy’s great surprise, the man knew his religion all too well.

The Muslim immigrant’s dilemma can, in my view, either be solved by rejecting the ideals of the West, or the ideals of his religion.  If he stays here and believes firmly in Islam, then he can resolve the dilemma, as the Moslem Brotherhood advocated, by engaging in “‘sabotaging’ its [Western Civilization's] miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”

At this point, I should make the usual disclaimer that many Moslem immigrants are fine upstanding patriotic people. I’m sure that’s true, but the testimony of people who actually know Moslems, have lived most of their lives as Moslems, and have honest conversations with Moslem immigrants, should not be ignored.

Facing racism honestly

Attitudes toward racism very dramatically in the U.S. Some believe that if there are more whites than blacks in an affluent suburb, that is discrimination, or if more black youths are suspended from high school than whites, that is discrimination, or if banks make fewer loans to people in inner cities, that is racist discrimination as well. So for instance, in the affluent mostly white suburb where I live, there is now a mandate that low-income people must be brought in from the inner city. Housing must be built for them somewhere in our small leafy suburb. Another example: Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Education Department, says that the disparity in suspensions between black and white students is a “potential violation of civil rights laws.”
And government put pressure on banks to lend to bad credit risks, again on the idea of supposed discrimination, and that helped lead to our current financial problems.
The opposite extreme is the Nazi types in the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. In a documentary, I saw one woman there saying that the American bloodline was being diluted by intermarriage. The idea is that people with pure noble Aryan genes are having their genes contaminated.

Now here is the problem. I used to be very prejudiced, though I was not a believer in how wonderful I was, or my ethnic/racial group was.

I’ll give 3 examples of the reason I was prejudiced.
1. Washington D.C.

I have never been more disgusted or shocked by what I witnessed Saturday night at the Anacostia Metro. I went to pick up a family member at the Metro, and just as she was telling me about the fights (Yes, plural!) that happened on the Green Line train [between L'Enfant and Anacostia], we witnessed a group of 6 to 8 young black teenagers kick, stomp, punch and push a lone teenage girl.

I could not believe my eyes! I also could not believe there was not an officer in sight.

2. New Haven, CT

Arber Tasimi is a 23-year-old researcher at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, where he studies the moral inclinations of babies… His experiments draw on the work of Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, his own undergraduate thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and what happened to him in New Haven, Connecticut, one Friday night last February.

It was about 9:45 p.m., and Tasimi and a friend were strolling home from dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Just a few hundred feet from his apartment building, he passed a group of young men in jeans and hoodies. Tasimi barely noticed them, until one landed a punch to the back of his head.

There was no time to run. The teenagers, ignoring his friend, wordlessly surrounded Tasimi, who had crumpled to the brick sidewalk. “It was seven guys versus one aspiring PhD,” he remembers. “I started counting punches, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Somewhere along the way, a knife came out.” The blade slashed through his winter coat, just missing his skin.

At last the attackers ran, leaving Tasimi prone and weeping on the sidewalk, his left arm broken. Police later said he was likely the random victim of a gang initiation.

3. Philadelphia, PA
A man who had both American Indian and white ancestors, was walking in Philadelphia and saw some black youths coming toward him. He smiled and thought to himself how much better racial relations had gotten. As they got close, one of youths pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the face. The other youths laughed. The victim grabbed the youth’s arm, and forced the knife into his assailant’s body. The youths stopped laughing. He staggered off, crying for help.
Both he and his assailant ended up in the same hospital. He ended up with a partially paralyzed face, and his assailant died. (this is from an article I read several years ago, I don’t remember the source).

This is just the tip of a big iceberg.

My father (who is Jewish) taught at a college with a very anti-semitic black-studies department. He says the whole faculty of that department was anti-Jewish. That, unfair as it may seem, made him prejudiced against blacks. To be fair, they didn’t like non-Jewish whites either.

Now before I say why I stopped being prejudiced, (sort of), I should add a few more worries about blacks.

I believe our government has gotten too large. Too many people are dependent on it, one way or the other. With the dependency, also comes a loss of rights. There is also a philosophy of redistribution, and that government should be Santa Claus. I will not go into the problems with all this here. However, over 90% of blacks voted for this current administration, and a majority of whites voted against. A recent Pew poll also states that most blacks say they like “socialism”.
I identify socialism with more poverty, less opportunity, and less freedom for me, personally.

There is also a culture of alienation, whether it is in Louis Farakhan’s Nation of Islam, that believes that an evil Black scientist created whites, or the statements of clergyman Jeremiah Wright, who cursed America and said the events of 9/11/2001 (Moslem fanatics flying planes of American passengers into high-rise buildings) were “America’s chickens, coming home to roost.” One black woman phoned into a conservative talk show I was listening to, and said clergymen like this are quite common in the black community.

There were the Los Angeles riots, over the acquittal of some white policemen who hit and kicked a black man who had led them on a high-speed chase through Los Angeles. You could see the large numbers of fires the rioters set from satellites in outer space. Whether they were right to be angry or not, they were burning the shops of Koreans and white business owners who had done nothing to them.

So even well-meaning types who would much rather not be prejudiced, can look at this kind of stuff and end up being prejudiced. And many of us are less than perfect, I certainly am, and have unfair attitudes.

The majority of black babies are born to single women, and that is not a good thing either.

So: how did I stop being prejudiced (sort of).

Partly by meeting black people.

Well, first there was Mawuse, a black colleague from Ghana who rescued my employer’s computer project, reconstructing it totally, after I had deleted a large part of it by mistake.

Then there were a few army vets I met, in various settings, who were fun, admirable people.

Then I read some books by black conservatives, for instance, Clarence Thomas, who described the blacks he grew up with as wanting to contribute to society. I read Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and others.

Recently, I saw a video about the “women in white” and other dissidents in the Cuban dictatorship. I admired the black woman who leads them, and another black man who also shows great courage in taking on the government there.

I also saw polls that show that there are countries in Africa that have a population which have friendlier attitudes to the U.S. than most countries of Europe have.

Finally, in my past I had a short period of celebrity status, before an abrupt fall from that status. During that short period, I was treated with affection by whites, blacks, Latinos, and even American Indians. There was no bias toward me whatsoever. I feel that I should reciprocate.

(I should also say that on my way down from popularity to the depths of unpopularity, I have also been victimized by whites, Latinos, and Blacks. But that’s another story.)

And when we talk about black crime, which indeed is a big problem, we should not forget the substantial amount of organized crime coming from mostly white countries like Russia and Italy. And here is a good point from Thomas Sowell:

In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.

IQ test scores are lower, on the average, for blacks than whites. Whether this is biological or cultural, the fact is, that with low scores and low educational achievement, it is harder to succeed. And when you don’t succeed, there is a temptation to blame society, or racism, or whatever.

Racism toward blacks has caused much death and suffering, from the deaths on the boats that brought slaves from Africa to the practice of slavery afterwards. But it does no good to blame disparate outcomes on racism, and it’s not even accurate.
The Vikings raided Slavic lands and enslaved Slavs. Slavs were prized in Europe because of their fair complexion. According to some sources, like Wikipedia, the name “slave” was taken from the name “Slav”, because the servants were from Slavic lands. But today’s Slavs don’t bear a grudge based on what happened. If they did, it would accomplish nothing.

To solve a problem you must first face it. Racism is a problem, but behavior of the recipient of the racism can also be a problem.

Source:
Attacks in DC: http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/black-mobs-take-over-washington-metro/
Sowell: http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/thomas-sowell-finally-some-honest-talk-about-race/question-2085549/
Attacks in New Haven: Smithsonian Magazine: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Are-Babies-Born-Good-183837741.html
Black vs White attitudes to Socialism: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/is-rush-limbaughs-country-gone/
Housing low income blacks into higher income white areas: http://www.builderonline.com/affordable-housing/new-yorks-westchester-county-yields-to-pressure-to-desegregate-its-affordable-housing.aspx