At Brad's suggestion, I have started a new thread and moved the last few posts here from the Waterboarding thread.

I suggest another question one can use to obtain useful information for evaluation: "torture for whom and for what purpose?"

For example, in this story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7185648.stm

Mike McConnell, the fellow who previously used the term "enhanced interrogation techniques", says that water-boarding "would be torture" if he were subjected to it. So how does he justify using it on others?

I think we have to consider the motivation to redefine or re-frame this in light of various self-definitions. When we say that the politicians use manufactured terms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" to control public reaction, we also do well to look at their starting frame of reference. If one defines oneself as "protecting a way of life for people dedicated solely to the purpose of destroying it", for example, one can find apparently solid justification for "adjusting" definitions for such practices based on "obvious" nuances.

I suggest that confronting practices like McConnell uses to control public opinion will have limited success without a related, or even prior, confrontation about underlying assumptions. Barry Goldwater once said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." If you believe you are "right" in your motivations, you will allow yourself far more leniency in self-evaluations of your own subsequent behavior.

I submit that a gs campaign aimed at examining this and other examples of "language abuse" would have more success if it included or even emphasized efforts to uncover underlying frames and assumptions.

I think David Burns advised that when you see someone acting "insanely" you will get insight if you ask yourself "What would have to be true for me to have that reaction or act that way?"

I enjoyed Nora Miller's nimble and concise observation.

The problem, as it appears to me, is that our country's "leaders" make statements that often appear to be designed to create a certain reaction or response in their target audience, e.g., US citizens, other diplomats, etc. I agree that knowing the underpinnings of these statements would render a more efficient analysis. How can this be accomplished without making assumptions about the speaker's assumptions? Can this lead to even more conspiracy theories? Fighting the "facts" that have been declared by our "leaders" with conspiracy theories has been ineffective for resolving the Kennedy assassinations, cause of the Twin Towers collapsing, invasion of (you name it) Iraq, etc. This is the reason I turned to GS for this problem. One can study a number of conspiracy theories along with what we are told to believe and come to our own conclusions. However, this divides the "analyzers" or "truth seekers" so they cannot influence leaders with a unified voice.

If we could just work this in reverse. Could patterns in linking abstractions, creating labels and engineering maps be reversed engineered to indicate possible motives?

I have enjoyed the recent responses to this thread.

With respect to uncovering the assumptions people hold, I often simply start with the first thing out of their mouths, then ask questions about how they came to that assumption or what beliefs their statements imply.

I don't know the truly first thing McConnell said, nor do I know anything about him as a person. I only deal with the news quotation, albeit an abstraction from a context I don't quite know. And I only deal with a select news quotation--I ignore other quotations.

He purportedly said, "The United States does not engage in torture. We do use enhanced interrogation techniques." What assumptions come with that statement? We can't know for sure, though I think we can make some guesses based on experience, to come to some idea of what he may assume.

One assumption I see he holds (based on that quotation): McConnell, at least professionally if not personally, sees torture as illegal/unlawful, and that he sees interrogation techniques the US employs as legal/lawful.

Taking that assumption, McConnell discovers that the US employs waterboarding. Since the US only employs legal/lawful interrogation techniques, we have nothing illegal/unlawful in waterboarding. You then say in public, "The United States does not engage in torture. We do use enhanced interrogation techniques."**

The postulates imply the theorems, says Cassius Keyser in Mathematical Philosophy. Your theorems stem from certain postulates in a fateful relationship. Change the postulates, you derive different theorems.

And some (many? all?) postulates amount to a matter of choice. "Do we start with Euclidean space, or some kind of non-Euclidean space?" Something like that. Here, I see that we start with "US interrogation techniques are lawful" space. Until we start calling people on their choice of opening postulates, we don't question their basic thinking, and tend only to get the same, related theorems repeated over and over again. We hear about the lawfulness of waterboarding, because the US only employs lawful interrogation techniques.

I see it that way. Please feel free to disagree. I think what I say above has some holes.

** I hadn't realized he said "do." Based on that, I get a sense that he recognizes that waterboarding "approaches" torture, meaning it approaches the standards that allow people to categorize it as "torture" without question. He use of "do" may alter some of what I glean as his assumptions. I'll leave that for later consideration on my part.

I think so, yes, possibly. George Lakoff has done a bit of writing on the subject of awareness of the frame of a statement, specifically in "Don't Think of an Elephant" published around the 2004 US presidential election. He focuses on two common overarching metaphors for the responsibilities of parents (nurturing family and protecting father) and how many seemingly unrelated statements activate these metaphors in listeners and thus influence semantic reactions.

For example, when making a statement about a potential treaty, a leader wishing to activate one frame might say "We don't need a hall pass to use our navy to patrol these waters" while someone wishing to activate the other frame might say "We strnogly value cooperation between a host nation and our visiting servicemen." The former resonates with people who view the "protecting father" frame as closer to their personal beliefs, while people who hold the "nurturing family" frame will see the same statement as needless independent, bellicose, or arrogant. And vice versa, the "protecting father" frame makes the second statement seem weak, inappropriately conciliatory and perhaps dangerous, while the "nurturing family" frame makes it see cooperative, progressive and hopeful.

Etc.

So Lakoff suggests, among other things, evaluating political abstractions in terms of what frame the speaker may might intend to activate. From there, one can perhaps begin to form a relatively extensional evaluation of the speaker's underlying "philosophy" and intentions. I presume this becomes an iterative process until one feels confident that one has acquired useful, relatively accurate information.

The problem, as I see it: Producing blather takes far less time than refuting it. You have to, for example, go back to statements made earlier, come up with ways to "translate" to state things extensionally rather than abstractly, provide background material to explain why one particular event had a different meaning that the one implied, show how apparently unrelated statements or actions actually have shared consequences or connected significance, etc etc. It seems to me that such an effort requires a synergistic group that provides mutual support, shares the work load and targets specific topics or speakers to increase the effectiveness of the few. I think that's why a group like MoveOn had so much success early on--the central figures devoted themselves to the task full time (and more) while others provided support to make that possible.

A while back, I wrote a grant proposal for a "gs quick response team" to do just that. Alas, I did not get the grant. I may try again at some point.

I feel responsible for taking the conversation off-topic. Perhaps, it might be moved to another thread. As I thought more about Nora's previous two posts, I realized that the problem of trying to curtail or expose "language abuse" by our "political leaders" might be approached from multiple directions.

If I understand you, we could examine the semantic reactions invoked by a given statement. We could check that this was the likely reaction intended. Given the semantic reaction, what behaviors are most likely? Finally, what political agenda would these behaviors enable?

Alternately, postulates might be derived from a political platform, that is, statements made by a current political party or administration. As statements are made by this party, they could be checked against the postulates for consistency. If an inconsistency is found, then we need to check our postulates (have they changed), check our interpretation of the statement and check our analysis. If the statement is still inconsistent with the postulates, then perhaps the inconsistency is deliberate or inconsequential to the intention of the statement (create a semantic reaction).

It seems that the deliberate generation of semantic responses that are inconsistent with the postulates could provide some useful insights, as well as expose hidden agendas.

Was the creation of "fear" using 9/11 intended? It does not appear to be part of a political platform. Does this expose a hidden agenda? Do the "behaviors" of the current administration validate the postulates documented by Naomi Wolfe in "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot"?

MoveOn.org is very interesting and to be encouraged. My particular interest is to focus on root causes and primary issues, which if addressed will make solving the many other problems easier. Unfortunately, I must also "make a living". I think the "gs quick response team" could be a very valuable tool in combating "language abuse" and protecting our "liberties".

"The United States does not engage in torture. We do use enhanced interrogation techniques."

We can break this into individual assertions:
1. The United States does not engage in torture.
2. The United States uses enhanced interrogation techniques.
3. The United States has used waterboarding.
4. Waterboarding is an enhanced interrogation technique.

I believe the assumptions are:
Enhanced interrogation does not include torture.
Since waterboarding is an enhanced interrogation technique, it is not torture.

McConnell has given us a logic problem that cannot be solved with the available information, to distract us from questioning whether waterboarding should be classified as a form of torture. It is a parlor trick in logic.

I suspect the semantic reactions McConnell wanted to avoid are anger, outrage or anything that will prompt US citizens to act. Desirable semantic reactions would be acceptance, confusion, etc. that do not lead to actions.

I can buy that, Brad--your parlour trick analogy.

I believe that certain people in the government realize they have the ability to characterize and categorize waterboarding however they so choose. They likely want to characterize or categorize it in their interests. They've explicated their interests in reaping information from terror suspects. They see value in the waterboarding technique despite its purported international characterization and categorization as "torture." So, because of their interests, and because of their linguistic knowledge, they characterize and categorize it as "non-torture." That way they can thwart the law and keep on doing what they want.

I feel the story needs someone who will press them on the personal responsibility involved in characterization and categorization. Basically, get the government to show it sees the practice as "torture," and intentionally tries to manipulate public opinion through linguistic tricks to see it as "non-torture."

The rhetoric, at least the rhetoric reported in news articles, stays somewhat constant. In this case, I think that makes it easier to attack. You start to sense the pre-conditioning of a certain message--conditioned perhaps because it goes against initial perception. ("No, you're not seeing torture! You're seeing an enhanced interrogation technique!")

I think we also want to consider the influence of the underlying belief that I have seen attributed to some in this administration--that because they believe strongly in their right to exercise certain prerogatives, they have sufficient justification to do things that other people would consider illegal or immoral. I have seen similar beliefs ]i{attributed }to some followers of Islam, and I sometimes wonder if the attributions themselves serve a purpose--ie, "see, they believe it's okay to lie to and cheat nonbelievers, so we are justified in treating them immorally too."

If so, then it may become fruitless or pointless to confront them on the immorality of something like water-boarding. One might imagine them saying in an unguarded moment, "sure, it's immoral, so what? Our enemies are unequivocally evil, so we have sufficient justification to do whatever it takes." I think this comes under the category of "logical fate."

Instead, perhaps we can target their absolutism and identification and allness statements about the "enemies" and show how that fails to accurately represent the people they have mistreated with this. In other words, if we can't get them to agree that water-boarding is torture, perhaps we can expose the invalidity of their categorizations in such a way that they can no longer draw such bright lines between us and them.

In sum, does a non-aristotelian approach to logic disarm an aristotelian approach to logic?

I wonder if their arguments hinge on the laws of thought attributed to Aristotle.

I wonder if classifying these seemingly deliberate schemes to create and divert semantic reactions might help the "public" to see misleading statements for what they are? It would be the undoing of putting a "spin" on a story. In the waterboarding spin, the speaker avoids definitions altogether. This "parlor game" might be considered a kind of shell game where waterboarding is moved under another abstract label (for which the definition is also not made available).

The undoing of this particular game may be to insist upon a definition of torture. Failing to get a representative of the administration to define torture, the public, press, etc. could offer a reasonable definition. This definition could contain the element that the interrogator and their superiors be willing to undergo the interrogation technique. A statistically high number of deaths for a given interrogation technique would tend to indicate that the technique may be torture (unfortunately, we would have to wait for these deaths to occur before acquiring the statistical data). Etc.

I think it is the premise of Mr. Korzybski's work that non-aristotelian techniques are a broader kind of representation and thus work where "linear-logic" approaches break down. However, and without analyzing many deceptive comments of our current administration, I would guess that many and maybe even most of their false assertions are not even true to aristotelian logic. Waterboarding is an example.

If the lie count for the article http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080123/ap_on_go_pr_wh/misinformation_study is anywhere near accurate, gs specialists would be lost in analysis while the administration goes on manipulating the semantic reactions of the "public".

Our president swears to uphold the Constitution and then is recently quoted to have said "it's (the Constitution) just a g**-damned piece of paper!" I don't think this administration would have any problem with dismissing something abstract like "morality" in the interest of creating a "free and democratic society" (what ever that means).

"Justifying the means by the ends" seems to be common in the current administration. This is likely one of the things causing alarm among those in this country who lived under fascism, know someone who has lived under fascism, or has studied the methodology for converting a free society into a fascist state. I would characterize this as one of this country's two most serious problems. The second can be found by following the money trail. Money feeds power. These are my opinions, of course. I was helping to support Ron Paul for the Michigan primary. As I was researching why the monetary system was such an essential part of Dr. Paul's platform, I began reading about the Federal Reserve and came across the video "America: Freedom to Fascism". I am convinced that the Federal Reserve is a root cause to many of our "political" problems.

I believe the administration (and according to Aaron Russo, the Federal Reserve) has worked to segment the public into "special interest groups". There are many benefits to this. Elections are almost guaranteed to select a president from one of the two major political parties. The public can be easily distracted from root cause type issues with popular issues. The distracted public is easily manipulated by fear. The American people have lost liberties with the Patriot Act and HR 1955. Our national debt is bankrupting us as a country. Yet, we discuss gay marriage, tax cuts and reduced spending (what ever that means), etc.

I like targeting absolutism, or at least mining their rhetoric for some good text book examples. Several books might be written.

My primary desire is to continue to live in a free country without fear, and to have our children enjoy the same rights. I think gs is an excellent tool to be used against the misuse of language as a means of creating fear and controlling people. I have seen many ideas here that I think could be used very effectively to prevent symbol rulers from engineering our semantic reactions and controlling our lives.

In my previous post, by "freedom" I meant as defined by the Bill of Rights and "fear" that emotion we most often label as fear.

I just came across this book, titled "Overblown" by John Mueller, and wonder if it might offer some material for discussion and action:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416541713

The subtitle, "How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them" sounds like the kind of issues we might find of interest. Excerpts from the book appear on Google Books:

http://snipurl.com/1yd8o

Any speed readers out there who might synopsize some of the relevant info here?

"Overblown" looks like it is dealing with the same phenomena as "End of America: A Letter to a Young Patriot" that I am currently reading. I am marking passages that I hope will be of interest here, and depending upon my "making a living" schedule will post soon. I have noticed thus far (about 1/3 into her book) that Naomi does point out absolutisms of the current administration. She also uses them (as do most of us who have not internalized the rigor of GS syntax), but it does not detract from the reading. I have also started a group at www.restoretherepublic.com in Michigan called "Constitutional Right to Freedom" at http://restoretherepublic.com/component/option,com_groupjive/task,showgroup/groupid,148/Itemid,26/.
I hope to report back soon.

Greetings everyone,
It is with some trepidation that I make this posting. I don't wish to start a new thread and Nora, I'm hopeful what I'm posting here doesn't lead to that. It wouldn't be surprising of course if it does as an understanding of the Structural Differential makes it easy for me to understand how easy it is to quickly jump from one thing to another. But that's not my intent. It's for general information directed towards some of you who may know me and wonder what became of that G.S student, Muslim dentist, Dr.Abdul Salaam (:-). I felt motivated to make this posting primarily by the uneasiness I felt as I read the back and forth posting primarily between Ben Hauk and Ralph Kenyon within this thread. Others were contributers too of course but I just happen to have had the experience of participating in a few seminars with Ralph in the earlier years (1976 and 1977 I believe it was but don't hold me to it) and I can still remember with envy Ralph's fondness for Mathmatical extrapolations in discussions of many G.S formulations. I wasn't surprised then as I read the exchange between he and Ben that what I interpreted as a hint of "hostility" crept in. Ralph's straightforward way of making his point using his mathmatical leanings can seem a bit threatening and hostile. I find in general hostility breeds hostility but in my experience he's usually "right on". BUT, to the point. All of the patter between participants on this topic seems to me to be a bit incestous--GS'er to GS'er. I have tried to the very best of my ability to weave GS into my everyday life and Religion and work hard to get others interested in the same and not get bogged down, as it is so easy to do, with "what I mean't to say was so and so but you took me to mean wasn't really that, let me explain again, etc, etc, etc," ad infinitum G.s'er to G.S'er. I am hopeful that the particpants in these postings are busy in thier everyday life living G.S and doing all they can to urge others to do the same. Does The attendance at seminars indicate that to be the case? Is it growing? I feel like Steve Stockton and Andrea certainly did all they could to "spread the word". I have enclosed a one and one half page as an attachment that I'm hopeful shows how I walk the walk and not just talk the talk. It harkens back to my posting in Jan, Feb 1976 about the Danish Cartoon hoopla and my statement to the effect that I was writing a book about my experiences in the Nation of Islam from 1957 to 1975 and that I was including in it my love affair with G.S. only second to Islam. I'm hopeful that I will have completed it within the next few months and most important to the point here, I have included in it verbatim with his permission, a piece Milton Dawes wrote called "My Story".

The attachment will evidence of course my ongoing love affair with Islam and how I have no problem introducing a little G.S. as I have done in many areas of the writing. Here again,no new thread intended, just a way to follow up on how I at least, weave in GS in my Religious discussions, an often controversial subject in GS circles. I am hopeful that many of you too get embroiled in discussions about GS and it's formulations in understandable ways in your everyday lives as well. All my office staff (My occupation is Dentistry)have to be able to demonstrate a knowledge of the Structural Differential on an ongoing basis.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

excerpt from my book on Islam for GS forum Excerpt for IGS Discussion.doc (24.6 k)

Abdul, thank you for posting that and sharing your evaluations!

Ben

Well, I have read "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" by Naomi Wolf. This is definitely a call to action and she appears to have done quite a bit of research to make a convincing argument. I remain convinced that GS can be used to validate or invalidate arguments and the premises they are based upon for many abuses of language by symbol rulers. The evidence of the sense of urgency in Naomi's plea is all around us. The question I cannot answer at this time is can awareness of this problem spread to enough people quickly enough to restore our “liberty” (as defined in our founding documents) and head off the “fascist shift” that Naomi describes? Part of the problem is getting the information out. A second part of the problem is presenting the information in a factual manner (with sound abstractions) so that it is believable above the din of administrative “propaganda”. Perhaps, this is where well respected GS specialists might help. A third problem is getting people to get involved.

On page 20, “Americans tend to see democracy and fascism as all-or-nothing categories.” This is a primary point that is substantiated and elaborated on throughout the book. This is also what creates the risk of fascism and likely why Naomi has coined the word “fascist shift”, so as to make people aware that it is a process and that there are graduations of existence between “freedom” and “fascism”. On page 30 she discusses the appearance of normalcy in an early fascist shift.

The first step in creating a fascist shift is to create or capitalize on an event that can be used to create an external or internal threat. The goal is to create a threat where people voluntarily give up “freedom” in exchange for the feeling of security. The strategists for the fascist shift take advantage of the tendency for humans to think in absolute terms. An event was caused by the enemy. You are with us, or you are the enemy. (Remember Japanese Americans in detention camps?) This technique is used to create a semantic reaction to mobilize people to face the threat (real or manufactured).

The second step is to create secret prisons where torture can take place. The criteria for which someone can be defined the enemy are vague. This gets into the water-boarding torture discussion on another thread. What “is” torture? For that matter, what “is” a terrorist? The language used by the fascist shift strategists is (deliberately) inexact and generalizing.

The third step is to create a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the people. From my understanding of our current situation (USA, February 2008) Blackwater can not be tried under either military or civilian courts. Effectively, they are above the law. This paramilitary force can that carry out acts of treason to stage terrorist attacks to create more events, or act against citizens without government incrimination. Whether or not they have or will is not the issue here. The issue is that they can. This is where the administration would like to engage the citizens in the details, so they loose sight of the root causes. We can argue without end whether or not Blackwater committed such and such an act and forget that the real problem is that we have created a situation in which it can happen.

The fourth step is the surveillance of citizens. This step begins to curtail unrestricted speech and organizing against perceived threats upon citizens by the government. This step also begins to extend the definition of who and what the enemy “is”. This, like the fascist shift is a continuum, not either or. There are a number of people who feel the national ID card gives too much power to the government, and while seemingly innocuous enough, this power could be used to complete step four.

Step five is the arbitrary detainment and release of citizens. The Founders (USA) took care in defining the fourth amendment to protect against “general warrants”. The Patriot Act and HR 1955 effectively remove these checks in our constitution, making it now easy to detain nearly anyone because they might be a terrorist or aiding a terrorist (remember “terrorist” is now very generally defined). The citizens benefit from the exact use of language. The fascist shift architects benefit by generalizing words, ideas and concepts.

I will leave off here for now.

I happened across two very pertinent and informative articles in an old issue of ETC that I have posted on the IGS website on this page:

http://time-binding.org/inner.php?mtrid=2&mpid=6&spid=23

One, by Charles Fleming, titled "Understanding Propaganda from a General Semantics Perspective" shows how one can use the various gs formulations in a very extensional way to analyze and deconstruct political statements.

The other, by Arthur McClung Lee, titled "The Iconography of Propaganda" offers a slightly offbeat way to flag propagandistic terminology in political speeches.

These seem to relate to today's discussion and today's political environment as well as they must have when they appeared in 1995.

Those are very nice links/references. I will certainly reference and disseminate these.

Step five of my previous posting is actually step six.

Step five is to infiltrate citizen's groups. Which is a subversive enhancement of step four - surveil ordinary citizens. infiltrating citizen's groups not only provides intelligence, but also tends to break the trust necessary to build effective organizations to combat the "fascist shifters".

Step seven is to target key individuals. This would include not only people openly opposed to the "fascist shifters" but those who promote objective examination and discussing multiple facets of a topic. This forces a thinking about thinking in terms of self editing to prevent semantic reactions that the "fascist shifters" may dislike.

The eighth step is to restrict the press. This seems almost ironic to me, since "the press" (in the US 2008) seems to already be restricted by taking a pro-administration stance. Increasingly in this stage, the press is used to get out the "fascist shifters'" message. One thing in favor of the fascist message is that it seems unified and simple compared to the many pluristic arguments across the many artificially divided factions of the public. "Truth" is defined by the "fascist shifters".

The ninth step is to cast criticism (by the "fascist shifters") as espionage, and dissent as treason.

The tenth step is to subvert the rule of the law. Most fascist takeovers are accomplished by the using current legal system and political structure to gain power and support. The danger that applies to our current administration includes presidential signing statements, the Posse Comitatus Act (shifting the control of the National Guard), the Patriot Act (the name itself uses one of the propaganda techniques), passing of bills like HR 1955 that erodes the 'checks and balances', etc.

Naomi has not invented these steps, but has done an excellent job describing them in a very readable and contemporary way. The references provided by Nora (above) are the verbal tools used to accomplish the 10 steps. By the time tools escalate to detainment, torture, ruin of career and personal lives, and death, it is extremely difficult to reverse the work of the "fascist shifters". How can we get more people to be aware of the 10 steps to fascism and the basic-seven steps of propaganda to the point where we can immediately identify and disarm these approaches, and even catch them when we begin to feel the semantic reaction that the "fascist shifters" are attempting to invoke? (This may be a rhetorical question.)