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  • On law, or how we view it

    I’ve been reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, a nonfiction work that’s part-memoir, part-journalism, part-travel writing about Hessler’s years in China. One of the more intriguing sections I’ve recently finished dealt with the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, a health system-cum-religion that gained millions of believers in the 1990s.

    Many of these adherents had a penchant for staging peaceful protests whenever the system received negative publicity, and their protests — highly organized, and highly effective — eventually grew to a point that the Chinese national government found alarming. Officials banned Falun Gong, rounding up leaders and arresting practitioners who mounted demonstrations in protest. These arrests quickly turned violent, and soon news of abuses and even deaths started spreading.

    I mention this here because a couple of passage struck me as relevant — or at least relateable — considering the current political climate in the Philippines.

    On one of Hessler’s friends, a journalist who investigated the crackdown (emphasis mine):

    […] Ian followed up by researching the Falun Gong structure, as well as the nature of the police response. He discovered that it was another instance of top-down commands: local police units were being fined for every believer who slipped through their clutches and made it to Beijing to protest. What started at the top as an idea — ban Falun Gong — materialized at the lowest levels as sheer brutality, for the stupidest, most pragmatic reason of all: money.

    It’s not a point-by-point correspondence by any means, but the parallels are there. I have no idea what methods of incentive/reward the present administration is using to spur on law enforcement, but I do feel like the ruthlessness of our current drug war is animated partly by a drive to “meet quota,” as it were. Certainly there’s pressure there to report concrete results, and that coupled with top leadership’s support for so-called “necessary violence” has given us our own daily feed of “sheer brutality” at the lowest levels. What started in Malacañang as an edict — solve the drug problem — has materialized as a bloodbath.

    And with that bloodbath comes a confounding apathy, which I’m afraid will only grow worse as our government sets aside (or at least talks about setting aside, loudly and vehemently) due process and the rule of law with growing frequency. Another passage from Hessler, I think, comes close to articulating why. Again, all emphasis mine:

    Regardless of what kind of problem an individual had, it was his problem, and only he could do something about it. Without the sense of a rational system, people rarely felt connected to the troubles of others. The crackdown on Falun Gong should have been disturbing to most Chinese — the group had done nothing worse than make a series of minor political miscalculations that had added up. But few average people expressed sympathy for the believers, because they couldn’t imagine how that issue could be connected to their own relationship with the law. In part, this was cultural–the Chinese had never stressed strong community bonds; the family and other more immediate groups were the ones that mattered most. But the lack of a rational legal climate also encouraged people to focus strictly on their own problems.

    The opposite seems to be true for most of the Philippines right now: a common response to the killings, for example, is a self-assured, “You have nothing to fear if you’re not doing anything wrong.” But regardless if it’s a lack of trust in the rationality of the system or a somewhat misplaced belief in the same, the end result seems to be a gulf between the manifest effects of law enforcement in society and how individuals imagine it might materialize in their own lives.

    I’ll veer off course a bit here to point out how a lot of the support for these killings is confusing (at least to me), even contradictory. Those same assurances of safety for law-abiding citizens, for example, often come from people who support drug-related killings precisely because they’ve lost faith in the law and its apparatuses of enforcement. Better writers than me have already sketched out these strange but potent twists of reasoning; from a recent New York Times article, for example:

    When people begin to see the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety.

    […] “When you have a system that doesn’t deliver, you are creating, over a period of time, a certain culture of punishment,” she [Gema Santamaria, a professor from the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology] said. “Regardless of what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it will be rough justice.”

    To me that sounds like supporting crime to stamp out crime, but that’s not how a lot of my countrymen see it. Again, from that same article:

    Surprisingly, that includes increased support for the use of harsh extralegal tactics by the police themselves. “This seems counterintuitive,” Ms. Santamaria said. “If you don’t trust the police to prosecute criminals, why would you trust them with bending the law?”

    But to people desperate for security, she said, the unmediated punishment of police violence seems far more effective than waiting for a corrupt system to take action.

    And so, over time, frustration with state institutions, coupled with fear of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for authoritarian violence — even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed institutions that failed to provide security in the first place.

    And this brings me back to that last excerpt from Hessler, because I think it’s also much easier to subscribe to this kind of thinking when one has the sense, however seemingly unfounded, that any authoritarian violence will pass one by. Or to put it in Hessler’s terms: that your problems are not connected to anyone else’s, and conversely, that the problems of suspects who are getting gunned down are not connected to yours. It’s not the only factor, clearly, but it helps: when you believe that others will be the ones doing the dying, that you (and your family — I can’t say much about Chinese culture, but placing a premium on family and more immediate social ties is spot-on for Filipinos, too) have no reason to fear, then why oppose violent measures that mean to cleanse the country?

    I think the use of terms like “cleanse,” as if criminals had transformed irrevocably from persons to unsightly grease spots that need to be — literally — wiped out, deserves a red flag here. It’s the kind of absolutely dehumanizing perspective that makes the ideas articulated in that last Hessler excerpt all the more troubling.

    Why? As we resort more and more to vigilantism and authoritarian violence, the rule of law continues to crumble — and so does any reliability or rationality in how we resolve questions of legality, of guilt, and maybe even of the right to live. And as Hessler’s observations warn us, those conditions breed apathy — or, in our case, are likely to feed the apathy that already grips many Filipinos. Who’s going to bother to push back against the widespread shift to “rough justice” and more vicious politics then? It looks as though the growth of desperate support for vigilantism and authoritarian violence also reduces the possibility of cultivating the same much-desired societies where such drastic measures would be unnecessary.

  • As T.H. White’s Merlyn says,

    “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love… There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

  • Radiolab on thinking trees

    Great episode from Radiolab on the vast underground networks that link trees together. Does that sound dull? It’s a testament to the Radiolab team’s skill that this remains one of the most riveting podcast episodes I’ve heard in months.

  • Cross-posted from Tumblr: Unit 731

    (In response to this post.)

    I’ve been interested in Japan’s Unit 731 since it came up in a bioethics class back in college. Recently, I read a journal article on the subject written by Tsuneishi Keiichi, one of Japan’s top biowarfare specialists, and several details stood out.

    “It is said that Ishii [Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, the head of Unit 731 and Japan’s wartime biochemical weapons research network] first became convinced of the need to develop biological weapons with the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925.”

    For context: the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawed use of biological and chemical weapons in war. Which means Ishii decided to embark on his research precisely because a good number of nations (38 original signatories), including many then-formidable powers – France, Germany, Russia, the UK, the US* – had agreed not to use biological and chemical weapons.

    * Though lobbies in Congress blocked US ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol until the 70s

    (My first reaction: What an asshole. This impression remains unchanged, and is much more vehement than that pithy statement implies.)

    It’s reasonable to assume that Ishii Shiro plunged into Japanese biological and chemical weapon development with the intent of taking advantage of the prohibitions placed on protocol signatories. But did Japan – or at least Ishii and his research network – really intend, or at least expect, conflict with these powers?

    At this point, it’s worth noting that:

    • the Geneva Protocol didn’t ban the production and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons, nor did it prohibit their use against non-ratifying parties; and
    • many of Japan’s neighbors didn’t ratify the protocol until much later: North and South Korea in 1989, for example, and China in 1952. (Japan itself was an original signatory but only ratified the protocol in 1970.)

    It seems that Ishii, at best, undertook his research in anticipation of biochemical warfare from Japan’s neighbors. At worst, he meant for Japan to use that research against those same neighbors with a little less fear of commensurate retaliation from other powers that had, by 1925, already used thousands of tons of chemical agents in World War I.

    But possibly belligerent motivations and Ishii’s rank aside, it would be disingenuous to characterize Unit 731 as solely a military enterprise:

    “For the most part, the Ishii network took on university researchers as technicians. The part-time researchers were part-time employees of the Military Medical School Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory; they were professors at Tokyo and Kyoto imperial universities who were contracted to perform research in their own laboratories. In short, a large number of civilian researchers were mobilized.” (emphasis mine)

    Civilian technicians worked in the military; part-time researchers also worked on Unit 731 projects outside of the military structure. It’s easy, and perhaps more palatable for us now, to compartmentalize these atrocities and confine intent and responsibility to the Japanese military personnel of the period. This was, after all, a secret unit. But the reality is that Ishii’s research was sustained by civilian participation.

    Did these civilians intend to commit atrocities? Let’s segue a bit to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Adolf Eichmann, who faced trial for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust. In general, criminal law requires some element of intent (mens rea) for there to be liability. But Arendt notes that, in Eichmann’s obedient implementation of policy, there’s a lack of reflection. Consequently, the legal concept of “intention” can’t be said to apply.

    In short: can we, must we, speak of criminal intent when dealing with blind obedience? Can standard legal frameworks grasp the details and encompass the systematization of these crimes?

    Arendt gives us the now-famous phrase, “the banality of evil,” which for Arendt meant how people like Eichmann “accepted, routinised, and implemented [these crimes] without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.” We can also take this as a gesture at the inadequacy of established legal frameworks in the face of cases like Eichmann and Ishii. Arendt enjoins us to consider people like Eichmann and the Ishii network (including its civilian researchers) not just as perpetrators of specific atrocities against discrete persons/groups. They’ve committed gross and unprecedented crimes against humanity itself, not least by failing to consider their actions crimes. Their systematic, unthinking commission of these crimes—and thus their implicit refutation of established frameworks of judgment, legal or even moral—should well count as a grave evil of its own.

    It’s important to remember, in this case, the sheer extent of the Ishii network. We’re talking about Unit 731, but it’s called a network for a reason:

    “With the expansion of the war front throughout China after 1937, sister units affiliated with Unit 731 were established in major Chinese cities… (Unit 1855 was established in Beijing on February 9, 1938; Unit 1644 in Nanjing on April 18, 1939; and Unit 8604 in Guangzhou on April 8, 1939). Later, after Japan occupied Singapore a similar unit (Unit 9420) was established there on March 26, 1942… As of the end of 1939 (that is, before the establishment of the Singapore unit), the network had a total staff of 10,045, of which 4,898 were assigned to the core units in Tokyo and Pingfan.”

    Sure, call Unit 731 the Asian Auschwitz, but just as Auschwitz was one of many camps, the same holds true for the Japanese complex in Pingfan. Despite being a “secret unit,” Unit 731 was in no way an isolated program confined to one horror-house facility or an unsanctioned pursuit led by a rogue officer. This was a massive undertaking, and official support stretched far beyond just Lt. Gen. Ishii. The Kwantung Army chief of staff and the Ministry of War’s vice minister signed off on these units’ formation; Emperor Hirohito approved their creation.

    Speaking of permission:

    “‘Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.’”

    That’s a line that Keiichi quotes from the Hill and Victor Report, which was the product of the second phase of US investigations into the Unit 731 network. That’s also, perhaps, the one line that best encapsulates why the United States let this vast, aberrant system get away with murder (and much else besides).

    I’m not inclined to buy wholesale the implied benevolence in the claim that the US meant to keep Unit 731 research out of any other nation’s hands. For one thing: that line up there and its “scruples.” It’s such a flaccid word for what ought to be a fierce and adamant objection to human experimentation. As it is, the Hill and Victor report makes such scruples sound like inconveniences that Unit 731′s discovery so fortuitously allowed the United States to sidestep.

  • Futures Within Our Grasp

    This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Today in Science

    Pokémon GO has been all over the news since its launch, talked up everywhere from NPR and Forbes to regional and local news sites. Even my old law school blockmates have been posting about it on Facebook (Law students agog over a gaming app! Imagine that.), which isn’t surprising considering the numbers the game has been pulling in: Time calls it a worldwide phenomenon, and SurveyMonkey’s numbers indicate it’s “the biggest mobile game in US history.” (Lately the numbers have tapered off, but that’s something to gab about another day.)

    It’s an impressive run for a game that’s built on a pretty simple mechanic: superimposing random creatures on the real world for players to catch. And it’s a mechanic I’ve been thinking a lot about since listening to a recent Naked Scientists podcast which had a segment dedicated to EuroHaptics 2016.

    Augmented reality (which is what fuels Pokémon GO) tends to rely heavily on sight and, to a lesser extent, sound to add information to users’ perceived reality. Just look at this overview from LiveScience, which starts by saying, “Augmented reality is using technology to superimpose information on the world we see.“ (emphasis mine) The article’s brief list of examples highlights how AR’s precursors mainly involved adding information to one’s field of view, a predilection that continues in more recent developments like 2013’s Google Glass and today’s phone and tablet apps. (Like, you know, Pokémon GO.) Even the sole mention of finger sensors, in the MIT SixthSense project, mainly involves the manipulation of projected images.

    In other words, AR as we usually know it creates visual realities. Touch is supplementary, if not derived completely from the existing physical aspects of the user’s environment. This is all well and good — for those of us who aren’t visually impaired.

    Which brings us to haptics, or human-computer interaction using touch and bodily movements. Hearing about the research presented at EuroHaptics 2016, I got to thinking about how the expansion of what constitutes mainstream AR could help a lot of users whose needs aren’t always accommodated by common tech interfaces. Deeper integration of haptic technology — going beyond haptics as supplementary mechanism for sight — could provide more accessible means for navigating and controlling various tech, which could, in turn, make it easier to interact with the real world in general.

    One project from EuroHaptics, for example, looked at the effectiveness of haptic feedback mechanisms for pilots landing aircraft at night/in featureless environments. Haptic cues proved helpful in countering the “black hole illusion” that arises from such visual conditions. It’s easy to imagine these mechanisms, with some tweaking and additional sensors, being useful not just in instances with unfavorable visual input, but ones where there are no visual cues at all.

    This isn’t a new idea, of course. I mean, EuroHaptics has been convening since 2006, and we’ve heard a lot about various technologies helping people with a range of disabilities. However, there are still a lot of avenues for improvement when it comes to integrating sensory input with a lot of commonly available tech, particularly in AR, and I point this out because there doesn’t seem to be as much of a push in these directions.

    I can’t speak for other people, but the futures I grew up dreaming about were often distinguished by vision-centric developments: glassy holograms; light-based interfaces dancing on smooth worktops; vast networks accessed through complicated headsets. As our technology progresses, some of  those developments inch closer to being part of our everyday: Google Glass happened, Microsoft now ships the HoloLens, the world is agog over Pokémon GO. However, the question remains as to how many people that “our” actually includes.

    True, a lot of that technological progress has also given us robotic limbs (even exoskeletons!) and other impressive solutions to various conditions that limit people’s abilities to interact with both the real and technological worlds. But as this Al Jazeera article points out, a gap remains in the everyday spaces — and that gap raises important questions about what goals we intend these technologies to achieve vis-à-vis disability, and what views of disability those goals and attitudes imply.

    In that same article, the filmmaker Regan Brashear asks illuminating questions about the perceptions of disability that come to inform the development of assistive technologies:

    “Is it a valuable part of human life that will always be with us, or is it a problem to be fixed or eliminated? These perspectives lead us towards very different futures. One is about fighting for inclusion on all levels of society, ending stigma and developing useful and needed assistive technologies to enhance quality of life in conversation with the intended users. The other perceives disability as an inherent negative to be “fixed” at all costs.”

    Augmented reality seeks to enhance our experience of the real world by overlaying important information and expanded controls over our interactions with that world. So far that enhancement has taken primarily visual forms, at least in AR’s mainstream implementations. But conventions like EuroHaptics 2016 tell us that this limitation can’t exactly be called a consequence of technological deficit: there’s a lot of research and development involving senses other than the visual, and it’s happening (and available!) right now.

    So why aren’t we seeing more extensive, dynamic deployments of this research in everyday technologies like smartphone-based AR? What’s keeping us from using advances in fields like haptics to implement more widespread — and better — instances of, as that Al Jazeera article says, the “simple technologies and accommodations” that enable persons with disabilities to participate more fully in society? Or to put it in Pokémon GO terms: while droves of us can now head out to try and catch them all, not all of us can take part in the catching, and it’s worth thinking about why.

    Augmented reality, as with other kinds of tech, develops towards goals that we set our sights on. Considering the dominance of the visual in these technologies’ current iterations, wouldn’t it be ironic if we missed out on more inclusive technological commons because of a lack of vision?

  • On human rights and drug-related killings

    I caught a really thought-provoking interview on human rights featuring the philosopher John Tasioulas recently. Being an (old) episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, which caters to a general audience, the interview focused on a basic1 question: What are human rights?

    Basic, but not simple, since “human rights” has become both a very charged term and, perhaps in some circles, one so overused as to have turned into a bit of a hollow buzzword. Which is why it’s notable how Tasioulas kicks off the interview by first dispelling the, shall we say, “special snowflake” air that has enveloped the concept: human rights are only one kind of rights, he asserts. Now this doesn’t undercut the importance of these rights, but it at least does away with the tunnel vision that they tend to inspire and situates them within a broader category of similar concepts that, he implies, are no less worthy of discussion.

    But the dissolution of the term “human rights”‘ definite edges is, like I’ve said, something of a problem. So what distinguishes human rights from other kinds of rights? Tasioulas says: universality, these rights’ applicability throughout humanity.

    This is the point I find most interesting, mostly because of personal experience. Ever since it became clear that our new president had won the post, there’s been a disturbing spike in drug-related extra-judicial killings. The number keeps ticking up to this day, and there’s been a lot of debate about the validity and ethics of these incidents.

    (more…)