Sunday, September 22, 2019

Japanese Academics Shun Military Research - Not So Much American Academics


The Asahi Shimbun reports that many Japanese universities have shunned military research:
EDITORIAL: Academics must play no part in helping to develop weapons. (2019, September 21). The Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201909210015.html
Many universities have reiterated their goal of having nothing to do with military research. In fact, there have been cases of universities withdrawing their applications after they were approved for funding.

Unfortunately, I can assure you that few US universities have such concerns. In fact, getting a DARPA early scholars award is regarded a PRIZED achievement in many universities.

And its not just the technocratic scholars who aspire to defense spending:
Cohen, P. (2008, June 18). Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security. The New York Times,https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/arts/18minerva.html

Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War, said Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, whose office will be overseeing the project.  
And then there is the sordid history of the American Psychological Association's DIRECT involvement in torture in the Middle East.
Greg Miller, “Inquiry: Psychologists group colluded with Pentagon, CIA on interrogations,” The Washington Post (July 10, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-american-psychological-association-colluded-with-us-interrogation-programs/2015/07/10/42b0cbec-2741-11e5-b72c-2b7d516e1e0e_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

Leaders of the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with officials at the Pentagon and CIA to weaken the association’s ethical guidelines and allow psychologists to take part in coercive interrogation programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a report released Friday.

The report contains the findings of an investigation led by a former federal prosecutor and appears to represent the most detailed examination to date of the complicity of psychologists in interrogation programs that at times relied on torture.

The probe concluded that the association’s ethics director and others had “colluded with important [Department of Defense] officials to have APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain” the Pentagon in its interrogation of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The association’s “principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DOD.”

The investigation also found that “current and former APA officials had very substantial interactions with the CIA in the 2001 to 2004 time period” when the agency was using waterboarding and other brutal measures to extract information from detainees.


Why should ethics and morality stand in the way of a big grant?

I must admit that the honest truth is that most American scholars I know are pacifists and believe in non-violent solutions to conflict but unfortunately these are the ones that are being villified in right wing attacks against "liberal" academics.


12 comments:

  1. Anthrophology spy programs.

    https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2018/12/of-scholars-and-spies/

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  2. I have never seen Majia advocate for trouble. The opposite. She stands against calls for violence and sedition. She doesn't like foul languages, which i can understand because she is a communications professor. I have never seen her advocate, for explicitly-extreme left-wing or right-wing causes, though it is her right to, in this supposedly, free country.
    I am not a philosophy major. I do not fully understand different arguement methods and techniques. If someone wants to use those methods in discourse, there is nothing the matter with that. It is non-ideologically motivated.

    There is a paucity of information about the nuclear energy problems and nuclear weapons, problems people face now I hope there will continue to be outlets for less-censored information about bad nuclear plants and the ongoing rediculous development of nuclear weapons in America and other countries.

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  3. It is sad that grants go like this to pork barrel projects and projects that do not get off the ground because of their limited war applications. I know of a physicist who got DOE money for medical imagaing. It was spevcialized magnetic resonance.
    The funding dried-up. He ended up working at Hanford. America is corrupt at so many levels . They will never even use a great deal of the technology and war knick-knacks they spend trillions on while many aspects of academoa and our society are unnderfunded and withering.

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  4. I wonder if we can request a torturer of our own political affiliation?


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  5. Whoever wrote the Art Of War was a master sociologist and psychologist. He commends those battles and wars which are won without any fighting.

    The psychologists you mention were bad at their discipline or they would have told the military that torture was pointless.

    What we do not want is bad academics helping bad people in the military do bad things.

    ReplyDelete
  6. A broken treaty with Iran. Crippling sanctions. Provocations. Inflammatory speech, with hints of using nuclear weapons
    against Iran.
    85 billion dollars for a new Nuclear ICBM program.
    Too cheap to supervise the 96 old, beat up nuclear reactors anymore. Reactors that could never exist without the Federal Government.
    The government went out of its way to glamorize torture, under the Bush administration. The lapdog wntertainement media glamorized torture, with shows like 24 hours

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tony Schwartz, told Reddit during an Ask Me Anything session that the president is “the most purely evil human being” Schwartz has ever met.

      “I believe deeply that most people are better than their worst behaviours,” he wrote. “I also believe there are some who are simply irredeemable and evil. [Psychiatrist and author] Scott Peck called them ‘People of the Lie’. They lack any conscience, as Trump does, and so they’re almost purely evil. Trump is the most purely evil human being I’ve ever met."

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    2. Japan has Reopened Multiple-damaged dangerous, reactors and done nothing to stop the radioactive hemorraghe into the seas. Japan is going ahead full steam with the 2020 Radioactive Cesium 137 olympic games in Tokyo and Fukushima and Trumpo the Clown, Trump endorses them Trump has made nuclear war many times more probable. Fuko has lobbied to make american taxpayers pay, to keep, some of the most meltdown prone reactors in the world open in Ohio, Michigan, California and Florida . Trump has gutted regulation of reactors. Gutted the hardening of some of the most earthquake, hurricane, and flood vulnerable reactors in the world. The Diablo canyon reactor is probably damaged the two earthquakes. The Bay City reactor's fuel pool is damaged from Harvey. When it floods and burns it will realease the radionuclide fallout, equivalent of 50,000 Nuclear Bombs. The Weatherford reactors, in Louisina were damaged from flooding and hurricane Berry. Same for the Duke Energy Reacor in North Carolina that was damaged by Hurricane Florence. One of the old reactors in Ohio that Trump demanded and virtually forced to stay opened, has a hole in its containment from a nuclear accident years ago. Trump and its cronies are completely deregugulating the supervion and oversight of the 97 embrittled, cracked, dangerous, old nuclear reactors and busy. extending their licenses The Fort Calhoun Reactor was inundated by the unprecedented flooding in the midwest and south this year. Other reactors were too. It has been flooding like this, every year in the south for 8 yeara years, where there are multiple reactors. Many people in America are climate deniers. Antinuclear people are not climate deniers.
      People are easily Dominated by psychopaths like Trump..
      How can people be so cowardly , and have no determination to save their children. No value to save their world.

      Wallowing in the trappings of crass materialism and enable the deranged sadism, torture and psychopathic insanity of the Sick Plutocrats. The devils have destroyed, most things left of virtue and beauty in the world.

      There will be a nuclear disaster in America soon. It is assured. It is assured by the chaotic-narcissism and hate that governs America and the authoritarian neo-liberal, kakicracies, now. It will happen soon in america. The nuclear disaster, will be covered-up. Another disaster will follow. The catastrophe will occur in the next 2-3 years or sooner. The illness will precipitate a societal breakdown, as is occuring in Ukraine. The decline and collapse will occur much more precipitously in America. America is in the the grip of a gross-simmering health crisis, from radionuclide pollution, that already exists.The monsterously irresponsible, Plutocratic-Kakiocracies in the west and, places like India or Korea will follow . Their Nuclear Death machines will explode from stupidity, aging and negligence. The nuclear cataclysms and climate change are insuring the demise of the humans in 5-8 years.

      Delete
  7. The arrangement with Iran was not a treaty ratified by the Senate. However, I do think our situation with Iran needs an overhaul.

    Tulsi Gabbard is the only level headed Democratic presidential candidate. And qualified for the next debate. They are afraid of her because she is not a sold out politician. She would be just as much a problem as Trump only in different areas.

    And yes, the Bidens did commit serious crimes. Laundered money for one thing. Now we see why Obama was not enthusiastic about Biden's run as his Fall will reflect significantly on Obama himself.

    The Democrat Party is in shambles and may collapse entirely before the next election. Their goal is to weaken America to the point where it will welcome its demise as an independent nation and simply melt in with some horrible form of world government run by people who enjoy mass extermination of whole peoples.

    You would be surprised by how many people think torture a good thing. As for old reactors where is your info coming from?

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  8. The troll-operative cannot have any truth in an obscure antinuclear-comment section. That is how important the current nuclear situation is.
    Fuko all but but said it would nuke iran. There is no reason for war with iran. More evil pnac plans that are completely
    insane.
    All the people who visit this site know the state of the reactors in murica troll. You cannot lie about that. 90 of them are older than 30 years old.
    America will be nothing with nuclear meltdowns. The world and america will be dead after a nuclear war.

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    Replies
    1. Freefall is right. Nuclear insanity and torture are not partisan issues in america. Many Military monkeys and spook monkeys in america that call themselves democrats are as likely to torture for money and the glory of the imperium and money. The end always justifies the means, in the savage war monkey world. Tulsi Gabbard was military police . No doubt very adept in torture techniques and from her statements she endorses torture.
      Gabbard is a cop and always will be a cop.

      Delete
  9. So sprach Troll-Anonymous: was tun Ich hier in diesen endlosen Nuclear Winter? Ya. The Kid is now in his thirties and still fails to wash his hands before meals and picks his nose. Has he been with a woman yet? He would not know what to do.
    Really. Likes Mary Pickford's mule, to tell the truth. Rode it to town and slept near the creek. Well, you don't say. I jus read about the big bomb in the paper. Blew up the Jap place. What about the mule though did it agree to come back? Not entirely. Not entirely. But eventually, eventually.













































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