Just going to take a deep breath and jump here. These are pretty much new books, mostly from Amazon, so I’m going to spare you photos and just insert affiliate links. If you buy anything, I get a small kickback.
Archive for October 25th, 2024
Random gun book crankery, plus Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters.
Friday, October 25th, 2024Norts spews.
Friday, October 25th, 2024I ran across a story on ESPN last night that, for me, raised more questions than it answered. I even ran it past Mike the Musicologist (who is very much not a sportsball person) because it just seemed so odd.
Josh Reynolds, wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, was shot last Friday.
Police documents indicate Reynolds and another man were located, after multiple 911 calls to report two people had been shot, near South Quebec Street and East Union Avenue in Denver. Reynolds had been shot twice — once in the left arm and once in the back of his head.
Team sources said Thursday that Reynolds was treated and released from a Denver-area hospital hours after the shooting.
So he was shot in the back of the head, treated, and released? That’s the kind of thing that should make you get down on your knees three times a day and thank God. It is also the kind of thing that makes you wonder what caliber he was shot with, and whether something slowed down the bullet on the way.
Strippers. Always with the strippers. Also, nothing good happens after midnight. Also, Shotgun Willie’s is where Ja Morant got into trouble. Maybe teams should be telling their players “Shotgun Willie’s is off-limits.”
Also also: situational awareness. Maybe teams should be hiring the Left of Bang guys (more on this to come).
Sounds like the car was shot up enough to where it wasn’t mechanically functional, which is another reason why I’m wondering if Mr. Reynolds was hit by a bullet or fragment that was slowed down by glass or auto body.
I don’t know that this worth the amount of thought I’ve been putting into it. It just seems like a curious thing.
By the way, the police have arrested two suspects. And while Mr. Reynolds was treated and released, he won’t be playing this week: he’s been on injured reserve for a finger injury. (Carolina plays in Denver Sunday afternoon.)
Obit watch: October 25, 2024.
Friday, October 25th, 2024Philip Zimbardo. I think everyone who took Psychology 101 in college remembers the “Stanford Prison Experiment”.
In 1971, seeking a novel way to study how situations can transform behavior, Dr. Zimbardo set up a prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building.
He turned rooms into cells. He made a tiny closet into “the hole” — solitary confinement. And he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.”
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For his study, he asked local police officers to arrest the students who had been hired (for $15 a day) to be prisoners. He outfitted the students hired to be guards with crisp uniforms and made them wear sunglasses to appear more inscrutable, an idea he got from the 1967 prison movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
As prisoners arrived, they were stripped, searched and deloused, a process overseen by Dr. Zimbardo, who played the role of prison superintendent. Initially there were a few giggles among the participants, but as the guards began enforcing rules, the mock prison began to feel very real.
Though critics have accused Dr. Zimbardo of coaching the guards to act sadistic, he told the guards only to “create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear and a ‘sense of powerlessness,’” according to a defense of the study on his website. They were, he said, given no “formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.”
Within a day, the guards had become abusive and were engaging in psychological torture: making the prisoners defecate in buckets, waking them up repeatedly through the night, forcing them to simulate sodomy. Several prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns. But Dr. Zimbardo kept the study going.
On the sixth day, he told Christina Maslach, a graduate student whom he would marry that year, that he was impressed by how much interesting behavior the study had revealed in just under a week.
Interviewed for the documentary “Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment” (2004), Dr. Zimbardo said she replied, “I think what you are doing to those boys is horrible.”
“She was right,” he added. “I had to end the experiment, because that’s what it was — an experiment, not a prison. These were real boys who were suffering, and that fact had escaped me.”
At least, that’s the conventional account of the experiment. Recent scholarship points to this being a whole bunch of bullshit, and that Dr. Zimbardo was manipulating the participants behind the scenes to get a pre-determined result.
LeTexier’s analysis shows that Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized.
Furthermore, Zimbardo and his research team were highly assertive in ensuring that participants acted as “tough guards,” contrary to Zimbardo’s claims that they just fall naturally into their roles. For example, in the orientation session for guards on the first day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s assistant David Jaffe, who acted as a prison warden, even read out a list handwritten by Zimbardo entitled: “Processing in—Dehumanizing experience,” that included instructions like, “Ordered around. Arbitrariness. Guards never use names, only number. Never request, order.” This contradicts Zimbardo’s claims that dehumanizing behavior like calling the prisoners by their numbers rather than their names was something the guards came up with themselves. Additionally, after the experiment, some of the guards stated that either Zimbardo or Jaffe had directed them to act in specific ways at various times during the study.
General Michael Jackson (British Army – ret.) . I probably would have skipped over this on notability grounds, but this is an interesting story:
General Jackson was Britain’s senior leader in the Balkans in June 1999 when NATO forces moved into the province of Kosovo to enforce a withdrawal of Serbian troops. Russian soldiers, who backed Serbia, made a surprise grab of the airfield outside Pristina, the capital.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, an American and NATO’s supreme commander, ordered General Jackson to block the runways with tanks and troops to prevent more Russians from landing.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” General Jackson told him. “It’s not worth starting World War III.”
The insubordination was taken up by both men’s superiors — the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and General Jackson’s British commander.
They resolved the dispute in favor of General Jackson, according to testimony that General Shelton gave to Congress.
In the British press, General Jackson was nicknamed “Macho Jacko” for his rebuke of General Clark. His words to the American were quoted as being sharper than they were in U.S. accounts. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark.
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In the end, General Jackson’s view — that Russia did not threaten NATO through control of the airport — proved correct. The Russians were absorbed into the international peacekeeping force.
Rather than causing a career setback, General Jackson’s insubordination lifted him among his peers.
“The clash enhanced Jackson’s reputation as the most colorful character of modern soldiery,” The Telegraph wrote in a profile of him in 2007. The following year, Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight Commander of the Bath.