Mass shootings, terrorism, and Columbine

Brief followup to the last post: via cshalizi's pinboard, here's an article that taught me something new about Columbine:

[In his book Columbine, author Dave] Cullen reconstructed the shooters' state of mind based on their own extensive written and filmed records and countless interviews with friends, family, and law enforcement. He concluded that Eric Harris was a psychopath, a young man without empathy or conscience, who coldly manipulated the deeply depressed Dylan Klebold into joining his scheme.

It was clear from the boys' meticulously documented plans that Columbine was an act of non-ideological domestic terrorism. Their goal was not merely to shoot bullies. They sought to first responders and parents with a mass shooting and then blow everyone up with huge bombs. Harris hoped this spectacular televised violence would touch of some sort of revolution. The bombs failed to detonate but the intent was clear.

If this is correct, then the Columbine shootings were in fact terrorism. It was violence staged against civilians specifically to generate an emotional reaction and an attendant policy reaction. However ill-conceived, weird, and amateurish, it appears to meet the definition.

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Addendum: Incidentally this does not, of course, indicate that we should deal with terrorists of all types in the same way. The wall-to-wall media coverage of Columbine clearly played into the first half of the killers' plans. The most effective way to defeat this particular pair of terrorists would have been for the national media to ignore them entirely. The shooting should have been a purely local news story, focusing on memorializing the victims, and coverage of the killers should have been confined to wonky academic criminal science case studies.

Are "lone gunman" school shootings terrorism?

I try not to take Twitter seriously, because I find its format frustratingly hostile to clear thinking, but once in a while something provokes me enough that I have to write.

People who think the Connecticut school shooting is "terrorism" are merely living evidence that our discourse has completely degraded the meaning of the term.

Terrorism is not a synonym for "violence you don't like". Terrorism is violence against civilians calculated to elicit an emotional and policy reaction. Properly understood, terrorism is a tactic of asymmetric warfare, no more and no less. It is not terrorism when a lunatic kills people because they are conveniently available targets, and then commits suicide for no particular reason. (Terrorist bombers often commit suicide, but only because it is necessary to deliver the bomb successfully without being captured and interrogated; if they could deliver the same bomb to the same target without risk of capture or death, they generally would.)

Incidentally, for the same reason, the United States' drone strikes are not terrorism either. The US does not perform drone strikes to provoke the Pakistani population into a policy response. It performs drone strikes mostly for the simple utilitarian reason that it wants certain people dead, and (international law be damned) those people shall therefore be killed.

But this is a language game, and I am playing the role of the futile prescriptivist holding the line against a huge tide of people who would prefer that "terrorism" simply be a synonym for "doubleplus-ungood". A perfectly accurate phrase like "heinous criminal violence" is simply not enough for these people: they demand that the T-word be deployed. And in the end, descriptivism is the correct school of linguistics, and thus in the long run I will inevitably be wrong. Eventually, terrorism will be a synonym for "doubleplus-ungood" and a useful tool of thought will have been blunted into uselessness, like a scalpel bashed repeatedly against a brick wall.

This reminds me of how we now call everything "war" — war on drugs, war on poverty, war on women, war on Christmas — except when we pay our armed forces to shoot at another nation's people, in which case we call it "kinetic military action" or whatever.

Does this matter? I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that our national policy response to terrorism is muddled in part because our thinking about terrorism is muddled. I claim you can draw a connection between people who throw around "terrorism" with such carelessness, and the ridiculous anti-terrorism policy of the Bush years, when we reacted to terrorism by invading a country that had not committed terrorist acts against us, sacrificed our liberties to defend our "freedom", and spent untold blood and treasure to prevent terrorists from achieving their goal of provoking America into losing blood and treasure.

PG explains TED

At least, that's what I think he's doing...

On the nature of software ownership, yet again

Being a Google employee, I shouldn't comment on the specific case, but I do think this is an opportune time to repeat that by adopting software, you make a calculated bet on the future behavior of a group of people. And sometimes those people behave differently than you hoped.

There is no magic bullet that will make software developers behave the way you want indefinitely. Pay for the software with cash, pay for it with attention, pay for it with a gift economy involving the mutual exchange of labor, don't pay for it at all; make it open source, make it proprietary; eventually you will always be at the mercy of developers whose incentives converge only imperfectly with your particular desires.

Well, I should amend that: if you really really want to control your destiny, you can dedicate your life to building a software ecosystem where every user has both the freedom and the burden of control. This requires much more than open source; it requires the embrace of both Free Software and software systems designed to be just as hackable as they are usable — perhaps even more hackable than they are usable. Basically, a lot of people need to (re)read In the Beginning was the Command Line, and the story of Richard Stallman and the printer. And maybe, overall, be a little less sniffy about the more "extreme" (that is, principled and consistent) versions of the Free Software credo.

Evolutionary psychology and philosophers: An anecdote

N. Strohminger's review of philosopher C. McGinn's recent book on disgust (via cshalizi's pinboard) is hugely amusing, and reminds me of something that happened when I was a freshman in college.

I was attending a talk by someone in the NYU philosophy department, and the subject was the almost universal (human) fear of death. Towards the end of a long disquisition by the speaker on why the fear of death was puzzling (for example, death itself is not painful, and dying need not be), and philosophical explanations for why it might exist regardless, I raised my hand and asked: "Since we were produced by evolution, wouldn't a fear of death be selected for, because a fear of death would make us more likely to avoid it, and organisms that avoid death are likely to be more successful?"

This seemed to me like a curious theory to have omitted entirely from the talk. At the time, I had recently read R. Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, so evolutionary explanations for our behavior were on my mind. And also, it seems to align with common sense.

However, a reader of a certain background might notice that my explanation was an invocation of evolutionary psychology. I had, unwittingly, landed in a minefield on the scholarly battlefront between evolutionary psychology and its critics. So the speaker replied, roughly: "Well, evolution might select for avoiding death, but it wouldn't necessarily select for fear. I would also direct you to [list of scholars' names here], who have produced devastating critiques of evolutionary psychology." He then breezily moved on, evidently feeling that he could now ignore the idea, and evolution was not mentioned further.

I was so astonished by this response that I couldn't even muster a follow-up question. At the time I thought: is this philosopher seriously claiming that evolution could play no role in our fear of death? Could there be any psychological phenomenon which is more likely to be evolutionarily motivated? (Maybe love for one's children?) The speaker's reply correctly noted that evolution did not necessarily entail a fear of death, but it certainly could be sufficient explanation, and under an evolutionary account there might simply be no necessary explanation, only a sufficient one: the fact that death-avoidance is motivated by fear, rather than some other mechanism, might be no more inevitable than the fact that we have five fingers per hand rather than four. (Or, if you prefer, its necessity might be an artifact of the adaptive mechanisms that were at hand when the selective pressure was applied, rather than an a priori truth about the nature of the mind.)

I don't remember the content of the rest of the talk, but if you've ever read a work of scholarly philosophy you should be familiar with the style: a lot of precise reasoning from first principles (which I love), coupled with an almost disdainful elision of the empirical (which I do not).

At any rate, it seems to me C. McGinn's bizarre ideas about disgust, and total ignorance of the modern scientific literature thereof, share something in common with the NYU speaker's dismissal of my question. There is a certain strain in philosophy which doesn't particularly like science. Science offers a mode of investigation of such staggering power that it threatens the philosophical discipline. When you like sitting on the metaphorical mountaintop, pondering from first principles about morality, or aesthetics, or emotion, it can be a rude awakening to learn that some yob with electrodes or a pipette or a computer might be able to probe deeper and more certainly into reality than you can — even those aspects of reality which you thought were your exclusive domain.

To muddle things up further, a great deal of evolutionary psychology is terrible science, and the worthy interdisciplinary project of battling that nonsense provides cover for this brand of intellectual anti-intellectualism.

Truthfully, the episode with the seminar speaker above left me more sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, not less, so whatever effect he wished to have on me was completely thwarted. I am not by nature contrarian or perverse for its own sake; in fact I think that contrarianism without regard for correctness is one of the most pernicious and irresponsible seductions that clever people allow themselves to fall prey to; so my sympathies are not merely a reaction against misguided authority. I suggest in all earnestness that the next time you read some hilarious evisceration of embarrassingly popular bad evolutionary psychology, recall Strohbinger's review and consider that there's plenty of evisceration to be done on the other side as well.