Eye for an Eye Until We're All Blind

One obstacle to overcoming mental afflictions is righteousness in its most hideous form: retribution.  Forgiveness is not a divine act or a favor that you bestow on someone.  It's salvation for your own small self on the way to becoming your big self.  If eye for an eye worked as a preventative measure against crime, we'd be in paradise by now.

Right?


Surgical Paralysis Ordered in Saudi Arabia as Punishment for Teenage Assault

Spine-for-a-spine punishment has mother 'frightened to death'

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Saudi police stand guard outside the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia,.
By STEVEN NELSON for US News April 4, 2013

Ali Al-Khawahir, 24, is awaiting court-ordered surgical paralysis in Saudi Arabia for an assault he committed when he was 14 years old, according to news reports.

Al-Khawahir has reportedly spent 10 years in prison since stabbing a friend in the spine during a fight. The wound left his friend paralyzed. The Saudi legal system allows eye-for-an-eye punishments.

The convicted man's mother told Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat that the family is seeking help raising $270,000 in "blood money," which in Saudi Arabia can be requested by a crime's victim – or victim's family in cases of murder – in exchange for punishment.

"We don't have even a tenth of this sum," she said, according to a translation by The Guardian.

"Ten years have passed with hundreds of sleepless nights," his mother told Al-Hayat, according to the English-language Saudi Gazette. "My hair has become grey at a young age because of my son's problem. I have been frightened to death whenever I think about my son's fate and that he will have to be paralyzed."

Amnesty International condemned the sentence as "outrageous" in a statement released this week. "Paralysing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture," said Ann Harrison, the organization's Middle East and North Africa deputy director. "That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking."

Tooth extractions, said Amnesty, have also been ordered in Saudi Arabia.

Israeli news website Ynet reports that 13 years ago a Saudi hospital gouged out an Egyptian man's eye as punishment for an acid attack that injured another man. A similar sentence for an Indian man six years later was set aside after international outrage.

If victims do not seek "blood money" or perpetrators cannot afford to pay the amount requested, the sentence is carried out.

Saudi Arabia's legal system is a perpetual object of scorn. In March, seven men were executed for committing jewelry heists and armed robberies. One of the men said he was 15 at the time he was arrested, claimed he was tortured into confessing and said the defendants did not have legal representation during court proceedings.

The technology of the bodhisattva is also available to the wayward.  If you don't think we're in a race against time, read on. -A.T.


SXSW: 'Wiki Weapons' Maker Says 3D Printed Guns 'Are Going To Be Possible Forever'
By Joshua Ostroff. Huffington Post: 03/13/2013 2:45 pm EDT



The takeaway from SXSW Interactive, the massive annual technology conference in Austin, Texas, is that this year got away from social media (finally) and started delving into the physical realm, in particular the coming 3D printer revolution.

But for all the wonderful possibilities that we were told this new technology portends, there was one which was somewhat more ominous — the creation of 3D printed guns.

“What does it mean to have a have a file that could be readily be assembled by a machine into a firearm?” asked Wilson to a surprisingly small crowd (or maybe not that surprising considering there was a Google Glasses demo down the hall). “Is that [file] by itself a firearm? Is it just data? Is it just speech? Where is the offense?” Though he did admit, “it’s not a book; it can become something, so it’s a grey area.”

Now here’s the thing about Wilson. He seems to be an extremely intelligent law student, well-versed in political and philosophical thought (even quoting 19th-century French thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) as well as the intricacies of technology that would make most of us blanche. He is also a self-declared anarchist and a lover of firearms. He will probably be underestimated, and that perhaps will be at our peril.

Wilson’s SXSW talk, which featured just him and some slides, attempted to lay out the relatively short lifespan of the so-called wiki weapon project. A 3D printer is able to digitize an object and then rebuild a replica of that object using resins and polymers. Defense Distributed began as, essentially, a “university project” but once Wilson got push-back, it went from being a hobby to being a serious undertaking.

He recounts how a major 3D printer company rented him a high-end machine and then, when they found out what he was using it for, not only took it from him but criminally referred him to the the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.


“They didn’t just try and put a kibosh on my project, they tried to mortally wound me,” Wilson said, sounding as bitter as you could imagine. In the process, it seems, they turned what was something of a lark into a life’s mission.

Though crowdfunding site IndieGoGo took Defense Distributed’s gun-printing project down after complaints, they still managed to raise $20,000 via Paypal, proving that this is more than the work of a, shall we say, lone gunman.

“Not only can we be successfully defensive with this project, that we can pivot and wrap around the laws quickly, but we realized we can actually go on the offensive with this project,” he said.

Congress has noticed what Wilson is up to, with Rep. Steve Israel sponsoring legislation to prevent 3D guns. “He saw an opportunity, ‘3D printed guns are upon us. Let’s legislate them away. Be gone, be gone!’” Wilson mocked, before boasting his files have already been downloaded 440,000 times. “Does he think law enforcement should have the power to affect your ability to find files on Google?”

Wilson, who doesn’t “view government as a benign institution,” argued these efforts would be ultimately futile. “[Israel] thinks this is how we’re all going to rid ourselves of wiki-weapons, and that’s false,” he said, noting that the industry-friendly law is written to apply to individuals, not gun manufacturers. “We’ve applied for a federal firearms manufacturing license.”

He also said they’ve been working on printing magazines. “It’s a box with a spring, and you can make it. This put us over with the firearms community. They were very ambivalent about us, especially the NRA types, that might seem hard to believe, but when magazines were on the chopping block and we said, ‘look, you could make one of these tonight for $15,’ the point was driven home.”

He noted his reason for naming the printable magazine software after Dianne Feinstein — the democratic senator who spearheaded the 1994 assault weapons ban — was that he hoped to associate the two forever. “That’s power,” he said.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, all of Defense Distributed’s gun files got taken down from Makerbot’s “Thingiverse,” a clearinghouse site for the 3D printer community. While this clearly angered Wilson, he also acknowledged that the Newtown elementary school shooting had turned his project into “a political football.”

What was perhaps most disquieting about Wilson’s talk was how much he sounded like the kids who founded Napster, except of course that, despite occasional claims against heavy metal, nobody believes music can kill anyone. Guns, not so much. But Wilson, in his evangelism, refuses to acknowledge that even as he boasts that once his tech is proven and let loose in the wild, that genie won’t go back in its bottle.

“We can pantomime a legislative solution,” he sneered, “but this is going to be possible forever -- and I'm interested in creating that world.”

The 7th Link of Dependent Origination - When it Begins

The 7th link of what we call dependent arising is the final cause in what keeps us toiling in un-ending samsara.  It is defined by Buddhist scholars as "feeling " or "a mental factor that experiences pleasure, pain and neutral feeling. Pleasure leads to a strong desire for more while pain generates an avoidance desire."  Essentially this means that we will do whatever it takes to keep the pleasure flowing while avoiding pain. Sounds normal, logical.  Except this, we will do whatever it takes, up to and including hurting other people to get what we want and avoid what we don't.

Science has recently (as in this year) discovered that this process begins in infants as young as 9 months old.  On the one hand, you can stop beating yourself up for your lack of willpower.  It is almost innate, this desire to be with people who think and look like us.  On the other hand, don't you have some work to do?  Because ultimately you must not stop working the path until you've conquered this habit.  People who think and look like us are at best a tool of comfort, at worst an obstacle to our true wish-giving jewels. 

Be like the Terminator.  You must not stop until you win.

Babies Prefer Individuals Who Harm Those That Aren't Like Them

Mar. 12, 2013 — Infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who are nice to people like them and mean to people who aren't like them, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In our social lives, we tend to gravitate toward people who have things in common with us, whether it's growing up in the same town, disliking the same foods, or even sharing the same birthday. And research suggests that babies evaluate people in much the same way, preferring people who like the same foods, clothes, and toys that they like.

This preference helps us to form social bonds, but it can also have a dark side. Disliking people who are different than us may lead us to mistreat them, and excuse -- or even applaud -- cases in which others mistreat people who are different than us.\

Are the roots of such tendencies present in infancy? To find out, psychological scientist Kiley Hamlin, now a professor at the University of British Columbia, conducted two studies as a graduate student at Yale University with her advisor Karen Wynn and colleagues.

The researchers had 9- and 14-month-old infants choose which food they preferred: graham crackers or green beans. The infants then watched a puppet show in which one puppet preferred graham crackers, while another preferred green beans. That is, one puppet demonstrated that its food preference was the same as the infant's, while the other demonstrated that its food preference was different from the infant's.

After the puppets chose their foods, infants then watched another puppet show, in which either the similar puppet or the dissimilar puppet dropped its ball and wanted it back. On alternating events, infants saw that one character always helped the ball-less puppet by returning the ball to him, while another character always harmed the ball-less puppet by stealing the ball away.

Finally, infants were given the chance to choose between the helper (giving) and harmer (stealing) puppets.

Unsurprisingly, infants' choices revealed that almost all the infants in both the 9- and 14-month-old groups preferred the character who helped the similar puppet over the character who harmed the similar puppet. Previous research has shown that infants like people who are nice to totally unknown individuals, so it makes sense that they would also like people who are nice to individuals who are similar to them.

Far more surprising was that almost all the infants at both ages preferred the character who harmed the dissimilar puppet over the character who helped him. Infants' preference for those who harmed dissimilar others was just as strong as their preference for those who helped similar ones.

According to Hamlin, these findings suggest that "like adults, infants incorporate information about not only what people do (e.g., acting nicely or meanly) but also whom they do it to (e.g., a person who is liked or disliked) when they make social evaluations."

The researchers confirmed these results in a second experiment, which included a neutral puppet that had demonstrated no food preference and no helpful or harmful behaviors.

This time, the 14-month-olds -- but not the 9-month-olds -- preferred the character that harmed the dissimilar puppet over the neutral puppet, and the neutral puppet over the helper of the dissimilar puppet. These results suggest that when a dissimilar individual is in need, 14-month-olds generate both positive feelings toward those who harm that individual and negative feelings toward those who help him. The researchers suggest that between 9 and 14 months, infants develop reasoning abilities that lead to these more nuanced social evaluations.

These results highlight the fundamental mechanisms that underlie our interactions with similar and dissimilar people.

"The fact that infants show these social biases before they can even speak suggests that the biases aren't solely the result of experiencing a divided social world, but are based in part on basic aspects of human social evaluation," says Hamlin.

But the exact reasons for infants' biased evaluations are still unknown.

"Infants might experience something like schadenfreude at the suffering of an individual they dislike," Hamlin notes. "Or perhaps they recognize the alliances that are implied by social interactions, identifying an 'enemy of their enemy' (i.e., the harmer of a dissimilar puppet) as their friend."

Hamlin emphasizes that even if these kinds of social biases are "basic," it doesn't mean that more extreme outcomes, like xenophobia and intergroup conflict, are inevitable.

"Rather, this research points to the importance of socialization practices that recognize just how basic these social biases might be and confront them head-on," she concludes.

Co-authors on this research include Neha Mahajan of Temple University, Zoe Liberman of the University of Chicago, and Karen Wynn of Yale University.

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0921515 and National Institutes of Health Grant R01-MH-081877 to Karen Wynn.