He says "I want to turn another page!"
Rep. Barney Frank is a Democrat
Rep. Mark Foley is a Republican
Can anyone explain why they were frequently on the same Page?
Back about twenty years ago, Massachusetts congressman, Barney Frank, admitted to having sex with a male homosexual provider. I don't think he was ever charged.
It was his fellow Massachusetts congressman, Gerry Studds, who was caught having a relationship with a male page at just about the same time as the Frank affair. As the page was of age, no law was broken, but the relevation soon led him to not run for reelection to Congress.
The page, who revealed himself, was quoted saying something to the effect of that he didn't mind having the sexual relationship, but would sooner have had the mental and emotional side of the relationship without the sex.
Barney Frank is still in congress and is in a long term open gay relationship.
Now back to your regularly scheduled scandlel sheet.
... trying to use alccholism as an explanation for being a pedophile. Now I've been real drunk before, but never enough to write love letters to 16-yr old boys.
He's really squirming. Now Foley says he was molested by a priest. It seems he was in Congress just for the group therapy.
responsibility, or community action, is a social and legal decision.
It's fine for philosophers to get involved, as long as they don't claim to know that a social maladjustment is known to be an organic disease that relieves a person of responsibility.
It's not that I'm sure nailing bad guys will deter the next one. It's that I'm sure bullshit doesn't help.
The law doesn't excuse a person for acts committed when voluntarily under the influence. BUT get a psych to testify that a person can't control themselves, and they're off.
My question is, how do they know they can't control themselves? The answer is simple: they have determinist views, that any feeling is uncontrollable. Like zero threshold. You show up in their office, you need to pay them for pills or time. If I want to fuck some babe, rape is uncontrollable.
I dunno where I'd put the line w/r/t defendants. My objection is to psychs saying their opinion on the same issue is scientific, when they know goddamned well it's bullshit. Philosophers who lie to pad their pockets are scum.
The responsibility has to be set with the person who performs the actions. The argument about whether they're determined is moot and unnecessary. If they are determined, we all are. It would be a democracy of determined behavior. Criminals would be as determined in performing their crimes as the rest of us are to punish them. You have to presume responsibility. If they aren't responsible being the most direct party, none of us are. End of argument.
I'm not a determinist. I think the hypothesis is *far* too simple to be useful, which is why I hate to argue it. However, I know of cases where stokes or other brain damage have radically altered personality. A mother of a friend of mine had a series of strokes that changed the mother's personality every time. At the end, my friend admitted she couldn't recognize her mother anymore. I know psychs have on film some very unethical and disturbing records of 0.01 volt electostimulas of parts of a man's brain where he goes from docile to murderous he was foaming at the mouth and would have attacked people in the room if he wasn't restrained. I know of cases of psychomotor epilepsy, of Touret's syndrome, where hiccups turn into curse words. You clearly can't ignore these. I know of a woman who cries out: "Bing Bing Bing Penis!" at 38 minute intervals, for no reason.
Determined? No. Too simple of a concept. We might be emotionally determined to feel certain things; emotions are as determined as computer programs. They act on us. We don't have control over what we feel, but our minds and wills choose the response.
he knows why these things happen, when in fact he should know he doesn't.
It's possible that your BingBing lady is a consummate actress. Neither of us think that's very likely.
The more common problem is somebody getting on the stand and telling a court they have a scientific opinion about why a defendant did something, knowing that their opinion is purely subjective and not reproducible or reviewable in any way, that it's based on confusing correlation with causation in studies financed by pharmaceutical industries, and knowing that the court is probably doing to be misled by what amounts to loads of BS, the contemporary edition of religious rationalizations.
I think a person has a lot of control over their emotions, in many ways.
What's more, I have yet to meet a psych who has the ability to predict a given person's emotions better than a random layman.
My beef is that I have seen an incredible number of psychs misrepresent issues - ignore or gloss over evidence to get to the result they want, or plain lie about issues.
One senior HMO shrink I'm working with now tells me that ADHD is "a complex of symptoms and associations that may eventually prove to be a complex of entities as well".
The translation of that is, "I don't begin to know what the fuck I'm talking about". Or more charitably, as the pediatrics chief told me, "nobody knows". That's OK, until they lie about it.
SO WHY DO THEY CLAIM TO KNOW?? Political demand, that's why. People want to be told they have a disease, so it's "not their fault". They drug the kids because they don't want to raise their voices to them.
I want to know, which is more abusive to a child, raising your voice to him, or feeding him meth?
Oops! Looks like I've already blown that one.
Look, I know what you're saying, Jack. There are nightmare stories about psychiatrists in the courtrooms. In the 1960s, the shrinks released Ed Kemper from an institution years after he murdered his grandparents. This is before there was any vigilance for serial killers. He killed and dismembered eight women including his mother, and they would have never caught the guy if he didn't turn himself in. The police wouldn't believe him. (Interesting story: As serial killers go, that guy was positively moral.)
There are nightmares the other way. In Texas, they had Dr James Grigson aka Dr. Death who, for a fee, would tell any jury that the accused was a violent sociopath, after at most a cursory examination.
Political demand: no society demands, too. I've said it before, if we didn't have psychiatry, we would need to invent it.
what is corrupt is concealing the reasoning process, and telling people we (the academic community) know things that we don't. DSM diagnoses are voted in & out of existence. Homos were "sick" until that was changed by vote; and people used to get the blues; now they get SAD, so psychs and pharmaceuticals can profit.
If a psych says that a person is "mentally ill", they can, without due process, lose all their civil rights. That's frightening. The Nazis and Soviets did that; I personally have seen the same Vietnam era deserters characterized as criminally insane or perfectly normal, depending on whether the psych was American or Canadian.
What I mean by political demand is that the community demands. I have seen any number of mothers sigh with relief to be told their son has a disease, and needs to take meth indefinitely, because they prefer that to the uncertainty of responsibility.
It's pathetic. Fucking pathetic.
I have nothing for or against Canucks, but I'm far too attached to be leaving, especially for a cold place.
Maybe more to the point, I think that disengagement is more dangerous than fighting in place.
Who is going to oppose the US if it goes crazy? The PRC?
Their standards are incredibly high. They really don't want you there unless you can contribute substantially. If I'm able to do it, it will take a long time to meet the qualifications. I was looking into a work visa.
I was looking into Ireland, Costa Rica and even Australia. Those are much further away, I'd have to really leave family behind (along with my GF and certain providers who are friends).
Then again, checking the map... that is a really long border Canada has with the US... hmmm. No, the illegal route isn't viable. They'd extradict me in a second.
I used to think as you did, till the government officially adapted totalitarian laws that buried the constitution. I've read too many books about totalitarianism. It won't help the situation a bit for me to end up in prison. People who haven't studied it, who aren't curious about knowing about it don't know what to look out for. IMO, it wasn't isolated, it's a sickness that can take any modern nation.
Here's what I've read on the topic: there's "1984" of course. Along with Orwells "Politics and the English Language." There's Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelgo." Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism." And the recent book: "Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar," by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
[sigh] then again, I've just had a family crisis that might nail my feet in place. If so, I'd be too embarrassed to write on the politics board again.
2 years of reading is a good start. I couldn't tell you where my perspectives come from without boring you to death; but I guess I've been working on it since I was about 14, most of a half century ago.
I think it's a bigger thing that nationality, it's basic values and civilization, etc; and while it's cute for Americans to think they're special, it's also dangerously naive.
OTOH, ya gotta keep trying; that's what life is about. When ya stop trying, you're dead. And I do think it's more dangerous to turn your back than face up to a problem.
I'm sure there's lots of good stuff about Canada, but I'm not ready to retire, and when I do, it won't be a cold place.
I assume you have some sort of economic plan to support yourself; but if you're relying on a govt, they don't take time to tell you everything.
All I know about it is that NAFTA requires some sort of reciprocity, so that people using their technical university qualifications should be able to get in, as well as investors, ie people who are meeting a payroll.
I can refer you to lawyers if you'd like.
I have a Bachelors' degree. I'll just say I've been terribly under-employed.
I suspect the degree has to be more technical, or have an equivalent license. I know US regs, not Canuck ones.
most of them will tell you, they know you have a "disorder" resulting from a chemical imbalance. You see & hear it everywhere, especially in kids' special ed programs.
But if you start getting into it, they will weasel away. I had one hand me a peer article "proving" ADHD had an organic etiology. Too bad he didn't read it, because the bottom line was that the authors said they couldn't prove it, even if they applied purely subjective standards.
Get into it, you will realize that the DSM can't prove an organic etiology in any diagnosis that is couched in terms of a relationship (he doesn't answer me or pay attnetion to me) because if you get into why, yoou realize you're making a social and legal judgment.
But they never get into it. They can't, because they can't investigate the entire situation. That's not what they're about. What they're about is labelling the "patient" into a category to justify others dealing with them in a particular way. Or, if you're dealing with a self-referred patient, they are trying to convince them to adapt, ie give up.
None of this is bad. What's bad, corrupt, etc, is misrepresenting it, saying that it's science, that the organic origins are known enough to predict results, when in fact it's not, and none of that is true.
yeah, we've got some really mind-bending drugs these days. That doesn't mean we begin to know what the fuck we're doing with them, any more than we did when we first figured out how to brew beer and get drunk.
I'm not saying we shouldn't use the drugs. I'm saying that charlatans should not be lying to us that they know WTF they're doing.
I disagree. I strongly believe a person might have a lot of control over showing or not showing their emotions. He might dissemble and find creative ways of doing it (like actors). He might respond to it in many different ways to his emotions. Emotions might pass in very fickle ways, but I believe very firmly that a person has no control over their emotions any more than he does the weather.
They are programs developed through evolution that have proved worthy in historical environments to give us the maximum possibility to reproduce and secure our genes in our current environment.
I hold this belief strongly: free will does not extend to sensations or emotions. In very slight ways it extends to perceptions. You could close your eyes or look away, but you have no choice about the input once the eyes are open and looking.
I think that many of these things depend on DEFINITIONS. I'd agree that free will doesn't extend to sensations; but I think a person can to some degree control their reaction to sensations.
Eg: a person senses (observes) a change in the market price of their stock. They feel some emotion, or maybe none. That may be the result of long experience, which experience may have been consciously directed by them (eg, what schools and jobs they've been in).
At another extreme, a person may be in severe physiological distress; and the way they react to it may vary widely according to conscious choices. Sometimes people with multiple major injuries get up, walk around, and behave very effectively. Other times people "get" PTSD because their cats are in distress.
How much of those issues are voluntary, the result of some sort of free will, is an open question that most often comes up in a courtroom, in finding intent in a crime, or in family law issues. I had one child psych tell me flat out he regarded volition as a legal question, and I think that's a justifiable view, if not necessarily a useful one.
But for me, it comes back to the issue of people (eg psychs) accurately presenting what they know and don't. When psychs vote on whether homos or SAD people are "sick", and then tell us that they are "scientific", we should be running them out of town with a rail up their collective ass.
It was just an "enabler" he used to moral position and bring the true condition of his heart to the surface...