Category Archives: Celebrity

UPDATED: Shine On Mr. Sheen, You Crazy Diamond

Celebrity, Drug War, Ilana Mercer, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

During an hour-long interview with CNN”s Piers Morgan, Charlie Sheen had some choice words for the addiction industry (Sheen’s clearly an enemy of the Industry.) I loved every minute of it.

SHEEN: “I’ve been around them for 22 years. And they’ve been lying to me for two decades. … I’m a winner and their lives look like they’re — you know, ruled by losers. Just to put it in black and white terms. I don’t want their lives, and they want mine, but they want to criticize the hell out of it. … I don’t believe myself to be an addict. I really don’t. I think that I just ignore or smash or finally dismiss a model that I think is rooted in vintage balderdash, you know? For lack of a better word.”

Lovely.

And about the busybody public Sheen said this: “I wish people would shift that focus on to themselves and their own family and their own friends and just maybe spend a little more time on their home front.” [Transcripts.]

Watch out: The Shamans will be furious. Haven’t the likes of Drs. Keith Ablo and Drew Pinsky labored to create lucrative niches for themselves in the media by medicalizing all manner of misbehavior?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders started out with some 60 categories of disorders (not diseases). It now sports hundreds for which a biological origin is asserted (with little scientific backing). Good for Sheen for copping only to being a bad boy, not a sick boy in need of the ministrations of prissy prohibitionists.

From “Mel’s Malady, Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.
A teacher who seduces her underage pupil has to be “sick,” or else she’d not have indulged her fantasies. The same post hoc illogic is applied to the morbidly obese: if you overeat, you’re diseased!
Are you a dad who dotes on his kids when they are around, but fails to mail them child support money when they return to mom? There’s a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. John Ratey who’ll cheerily diagnose you with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: you remember your kids only when they are present.
And so it goes: the arsonist has “pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with “kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a “sex-addict.”

From “Addictions Are About Behavior, Not Disease”:

“When it comes to thinking about addiction, opinions converge. Having bought into the addiction industry’s mantra, so-called social progressives and conservatives alike share the same ideological hangover from the Prohibition era, with a twist of AA sadism: all are religious about abstinence, and all accept as bible from Sinai the wisdom of coercing addicts into treatment regimens. But perhaps the greatest error made in the attempt at humane formulations about addiction is to cast as a disease what is essentially a problem of behavior. …

“The rationale for using the disease model to describe addiction even though it is intellectually dishonest is that medical treatment is effective. Yet another deception. An overview of controlled studies indicates that ‘treated patients do not fare better than untreated people with the same problems.’ Of note is a 4500-subject-strong 1996 US epidemiological study conducted by the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey. Treated alcoholics, it was found, were more heavily alcohol dependent on average than untreated alcoholics. Clearly a behavioral problem cannot be remedied by medical intervention. Addicts are cured when they decide to give up the habit.”

I don’t watch Sheen’s television. But as far as bucking a treatment industry that relies, for the most, on coercing addicts into rehabilitation—I say, Shine on Sheen, You Crazy Diamond.

UPDATE: Contemplationist: Dr. Thomas Szasz is a friend who is featured on these (BAB’s) pixelated pages. Do search for his articles under “BAB’s A List.” Tom has provided praise for my new book, to be released on May 10, 2011. Sign-up for my newsletter, befriend me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter for updates.

UPDATED: Have Sexual Abuse Will Travel

Celebrity, Politics, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Republicans, Sex

The therapeutic creed is often used to coerce people into conformity. A central tenet of that creed is the idea that any trauma suffered will fester unless excavated, in public, if at all possible; on Oprah if you belong to the gilded elites. Research does not support the idea that beavering at—and broadcasting—past pain; picking at those scars and digging in them wounds, makes for a better adjusted individual. Still, an individual will pay a cruel price if he dares to challenge this convention.

Of course, there is nothing heroic about sharing the intimate details of your life. This state of affairs is the norm in a society that abhors boundaries between what is private and what is public, and encourages a state of flux between these spheres. If anything, hero status is granted to the conformist who lives by the precepts of pop-psychology, and manages a showy demonstration of therapeutic ‘self-knowledge.’

Thus, Sen. Scott Brown, a liberal, Massachusetts Republican, made a smart move by coming out with his torrid tale of childhood sexual abuse.

The silent and steely type is out. A country run by women (some of them with the Chromosome Y) wants its men to let it all hang out. Or at least to be a metrosexual like Barack Obama (who, to his credit, is more discreet than Scott). Brown’s “book,” grandiosely titled “Against All Odds,” might even be an attempt, like that of Republican Tim Pawlenty’s, to grease the skids for a presidential run.

Excellent strategy. Ask Oprah; she knows a thing or two about helping to elect a president.

UPDATE: On FAcebook, Michael Barnett expresses surprise that there is a “market for this stuff. Why do people want to hear about other people’s sexual abuse? I sure don’t.” I replied: “Michael, you are not yet a properly ‘evolved’ man. You haven’t got good ’emotional intelligence.'”

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Politicians Pair Off For Their Big Night (Not Ours)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democrats, Ethics, Government, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Care about principles? Then the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat. What about sitting together at the biggest “Stalinist extravaganza” (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33815) of the season, the State of the Union Address? “More than 60 members have signed up to sit next to one of their colleagues from a different party,” reports CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/25/brazile.congress.sit.together/index.html?hpt=T2). Reporters are giggling and cooing over who’s dating whom. I could not care less about the seating silliness. Let the statists play at symbolism. It’s a matter of time before tea partiers, bar the Pauls, slip between the sheets with their big-spending profligate pals.

Watch the formations—the twosomes and the threesomes into which the pols pair. That ought to tell you something about future alliances.

The Trump Card: Trade Aggression

Business, Celebrity, China, Economy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Politics, Trade

Watch out Alec Baldwin (or should that be America?), publicity hound Donald Trump is considering a run for office. Trump is motivated by the sense that the nimbus of great power that surrounds the US is dissipating. It hasn’t occurred to him to look closer to home for the cause of America’s economic anemia—at Fanny and the Fed, for example. Trump thus blames OPEC because he has no idea what’s potting, and is not eager to look in his own plate—at the burdens of doing business in the US. OPEC and the Chinese.

Among American opinion makers, Sinophobia is considered an economic theory and is thus sanctioned. Disliking China falls within the realm of economic theorizing. Accordingly, Chinese success is put down to currency manipulation, and not the industry, frugality, and hard work of that people.

The Trump plan to reclaim American power and prestige in the world includes force, of course. Like Baldwin, Trump has never wanted for anything for too long, at least not in recent memory. Strutting around on the world stage; showing those South Koreans and Chinese who’s boss: that’s a perfect complement to the waning testosterone and increasing megalomania that are the ingredients of Trump persona.