Celebrity, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, South-Africa
I love that guy. I mean the random gesticulator at the Mandela memorial. A very cool, creative guy, if you ask me, and the most original act at the funeral. What gumption! Give the sign-language interpreter an 0-1 Visa. He’s got rhythm. Deaf people can learn a new language. Learn a little tolerance too. The best part is how everyone is beating up on South Africa’s ruling ANCniks for hiring the improv-signer. He’s a great hire. Now give him a name. Stop dehumanizing My Man.
Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason
“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.
Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.
The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.
2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:
the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.
The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.
This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.
Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”
UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”
Family, Gender, Kids, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Relatives
Emily Wilson of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania begins her review of books that span “three millennia of motherhood” with a charming distillation of Philip Dey Eastman’s classic story for “beginning readers,” Are You My Mother?:
Are You My Mother? starts with a mother bird who realizes that her egg is about to hatch. Being a good, responsible mother, she flies off to get the hatchling something to eat when he emerges. In the meantime, the baby bird pops out of the egg, falls “down, down, down!” from the nest, and finds himself alone in the world, unable to fly or fend for himself. But he can walk, and he decides to look for his mother. Unfortunately, and comically, he does not know what she looks like. So he walks right past her, though the reader sees her, busily engaged on tugging up a nice fat worm. He encounters a series of animals and other objects, and asks each of them in turn, “Are you my mother?”. Finally, a huge power shovel – which, being the largest, seems like the most likely maternal candidate of all – lets out a scary-sounding “SNOOOORT!”, and lifts the baby “up, up, up!”. The illusion is shattered: the baby realizes, “You are not my mother! You are a big scary SNORT!”. But, in yet another thrilling reversal of fortune, the Snort drops the bird back into its own nest. Just then, the mother bird comes home. She asks, “Do you know who I am?”, and the baby bird says, “Yes!”. He knows she is his mother because she is not any of the other creatures he has encountered. He therefore knows that she is a bird, and she is his mother.
One of Wilson’s poignant insights:
“There is a deeply rooted idea in our culture that mothers, far more than fathers, are responsible not just for picking up the toys and changing the nappies, but also for how the child turns out in the end, for good or ill.”
Ms. Wilson’s conclusion:
“Mothers are all different, because they are all human. The good enough mother is one who gives her child what it needs to grow up. The good enough child is one who manages to grow up, and in doing so, is able to recognize her mother’s humanity.”
Happy Mother’s Day.
Christianity, Criminal Injustice, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Sex
The breakdown of boundaries in society may be one of the main sources of all the rot we see around us, but the Catholic Church will not be permitted to survive in the way it was intended to function: as a hierarchical organization.
The Pontiff likely quit because, brilliant prescient man that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is, he knows that the Church is no longer a haven from the toxic tides of populism and liberalism. And he is powerless to stop the avalanche.
The clamoring masses believe that they are every bit as smart as men like Benedict. The faithful, moreover, no longer see themselves as members of a community of believers, but as members of gay, lesbian, feminist, black, brown and plain angry clans. Unless the Church recognizes their brand of identity politics—they will bring it down.
Benedict also knows that the Church is on the rack. The victim community has found a way to bleed the Church dry and rob it of its moral authority. Sexual abuse litigation is big business, a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to this theft.
After “asbestos, tobacco, guns, lead paint,” the next jackpot for tort lawyers was … sex, wrote Daniel Lyons of Forbes Magazine. In 2003, Lyons hashed out all there is to say about the sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected.
In “Sex, God & Greed,” Lyons pointed out how many of these class-action claims are, if not bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories. (See my “Repressed Memory Ruse.”)
“… The focal point of this tort battle is the Catholic Church. The Church’s legal problems are worse even than most people realize: $1 billion in damages already paid out for the victims of pedophile priests, indications that the total will approach $5 billion before the crisis is over… The lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades. Last year California, responding to the outcry over the rash of priest cases, suspended its statute of limitations on child sex abuse crimes for one year, opening the way for a deluge of new claims. A dozen other states are being pushed to loosen their laws. … But this wave of litigation does not end here. Is there any reason to think that the priesthood has a monopoly on child molestation? The lawyers who are winning settlements from Catholic dioceses are already casting about for the next targets: schools, government agencies, day care centers, police departments, Indian reservations, Hollywood. Plaintiff lawyer Roderick MacLeish Jr. and other litigators have parlayed the priest crisis into a billion-dollar money machine, fueled by lethal legal tactics, shrewd use of the media and public outrage so fierce that almost any claim, no matter how bizarre or dated, offers a shot at a windfall.”