Category Archives: Pseudoscience

The Managerial State’s Media and Medical Lapdogs

GUNS, Individual Rights, Propaganda, Pseudo-intellectualism, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Regulation, The Zeitgeist

I had feared that the reaction to this week’s column on the pornography of public grief, now on LewRockwell.com, would be as angry as the reaction to my “Bullied ‘Jail Bus’ Lady: Fearful Fatty, Not A Hero.” Was I in for a happy surprise!

The letters have been overwhelmingly full of gratitude and relief for my having expressed what readers were thinking.

Here is a smattering:

Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 10:42 AM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: RE: The pornography of public grief

You are a Modern Prophet. You have identified the real affliction that humanity is either willingly blind to, or naively blinkered.

Regards,
JT

Friday, December 21, 2012 1:42 PM
To: ‘imercer@wnd.com’
Subject: Public Grief!

All I can say about your article on public grief is…”AMEN”. … Thanks for your articles. I have always appreciated them, I should have said so before this.

JB, Texas

Friday, December 21, 2012 4:28 PM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: The pornography of public grief

Very good piece.

Interested in you book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Having lived in SA for five months.

John

Friday, December 21, 2012 4:38 PM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: EXCELLENT!!! (THE PORNOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC GRIEF)

Hello Ilana,
It has been several years since we exchanged emails, and it has been some time since I’ve caught back up with your intellectually masterful musings.

Your piece said what I, and I think many others, have been thinking since the awful news broke last week. And nobody has said it better than you with this:
“At the root of it all is the rejection of the existence of unadulterated evil. Rather than accept the reality of evil – s–t happens, live with it and be prepared to proceed against it – misconduct has been medicalized.”

Thank you so very much for your strength to stay true to your moral and intellectual compass.

Wishing you peace and prosperity,

CB, OH

Friday, December 21, 2012 10:00 PM
To: ilana@ilanamercer.com
Subject: Thank you

Your article brought clarity to me of the feeling I have had about the circus and exploitation of the grieving process of the families and friends of the victims. The national media avoids the issues, use any excuse not to make news and create entertainment ghoulish at the least.
Sincerely,
HS

*************

Needless to say, the media as master of ceremonies is sustaining the puke factor. And the ostensible defenders of our sacred right to defend our lives are looking like clobbered seals on ice floes.

The Pornography of Public Grief

Crime, Ethics, Etiquette, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason

The following is from “The Pornography of Public Grief,” the current column, now on WND.COM:

“A headline on the Huffington Post blared: ‘Comfort Dogs Sent To Newtown From Chicago Area To Help Community After Sandy Hook Shooting.’ CNN’s top dog Anderson Cooper followed—or led the pack; who cares?—with a similar segment about insourcing dogs to comfort the afflicted community of Newtown, Conn.

One day after the massacre of 20 children and seven adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, ‘a group of golden retrievers from the Chicago area made a cross-country journey to … Newtown.’

Woof, woof, or barf, barf?

Are there no companion dogs in Newtown, Conn.? Must expert dogs be brought in to properly minister to the mourners? Apparently so. Even the neighborhood dog is now unqualified for the big time.

The pornography of public grief in our country is almost as warped as the evil (not ill), mother-slaying, mass murderer responsible for the Sandy Hook carnage. There is very little dignity in the freaky spectacle of mass contagion—where members of the public turn professional mourners, flock to memorial happenings for victims they never knew, and mill about for hours in the hope of being discovered by the master of ceremonies, the journalist.

These ritualistic displays are symptomatic of our festering cultural commons.

At the center of this festering culture that turns victims into a backdrop and prop to the state’s army of experts is the journalist. …”

Read the complete column, “The Pornography of Public Grief,” now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE II: Adam Lanza: EVIL, NOT ILL (Guns; There They Go Again)

Crime, Family, GUNS, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

It is at times like this, when news comes of the murder of 20 children and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that I miss my dear friend and intellectual soul-mate Tom Szasz, RIP, more than ever.

One of the last emails he wrote to me—he was a constant in my life for years—was dated Fri 6/29/2012 5:52 PM. It was a response to one of mine. I had complained (kvetched, as we older Jews would say) about the loss of “wisdom, shophia.” He wrote back using the beautiful Greek concept I had invoked.

“As you know I have done that (and so have you). But this is what passes for wisdom now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/abdul-awkal-deemed-mentally-unfit_n_1600273.html
So be it.
Love, Tom.”

Like all brilliant men, Tom was pessimistic. Reality warranted a pessimism of the deepest kind, something we shared. Tom was alluding to the dominant narrative in the Zeitgesit about evil, and the attendant error of medicalizing misconduct.

That ritual has begun. Once again, the true “Mad Hatters”—the self-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry—have gone into high gear.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the exculpation industry has taken its perennial position. And it is that of placing wicked behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions.

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 Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.

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. These liberals (including most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

As the psychiatric shaman has it, a killer is not evil, but ill. The modern-day witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer.

UPDATE I: CORRECTION. The shooter’s name is Adam Lanza. Media initially named Ryan Lanza, the “suspect’s older brother,” because A. Lanza may have been carrying his brother’s identity document.

UPDATE II: GUNS: THERE THEY GO AGAIN. Displays of evil invariably elicit calls to ban or restrict certain firearms, as these are seen as part of causality. If you’re going to look for root causes, look for the right root causes. I’d look in the direction of permissive, child-centered, progressive parenting, which is conducive to the creation of narcissistic personalities. Progressive, indulgent, child-obsessed parenting is practiced by “conservatives” and liberals alike.

An acrimonious divorce, where the young man was alienated from a father by the Courts, by the mother or by the father himself, or by all the above: these could go toward the making of a monster. However, anti-gun, progressive interests dominate the media, and so one is less likely to hear a rational debate about the role of permissive parenting—where the child is encouraged to think that the universe does and should orbit around him—and the breakdown of the traditional family, in the creation of these monsters.

Here is something I fished out of the Mercer Articles Archive, dated … 2000. The Calgary Herald article I wrote quotes Canadian Professor Marilyn Bowman:

“The prototype aggressor,” explains Bowman, “is a man whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive.” Like all efforts to drum up ignorance, this one can be dangerous.
“…every kind of social problem is analyzed as the outgrowth of low self esteem,” and while “treatment programs to teach people how to love themselves are put forward as the means of raising self-esteem,” not only is “the relationship between emotion and well being not robust, causal or meaningful,” but, on the contrary, there is a dark side to self-esteem.

Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol

Free Markets, Healthcare, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Regulation, Science, The State

What follows is a segment of a conversation I had with Karen De Coster, CPA. “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol” is now on RT:

Karen De Coster is an accounting/finance professional and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the corporate state, food politics, and essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings.

ILANA MERCER: Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. As convention has it, Americans should give thanks to Native Americans for having taught them to plant corn. Even if this palliative history—this bit of myth-making—were true, all in all corn is a modern-day curse, is it not? Give us the goods on corn and Thanksgiving. What “primal” recipes made their way onto your Thanksgiving dinner table?

KAREN DE COSTER: Corn is at the top of the government’s list for subsidies. The current farm bill gives billions per year to commodity producers of corn. According to the EWG farm subsidy database, corn subsidies in the US totaled $82 billion from 1995-2011. These subsidies take the financial risk out of the system, thereby allowing for a fabricated sustainability. Hence we have the corn-bred Industrial Food Machine.
Cheap corn is a staple in processed, industrial foods. No matter how unhealthy these products are known to be, they become the preferred choice of food for consumers looking for bargains in order to chop at their family budgets.
Additionally, we have had 30+ years of federal alternative fuel subsidies to support ethanol production. In the early 1980s, the government’s ethanol subsidies made it worthwhile for everyone to risk getting into the corn growing game. They did, and the subsidies drove down the price of corn while the government’s tariffs on sugar drove up prices of that product. These government interventions brought us an economical alternative to the tariff-burdened sugar: high fructose corn syrup. Like soybean oil, HFCS is found in so many processed foods, as well as beverages. Nowadays, you have to go to a Mercado (a Mexican market) to buy coke with cane sugar instead of the usual HFCS.
The pilgrims may have celebrated with corn as a way of showing gratitude for their plentiful harvest, but growing that corn involved risk, capital investment, much labor, and it offered no subsidies.
For a primal Thanksgiving, I have access here to free-range, heritage turkeys; raw butter; locally grown organic sweet potatoes, and fresh-off-the-farm stalks of Brussels sprouts. I make my own mayonnaise from free-range eggs, vinegars, olive oil, and nut oils. It takes 10-15 minutes to make a big batch that stays good long enough to use it all. This gives me a pass on the government’s horrific soybean oil, most of which is made from subsidized, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Furthermore, Monsanto corn will never make it to my Thanksgiving table.

ILANA MERCER: Speaking of the devil, what’s up with the misguided love establishment libertarians have for GMOs and Monsanto?

KAREN DE COSTER: Wrong-headed libertarians worship Monsanto and exalt the Frankenfoods (GMO) industry because they believe these “food” innovations are advancing mankind and therefore represent the ultimate free market. No matter what your views on the science of genetically modified foods, the Big Food-Big Agra complex, as I have mentioned, is a heavily subsidized and government-enabled corporatocracy. …

Read the complete interview, “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol,” on RT. Stay tuned for Part II of my conversation with Karen.

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If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

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• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”