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.

UPDATE II: Oscar Offal (Salutations From the Stutterers)

Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Previously, I watched the Grammys for you guys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.)

The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of “The King’s Speech”). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in-sync with the times, I know.

The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture.

The last simply superb picture I watched was “The Secret In Their Eyes,” a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Naturally I will be on the lookout for more such gems in this category.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): TRUE PUKE.
Mike D.: For me film is not really about striking the right ideological tone; it’s about weaving a yarn and avoiding that wagging ideological finger. I will not be lectured by pin-heads. I’d like them to weave a story that I have not figured out in the first 5 minutes.

I would never watch—much less wax fat about (as some libertarians have been doing)–“Atlas Shrugged” when placed in the hands of Hollywood. (I believe Dagny takes to green energy, or something along those lines.) And the snippet I saw of the “You Go Girl,” aka “True Grit,” was the standard emotional rubbish from Hollywood. Mike, you seem no longer able to even detect the abiding themes that ought to repulse you: young courageous girl sets lax, libertine, drunk adult on the right track and awes all with her moral certitude. They should provide vomitoria in the cinema for this kind of fare.

Such hackneyed, corrupting pabulum ought to repel the intelligent viewer. It’s Hollywood’s revival of the Noble Savage, only applied to kids; they are always the prescient sages; adults are the dolts needing the guidance and direction of babes barely out of diapers. Puke.

And if saintly, snotty-nosed kids are not enough, then you have “The Social Network”: fast talking, hubristic Millennials, making, if to go by Mike’s advisory, “profound” statements about the Culture of the Commons. Yeah, that’s just what I crave. Wisdom from Meghan McCain’s peers. Remember the dot.com kids to whom errant adults were praying, not so long ago?! Get a grip!

UPDATE II: Salutations From the Stutterers. A disease has been born. A new adversity to diagnose, medicate, write soppy stories and scripts about overcoming, launch campaigns for, and discuss, if you are lucky, while plonked on Oprah’s load-bearing couch.

The Dawn of Democracy

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

Diana West notes the under-reported “triumphal return to Egypt of the poisonous Yusef al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s favorite cleric who just drew 2 million Egyptians back to Tahrir Square where he prayed for the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.” She ponders the “delusional belief that American principles — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law — have a natural place as ‘universal principles’ in a culture grounded in Shariah principles. This is the pure fantasy that has driven our foreign policy through a decade of ‘nation-building’ wars. …”

One quibble: The revolution in Egypt had its own momentum. The US and its incoherent foreign policy had little to do with the Changing of the kleptokratic Guard in Egypt.

More at “Big Peace.”

UPDATED: Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions

Democrats, Education, Government, Labor, Political Economy, Politics, Private Property

The following is excerpted from “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” my new WND.COM column:

“For evidence of the power of the teachers unions acting out on the streets of Madison, Wis., look no further than your property taxes. Almost 50 percent of mine are garnished for ‘Local School Support.’ ‘Port, Fire, Hospital, Library’ constitute a miniscule 5 percent of the property-tax bill. Law enforcement is not even itemized. Other states confiscate even higher percentages from their propertied taxpayers in the service of government-employed teachers.

Yes, do use the term ‘government unions,’ won’t you, as ‘public sector’ or ‘public servants’ implies, incorrectly, that these people serve the public. Besides, have you seen these slackers? In his path-breaking book, ‘The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,’ Peter Brimelow left us with a lasting mental image of our children’s over-sated role models, attending one of the National Education Association’s annual meetings. The same apparition is everywhere apparent in Madison, as teachers ‘wobble and waddle through the teeming crowds of [supporters] … thighs like tree trunks, bellies billowing, jowls jiggling.’

Over and above the property tax – the federal income tax claims from those who pay it more monies for the educational oink sector. Whether the taxpayer has children in the system or doesn’t, whether he chooses to homeschool his offspring or pays for a private school, whether he approves of the job government pedagogues are doing or doesn’t – he has to pay them, even go into hock for them.

To compound it all, America has a most progressive tax code. According to USA Today, the number of Americans who owe no federal income taxes, and do not share in the cost of government, stood at 47 percent in 2009, and is increasing. What has come to pass John C. Calhoun predicted in ‘A Disquisition on Government,’ where he described the devolution of a democracy in which all private property is, eventually, subjected to the vagaries of majority rule. …”

The complete column, “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions,” is now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (Feb. 26): Tom DiLorenzo points out the power of the monopoly that is the government union:

The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their “demands,” it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction. They are the beneficiaries of a particular form of taxation without representation (not that taxation with representation is much better). This is why some states have laws prohibiting strikes by government-employee unions. (The unions often strike anyway.)
Politicians are caught in a political bind by government-employee unions: if they cave in to their wage demands and raise taxes to finance them, then they increase the chances of being kicked out of office themselves in the next election. The “solution” to this dilemma has been to offer government-employee unions moderate wage increases but spectacular pension promises. This allows politicians to pander to the unions but defer the costs to the future, long after the panderers are retired from politics.
As taxpayers in California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and many other states are realizing, the future has arrived. The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local governments in the United States currently have $3.5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. They must either raise taxes dramatically to fund these liabilities, as some have already done, or drastically cut back or eliminate government-employee pensions.