The Last Psychiatrist

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Book 4

​
​
“I'm thankful to those who defend me, and I'm not
surprised by those who hate me, but either way you are
missing the point. I don't matter. It's debatable whether
my ideas matter, but for sure they matter much more
than I do.
​
I am "Alone." What does that mean? It means that no
other characteristic should matter to you, the reader,
except that there's only me, whatever that is.”​

​
Compiled by zenarcade3

Send donations through Paypal to thelastpsychiatrist.com

Hot Sports Reporter Ines Sainz Was Sexually Harassed

Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children

Marc Maron's Mid-Life Crisis

Finding Existential Solace In A Pink Tied Psycho

The Contagion Is The Solution

We Are All Skyscrapers Now

How To Be Mean To Your Kids

"What should I say/do to my son after this happened to him?"

The Wisdom Of Crowds Turns Into Madness

Can The Court Force Treatment on Jared Loughner?

What To Do About Sexy High School Girls Having A Slumber Party

Grade Inflation

The Nature Of The Grift

4 Unintended Consequences of Seroquel's Adjunct to Antidepressants Indication

The Terrible, Awful Truth About The Debt Ceiling

Why We Are Terrible At Math (And Reading Comprehension)

Crazy

My name is NotMichaelBay, and I just fucked your girlfriend

When A Culture Is This Invested In The Lie, The Culture Is Finished

Jezebel Proves Scott Adams Is Right

Is The Cult Of Self-Esteem Ruining Our Kids?

Louis CK on being a dad-- the hidden piece of his happiness

If this blog were a book you would give to someone else, what posts would you want in it?

Are Antipsychotics Overprescribed To Kids?

An Education

3 Important Things About The New Wikileaks Controversy

Second Life Is A Second Chance, Which Is Why It Fails

How To Write A College Application Essay Or Personal Statement

The C Team

Osama Bin Laden Has Been Killed

What Should Really Be Done For Autistic Children?

Hop, With Russell Brand: A Life Lesson For 4 Year Olds

Why Do Autistics Score Poorly On The Eyes Test?

What Is A Real Man?

J Crew Ad Promotes Something That Some Call "Transgenderism"

The Abusive Boyfriend

After You Shoot Three Women, Who Should You Call?

Observations Afterwards

The Lululemon Whydunnit

The Fall And Rise Of Rebecca Black

Bad At Math

March 13 Week on Partial Objects

When Is It Okay To Rape A Woman?

Partial Objects

3 Media Narratives About The Middle East You Should Defend Against

The Trouble With Charlie Sheen

The Decline Effect Is Stupid

Not A Good Month For Blonde Reporters

The Effects Of Too Much Porn: "He's Just Not That Into Anyone"

Or, You Could Just Nuke The Bitch

Are All Drug Reps Hot?

Tech Sunday: Will.I.Am Gets A Job At Intel

Ohio Mom In Jail For Sending Kids To The Wrong School

Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?

This Time It's ESP

Are Chinese Mothers Superior To American Mothers?

The Suicide Of Bill Zeller

Wakefield And The Autism Fraud-- The Other Part Of The Story

The Black Swan Movie Review Criminal Attorneys And Hollywood Don't Want You To Read

Happy New Year 2011 From Your Friendly Neighborhood Pirate

What Does The Woman Who Feels No Fear Feel?

Taboos Are The Ways Christians Try To Control Us

Infidelity And Other Taboos, Media Style

Test of Psychopathy 2

Test Of Psychopathy?
 SEPTEMBER 14, 2010
Hot Sports Reporter Ines Sainz Was Sexually Harassed

according to my script, I'm supposed to be crying

NEW YORK (KABC) -- The New York Jets are playing defense off the field, after allegations that players
and coaches sexually harassed a female reporter.​

Ines Sainz, reporter from Mexican TV, somehow slipped across the border undetected to
steal our jobs, only to have players throwing the ball towards her so they could bump up
against her, and when she went to the locker room to interview the QB, they started
"making remarks."

Complicating the matter is that the reporter in question looked like this:
Two camps:

●​ another example of men acting disgustingly, and protected by the NFL; women being
degraded and disrespected, being treated as objects.
●​ Look at her, she asked for it! Dressed like that, what did she expect. Listen, ladies,
you can't flaunt it and then get angry when someone notices.
Yes, if only either of these two had anything to do with the real issue. Come on, people,
first principles: What do the writers want to be true?

II.

While it's not a justification, it is a perfectly legitimate query: how can you dress like that
and not expect the attention?

Attention is one thing, lewd comments maybe another, but as Marc Maron pointed out,
sexiness isn't a smart bomb, you can't select your targets, you put it out there and there's
going to be some collateral damage.

"I don't want to be thought of only as a sex object." You don't see the irony of your
thinking. You want people to have a certain thought, yet you also demand that they don't
only have a certain thought. You're trying to control their minds just as much as you claim
they're labeling you.

You don't get to make that decision, ever. As much as anyone wishes they could make
everyone else accept the identity they've invented for themselves, the ugly existential truth
is everyone has their own mind and they seem to have decided that you are a sex object.
They may be wrong, they may be right, you can certainly try and alter this perception, but
you cannot tell other people not to have it.

"You can't label me!" Throw the cognitive kill switch, after which I'm supposed to be left
shuddering, did I label her? All I meant was, hey you got me all wrong, wait a second,
that's not what I meant (is it?)...

Well, I ain't going out like that. I'll accept that I'm a big jerk for thinking what I think, I'll
accept that I may even be wrong, but I will not accept that my limited experience as a
human and the information you are giving me has lead me to a few conclusions about you
that I am not allowed to have.

"I know who I am." No you don't, that's my point, if you knew who you were you wouldn't
be playing multiple characters, in this case eye candy and serious reporter. "Well, I have to
act this way for the job, for TV." They didn't spring this on you last minute. It may be
wrong to expect a reporter to be sexy on TV, but if you say you have to be sexy as part of
the job, you can't double back and say you weren't being sexy.

What you want is to be able to behave sexy, or rude, or ridiculous, or offensive-- and still
demand to be seen the way you want to be seen.

It may be unfair, but it is the most important fact of human existence: people exist
independently of you.

III.

Before all the men form a celebratory circle jerk, let me back up: it's 2010. 'Well, what did
she expect?' doesn't fly in Human Resources's America. Like it or not, that's reality, and you
don't get to change reality. She's not a ninja, and if she feels harassed she's going to fight
back using whatever she's got, and if what's she's got are lawyers, well, what did you
expect?

"We don't want her to fight back, we just want her to take it." Got it. See II.

IV.

Note the power set up. All you fools think that female reporters are in the locker rooms
because it is some sort of measure of equality, "why should the males get the best
interviews?" that this is somehow a success for equality, something that women had to
struggle to earn, and you think that because you were told that.

Women didn't earn this over the resistance of an old boy network; the media conglomerates
decided it would be awesome to televise a hyperfemale in a locker room with a nearly naked
hypermale and pretend there's no sexuality implied. So anything that goes wrong is
between individuals, nothing to do with the Machine.

CFNM, right there on ESPN.

V.

Take a look at another sideline picture of her:

I can't believe I am the only one to notice this: she has a big ass, and 70% of the Jets are
black. Hi.

"What's that got to do with it?" That has everything to do with it. Sandy Flatbutt and Ines
Sainz both want an interview. Who does Marquice Cole choose to talk to longer? Which
interview is going to have more sexual tension to display TV, so that everyone in America
can think, "look at this guy, he hasn't heard a word she said, all he wants to do is---"
 no,
seriously, it's not real leather

That's how "professional news" is run. Bring the sexual energy as high as you can and then
pretend it isn't there. Quoting Marshall McLuhan, "make sure the message has a nice ass."

VI.

But now we're in the middle of it.

Whatever else you may think about Sainz, this is a woman who can handle herself, and
men, and players. That's the problem.

I want to say that I'm not the one who made the charge (of harassment), because I didn't even feel bad
about that... the ones who say that there was something wrong was the rest of the media.
Uh oh. So nothing I wrote in this post applies to Ines Sainz; in fact, none of the controversy
you are hearing applies to her, because she didn't care that much. If she can handle
players, if she can dismiss this as boys will be boys, what are the other reporters supposed
to do?

The question isn't whether the players' behavior will be tolerated by Sainz; the question is
will Sainz's behavior be tolerated by other reporters, like a hussy walking past the First
Wives Club. Oh, hell no. She cannot be allowed to walk away from this. Meanwhile, the
networks couldn't be happier even if they planned this, which they did, which is the whole
point.

I can see the unfair advantage that if she's ok with it and someone else isn't, she'll get all
the good interviews, but I would like to point out that this is the contract you media fools
started, the Pretend Contract, we all pretend her looks weren't part of the reason she got
the job, and she pretends no one is looking at her that way.
Oops-- she broke the contract, stupid Mexican, by labeling herself the Hottest Sports
Reporter. She's made subtext into text, and everyone in media knows you don't do that,
ever. "Cat's out of the bag, mofos, what are we going to do?"

Plan B: rewrite the story.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

OCTOBER 7, 2011
Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children

is this a joke?

A study, Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among US Childrenfinds, surprisingly,

that 3.5% of kids under 18 got stimulants, vs. 2.4% in 1996. Holy crap!! The reason this
is surprising is that 3.5% is about 10x smaller than I thought it was. American Journal of
Psychiatry? Did I move to Romania?

Then the article informs me that I am both racist and color blind: most stimulants are going
to white kids (4.4%), not black kids (3%), and about hispanics I was WAY off, I was certain
the number was close to 133% but apparently it's only 2.1%. Huh? Does this study include
the 48 states of America that have Americans in them, or just Guam and parts of the Virgin
Islands?

The article pretends to be shocked by this "steep increase," and then tries to explain it by
putting some nouns and verbs next to each other hoping you'll be impressed:

The significant increase in stimulant utilization in racial and ethnic minorities and low-income families
indicates an increased recognition of ADHD... social and cultural factors continue to play a significant
role in ADHD treatment utilization. Parents of Hispanic and African-American children are less likely
to report ADHD than parents of white children...(15)

That last sentence, referenced with "(15)", sounds like the conventional wisdom I heard in
residency: "African-Americans don't like to admit depression", excluding those in the packed
waiting room. (1) But when I eventually (2) found study "(15)" I was totally not surprised
to find it did not say parents are less likely to report ADHD. "(15)" was a survey of parents
asking them if they had been told by a doctor or school that their kid had ADHD.

The reason that 3.5% of kids are on stimulants is that their doctor neglected to give them
Risperdal. The kid who got Ritalin at age 6 and it helped carried that Ritalin into the teen
years, hence the growth among adolescents; but any new kids coming through the pipe
don't get stimulants, they get something else, by which I mean everything else.

Note the big jump at 6 years old, from 0.1% to 5.1%. Yes, certainly symptoms become
more prominent, but also they become prominent at school; schools have an interest in
medicalizing the problem, both practically (calm that kid the hell down) educationally
(diminished expectations) and economically (schools get more funding.) Stimulants are the
natural first line drugs. Well, they were, anyway.

This ridiculous article pretending to be amazed at the increase in stimulants is there to

prevent the heart attack you'd experience if you looked at another study that has a graph in
it:
Unless you believe bisphenol-A or global warming is changing the genetics of kids born after
1990, then the correct and terrifying way to interpret this graph is that one in every four
kids is considered by adults to be in need of psychiatric treatment; and only 3.5% get put
on stimulants. The other 20% we can assume are receiving psychoanalysis.

Maybe they need the meds, maybe they don't, the question is if these are the same kinds of
organ donors that existed in 1896, what happened to them before psychiatrists? Did they
eat each other? And if they are, in fact, more "psychiatric" than they were in 1896 and
bisphenol-A isn't to blame, then what is the other possibility?

And as that huge number of psychiatric patients grow up to become either unemployed
adults, or at least the children of unemployed parents, will they

a) experience spontaneous and permanent remission of symptoms

b) be treated with psychoanalysis
c) .....

-------

1. The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn't resistant to admitting he
has depression, he is resistant to the white doctor's attempt at labeling him depressed, and
consequently marginalizing him, diverting attention away from the social factors over which
the doctor is nervous to discuss and powerless to change. "You have depression" is the
nimble dance around the question of whether a white doctor can understand a black
patient's life. It is a delicate thing to say to a black woman that perhaps her man isn't
worth a damn, as she just said out loud to you but you're not sure if you're allowed to echo
back, maybe these kind of relationships are culturally appropriate? It's tough to know when
most of your information about black people comes from Martin Luther King quotes and The
New Yorker.

Lacking any common language to bridge racial, economic, or sexual divides, clinicians hide
behind the invented terminology of psychiatry. Medications become the physical
manifestation, the proof, that the language is real.

2. Whenever I see a reference to a statement that seems insane to me, two things will be
true:

1.​ It will take me as long to get the study as it did to conduct the study, i.e. 45
minutes. No hyperlink. No free access. Then I have to go into the university's
PubMed, which takes me through three windows to Science Direct or some other
outlet. Why, oh why, can't I just click "(15)" in the original paper and immediately
see it? Because:
2.​ It will turn out to be actually insane, and the only part of the reference that will
support the statement will be the title.

See also: The Rise And Fall Of Atypical Antipsychotics

OCTOBER 3, 2011
Marc Maron's Mid-Life Crisis
 but the point is to go slower, not faster

Comic Joe Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, this week mentioned a speech by
comic Marc Maron.

Marc Maron is a great comic I've referenced before. It's probably not overstepping for me
to say he suffers from narcissism, i.e. not that he is a narcissist, but that he suffers its
consequences.

Rogan said that when he was first starting out in comedy, Maron (who was already well
established) was nice to him and gave him good advice. "I've always tried to be nice back
to him because of what he did for me in the early days," said Rogan.

But over the years, as Rogan got more popular and then became the host of Fear Factor,
Maron apparently resented him. Maron insulted him whenever he came up; he said Rogan
was worse for comedy than Carlos Mencia (the two had a public battle over stolen material),
and one night Maron had to introduce Rogan to the stage, and did so with a dispraging
diatribe.

Rogan is a savvy student of human nature and a well practiced judge of character; and I'd
trust his insight way before any psychologist, let alone the armchair variety they use to
stabilize the chairs at The Atlantic. Rogan's point, therefore, wasn't that Maron was a jerk;
Rogan still believed Maron was a great comic and a nice guy. The point for Rogan was how
some people get caught in a self-hating, self-defeating loop of narcissistic resentment.
Forget about being happy for Rogan's success; or accepting it, or even being jealous of it.
Maron took it personally.

For example, from Maron's speech:

I have been doing standup for 25 years. I've put more than half my life into building my clown. That's
how I see it. Comics keep getting up on stage and in time the part of them that lives and thrives up there
is their clown. My clown was fueled by jealousy and spite for most of my career. I'm the clown who
recently read The War for Late Night and thought it was basically about me not being in show business.
I'm the clown who thought most of Jon Stewart's success was based on his commitment to a haircut. I'm
the clown that thought Louis CK's show Louie should be called Fuck You Marc Maron.

Whether Maron is or is not a narcissist is not the point; this thinking is narcissistic.
Anything that happens he relates back to himself, even if it reveals him to be a loser.
(Hence the statement: the belief that narcissism is synonymous with grandiosity is itself a
narcissistic defense.) So other people's successes don't exist independently, they
necessarily provide a commentary, a value, about oneself. His success reflexively implies
you're less of a success; his failure reflexively means you're more of a success.

The end result of this thinking is this:

Three years ago my clown was broke, on many levels, and according to my manager at the time
un-bookable and without options....I was thinking, "It's over. It's fucking over." Then I thought: "You
have no kids, no wife, no career, certainly no plan B. Why not kill yourself?"
By "the result" I don't mean the suicidality, though of course that option is never flatly
rejected, it is a last chance at immortality. The result of this loop is the first sentence, the
"without options." There are no options not because there are actually no independent
options, but because there are no options which change the balance of worth between you
and the other person. Because your value is measured relative to the other person, and
you've now discovered that you have no control over that other person, you are indeed left
"without options." No obvious way to become more successful, OR no obvious way to make
Joe Rogan less successful.

II.

I can't tell you how to be successful, but I can tell you how to successfully get through this
kind of misery. Note that this advice is not for people in their 20s, it will not work for you, it
will only work if you're over 40. (1)

The trick to solving physics problems is to recognize the form of the equation; the trick to
solving your life is to know the form of the conflict.

Maron was having a mid-life crisis, which is always of the form: "will I do anything useful
with the rest of my life?" Note the emphasized "always." There is no alternative question.

Typically, people misinterpret the mid-life crisis as, "I'm 45 years old and I've never done X"
where X equals: blondes; car collecting; skydiving, a book, loved, learned Italian. And while
these things are enjoyable, and will bring the person happiness of varying amounts, they
don't solve the crisis because the crisis isn't about doing things but about running out of
time. "That was fun," you say as she drives back to Wellesley, but then you glance at the
calendar and it says you're still 45. There are only two things that will make that 45 less
painful, and one of them is alcohol.

All the maneuvers indicative of a mid-life crisis-- younger women, sportscars, new hobbies,
new careers, new looks-- are easily interpreted as new beginnings to help you trick yourself
that the clock has been rolled back. (That these things do, in fact, make you slightly
younger is not here the point.)

So other than alcohol, what answers the question, "Will I do anything useful with the rest of
my life?" The key to navigating this stage is to understand that the word "useful" has a
very specific definition and can only be fulfilled through limited ways: it has to serve the
next generation.
I can see you rolling your eyes. (2) This isn't touchy-feely nonsense; this is how humans
were built, no different than they were built to see Roy through Biv or to find the absence of
eyeballs uncanny. It explains why happy people still go through this; why making millions
of dollars doesn't solve this; why having kids, being celebrated or even famous all fail, not
because these are intrinsically "bad" but because they do not specificallyfulfill the human
necessity to believe it is useful to the next generation.

Most people get through this by raising kids (not just having them), teaching them things,
"getting them into college," passing on the culture. The more you feel responsible to this
process the easier mid-life will be. Nor does it require active or even good parenting; it is
an internal conceptualization of your life, rather than any external activity. Not changing
what you do, but how you thinks about it. Though it sounds like a cognitive trick, it is as
simple as not saying, "I want to get rich" and instead saying, "I want to get rich so my
family has a good life." To emphasize, this is not about the comparative morality of wealth
vs. poverty, but the inclusion of the clause "so that" by which the narcissism is dissolved.
(Yes, this means one could fool themselves into thinking they are "useful," thus passing
through the crisis with not having accomplished anything.)

Maron, however, doesn't have kids. Other options:

1. Become someone's "mentor." You can unload a lot of that rage if you feel valuable, and
giving of your wisdom and experience serves the dual function of confirming your identity (I
am the guy who..) and connecting with someone else in some meaningful way. (E.g. the
ex-player who goes into coaching.) (3)

2. Become everyone's "mentor." This is the route that saved Maron's life.

Broke, defeated and career-less, I started doing a podcast in that very garage where I was planning my
own demise... I started to feel better about life, comedy, creativity, community. I started to understand
who I was by talking to other comics and sharing it with you. I started to laugh at things again. I was
excited to be alive. Doing the podcast and listening to comics was saving my life.

The mistake is to think it is the fame that saved his life. Maron might not be sure what,
exactly, he is giving 20 million downloads that is of value, but he knows it must be
something, which is why being more famous isn't helping, say, any of the Real Housewives
from suicide by collagen injection, but an aging ex-football hero can get a patent extension
as a sports commentator. Maybe it's the comedy, or the insight, or the perspective-- what
specifically it is doesn't matter, just that he feels as though it is something he is giving
others. If Maron had simply been given a check for $20 million dollars to perform one last
show and then obligated to disappear, he would have happily taken the money and
eventually killed himself, if not with a gun, then with

with internet porn, booze, pills, weed, blow, hookers, hangers on, sad angry girls we can't get out of our
room, twitter trolls and broken relationships.

III.

Unrelated, but a great: Louis CK, on the Opie and Anthony show, relates this story:

I'm at the Comedy Cellar, and I make this 9/11 joke. Basically, I was talking about how when you're in a
marriage, you always feel like you're doing something wrong, in trouble for something. So the joke is
I'm in a hotel, and my wife calls, crying, and I'm thinking, what the fuck did I do now? Did she find a
sex phone bill? So I say, "what's wrong?" and she just cries, and finally she says, "turn on the TV" and I
see the planes crashing into the towers. And my first thought is, "Yay! Phew! I'm not in trouble, it was
just thousands of people getting killed."

So I tell this joke in the Cellar, and some guy just stands up and says, "that, that is not funny," and he
stomps out.

Later on I'm upstairs talking to Marc Maron, and I tell him this story, and I'm telling him how much I
hate it when people choose their one thing to be offended. All night I'm doing rape jokes and racial jokes
and he has no problem, but this is the one thing he decides goes to far. How narcissistic this guy must be
to think that he's allowed to decide that what offends him is what should be off limits.

So Marc looks at me and says, "dude, are you insane? He's the narcissist? You just told the most
narcissistic joke in history, about how relieved you were that thousands of people died just because it got
you off the hook with your wife..."

--------

1. When a 20 year old says, "why is he famous?! For what? I hate that guy?" It's normal.
As you get older, you learn accept the unrelatedness of people's successes to your own. "I
still hate him, but it's got nothing to do with me." It is a mental disease when a middle
aged man reacts with rage to the success of Kim Kardashian, however underserving she
may actually be.

2. "I hate these 'solutions' because they aren't really solutions," you say. "It's noble and
all, but I need specific advice that can help me." That's the narcissism. You don't want the
solution to be "it's about the next generation" because what you want the answer to be is
about you-- your own fulfillment, your own happiness, your own safety, your own sanity. All
of these are defenses, and none of them will work, viz Marc Maron.

To use an example from The Matrix: The Oracle "lied" to Neo when she said he wasn't the
One, but she had to lie in order for Neo to believe that Morpheus was more important than
he and to risk his life to save him; only by making this sacrifice, by being willing to exist for
someone else, could he actually become the One. Had he "known" he was the One, and
then let Morpheus die so that he, the One, could live, then by the atemporal nature of
existential logic, he wouldn't have been the One after all.

3. This is how you could help someone else with this kind of "mid-life depression:" making
them feel valuable in a consistent way. If this is where, say, your father finds himself--
empty nest or career gone flat-- regularly soliciting his opinion on things he considers
himself an expert in can help remind him of his value. The point is not that he needs to
accomplish something, the point is that he needs to feel he is valuable to you accomplishing
something.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

Finding Existential Solace In A Pink Tied Psycho

unamerican

Forbes: "Stock Traders Are Psychopaths"--

... a University of St. Gallen study that shows stock market traders display similarities to certified
psychopaths. The study... compares decisions made by 27 equity, derivative and forex traders in a
computer simulation against an existing study of 24 psychopaths in high-security hospitals in Germany.
Not only do the traders match their counterparts, but, as Der Speigel [sic] succinctly puts it, the
"stockbrokers' behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths."
Der Spiegel:

Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor
had the same car, "and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves."

The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.

Hold on. The study compared institutionalized psychopaths to a group of German traders
and found the traders are worse psychopaths, with a "penchant for destruction." Umm, how
about the more obvious explanation" they're German. What? Too soon? Hello? Is this
thing on?

The preposterousness of my comment is only slightly less than the overall idiocy of this
study and the reporting around it. Following a rigorous objective analysis, the fact that the
traders were German is a more plausible explanation for their baseball bat smashing
behavior than their employment as traders. I realize the institutionalized psychopaths were
also German, but the presence of mental illness is itself a greater confounding factor, i.e. in
a study of psychopathy, the general order of important factors can be approximated:

mental illness > species of pet > race > employment > favorite movie > phone number

in other words: this study is stupid, which is also a rigorous objective analysis.

But the existence of confounding factors did not stop nearly everyone from turning up the
volume of their own cognitive noise:

NYMag:

With rogue traders all the rage, a Swiss university study found that brokers "behaved more
egotistically..." The study's co-author Thomas Noll said, "Naturally one can't characterize the traders
as deranged..." Particularly shocking for Noll was the fact that the bankers... Noll said it was as if the
stockbrokersrealize...

Of course I can't find the study anywhere, which is suspicious, but not half as suspicious as
the reporting. Are they "stock market traders" or are they stockbrokers? Why did Forbes
include the above American Psycho poster? Because he's a psycho? But he's not a trader,
he was an investment banker. Do these results extend to everyone in a tie or anyone who
deals with securities? How about the baby in the Etrade ad?

German
I'd say this was an example of the media manipulating the study to suit their needs, but it
appears the researchers themselves were pretty liberal with the nomenclature and pretty
conservative with the N=.

I'm fairly confident that a study of comparing 27 idiots to 24 other idiots done by,
apparently, idiots, most likely explicitly done for the mass consumption of more idiots is not
a study worth repeating, but you can be sure it will be repeated many, many more times
and eventually form the foundation for future research not to mention conventional wisdom
for the next 25 years. They don't really care who or why someone is a psycho, so long as
you get the hate pointed in the right general direction.

II.

Interesting how you spin it:

Forbes: "The study, authored by MBA students Pascal Scherrer and Thomas Noll"

HuffPo: "The research, led by forensics expert Pascal Scherrer and prison administrator
Thomas Noll"

III.

Here's a happy video:

I like to watch these kinds of videos when I have to get psyched up to wrestle a crocodile or
storm a castle.
Though narcissism demands the right to self-identify, narcissists are often unable to do so
because they don't know what it is they want to be. Who am I? What are the rules of my
identity? So people look for shortcuts, like modeling oneself after another existing character.
But the considerably more regressive maneuver is to define yourself in opposition to things.
"I can't tell you what I want for dinner," says the toddler, "but I am certain I don't want
that. Or that. Or that. And if you put that slop in front of me I swear to God you will wear
it."
Now you can go through life floating, letting hate, the Dark Side Of The Force, the easy
path, guide your reactions. It seems certain that you have a fully formed identity because
of the magnitude of your passions, emotions, and responses, but you can only operate in
response, never first, never with commitment or vision. I know the young lady with the
mace in her eyes thinks she is driven by love, but that doesn't really come through here,
does it? Her hate defines her. "I'm anti-establishment." We get it.
What do the protestors want? Can they articulate it meaningfully, not in platitudes or
"people over profits" or "more fair income redistribution" soundbites? They can't tell you
because they don't know. They can, however, yell at you what they don't like, and the
louder they yell it the more they hear it themselves.

Nothing is expected to be accomplished, it is all for branding. The enemy of the day is "Wall
Street" but that's not an actual thing, and the cops they are so earnestly hoping will assault
them aren't their enemies either, they are proxies for Wall Street which is a proxy for
something else that I am going to politely refrain from suggesting is their father. This time
they have a camera. None of that matters, so long as they have successfully identified
themselves to themselves, a little cover from the incessant bitter winds of existential
freedom. Marijuana will take care of the rest.

IV.

The protestors didn't realize they were themselves bit players in someone else's movie, the
media's movie, which offers this clip and others like it so that you, the viewer, can easily
define yourself by who you hate. "That's what the ratings said you wanted," studio execs
say, perplexed. "Were we wrong?" No, no, you were right. Carry on.

If I hate the protestors, I'm on Wall Street's side, and vise versa, no further branding, let
alone thought, is necessary. And now you have a quick way to decide if you hate me.

[The market is] going to fall pretty hard.... Investors and the big money, the smart money... they don't
buy this rescue plan.... they know the market is toast. They know the stock market is finished. The Euro,
as far as they're concerned, they don't really care. They're moving their money away to safer assets like
Treasury bonds, 30-year bonds, and the U.S. Dollar. So it's not going to work.

And:

For most traders, we don't really care that much how they're going to fix the economy, how they're
going fix the whole situation. Our job is to make money from it... I have a confession which is: I go to
bed every night and I dream of another recession. I dream of another moment like this. Why? Because
people don't seem to remember but the ['30s depression] wasn't just about a market crash. There were
some people who were prepared to make money from that crash... It's an opportunity.
This is not the time for wishful thinking that the government is going to sort things out. Governments
don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.

Wow! Did he really say that?

But what did he say that's so shocking, that we haven't heard a million times before? Why
is he so believable? One lone trader? What does he know that we don't?
America loves to believe information if it comes by an accent, the "otherness" of the
speaker implies they have both impartiality and additional information, hence Nouriel
Roubini.
If you're watching it it's for you, and how many of you watch the financial news of the BBC?
Zero. And yet we have this clip, submitted for your consideration. Submitted everywhere,
from the NYT to Salon, which actually titled its article: "The rogue trader: Crazier than a
psychopath." Wow, wildman, not even close. So while the trader is an American he is the
"other" speaking to a British audience which we get to spy on; and this information carries
greater weight because it is delivered over there, via the BBC, not via Fox News to the
evangelicals of Nebraska.
After the initial panic about what he said, the controversy morphed to whether this is a
hoax, whether this guy is part of a performance art troupe that tries to impersonate and
thus humiliate capitalists. This controversy is wildly besides the point: what's the
difference? The entire theatre of this clip is a hoax. What difference does it make if he is
an actor or a real trader? How do you think the BBC found this guy in the first place? They
don't pre-interview at the BBC? They just wing it?
The media has chosen the easy path because that's what you want, we want to be told that
traders et al are psychopaths and cops are Wall Street heavies and white women are
entitled jerks and this guy's a hoax/for real, all so that the rest of us can decide which side
of that invented controversy we are on so that we remember who we think we are. "I hate
something!" says the person who is out of ideas. About as nuanced as a mace shot to the
face, which happens right in the the first episode. You can't be subtle when the bitter winds
are blowing.

------

Related:
Are conservatives psychopaths?
Protestors Get Maced

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

The Contagion Is The Solution

wait... why can't I talk to anyone?

Seen Contagion yet? Here's a simple question: can you name one character?
Not the actor's name, the character's name. Take your time. Nothing?

A=A, and character driven movies, the kind Soderbergh is famous for, are supposed to be
about characters.

Maybe this isn't a character driven movie. Maybe it's a documentary, aTraffic-style story
about "what would people do if?"

But the movie doesn't depict them doing anything you wouldn't predict (die; panic; kill each
other; attempt to profit; mourn; protect their own at all costs) or in a new way. So
characters you're not emotionally involved in, doing nothing unusual... what's this all about?

I.

This is the opening scene:

Gwyneth is not driving, but is still holding a phone, unnaturally, with her left hand. Is she a
leftie? No. Did she have a stroke? No. Look closely, she's married. Two ways to go with
this: either this is a disaster movie about grief, or a disaster movie about about punishment.
Well, she's calling from an airport and the guy on the phone isn't her husband. The hell you
say?! That's right, she's having-- and this is a quote-- a "layover."

Soderbergh obeys the Rule Of Thirds

So maybe this is like a horror movie: sexual sin= horrible punishment; a subtext which is
repeated later as her husband, Matt Damon, tries to protect his pretty-but-not-hot
(=survives) teen daughter from her urges to be with her who-knows-if-he's-infected
boyfriend. (The script which I did not find on The Pirate Bay maybe says her name is Jory,
BTW, but the audience doesn't care.) Is it the virulently contagious virus Damon's worried
about? Sure it is. That's why he pulls out a shotgun when he catches them after 15-900
minutes of close contact frolicking in the back yard. Jory looks flushed. He finally relents to
the inevitability of penis and vagina at the end of the movie when boyfriend shows up at
their house wearing the vaccination bracelet. Safe sex. Matt Damon smiles as they dance
with each other, then walks away, I assume into oblivion. That's what single dads are good
for, cuckolding and pass interference, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Back to the inception. Gwyneth is infected but she doesn't know it, and is shown partying in
a Chinese casino, blowing on men's hands, and forgetting her sin phone at the bar, which a
Ukranian model (=blonde harlot) returns to her, thereby ensuring all sexualized blondes are
punished.

But not before their sins are visited on the son.

And being an American, you say, "wow, they killed a kid in a mainstream movie?" Quite
gruesomely, I might add, but don't worry, you'll feel nothing. He wasn't really a kid, he was
merely an extension of her (he was only Damon's step-kid, making Matt twice a cuckold),
and he needs to die to free Matt Damon to return to his real daughter.

When a disaster strikes, the answer to "why?" is usually of the form, "endocytosis of the
virus into the cell" or "plate tectonics and subduction zones" which is as satisfying as an
imaginary bottle of rum. So we convert it to a narrative, a story, yes like a movie and yes
like 9/11, to which the answer is always 100% the same: punishment for guilt. The only
question is whose.
Gwyneth is Patient Zero, she is the cause of the outbreak, and if this was an ordinary movie
about ordinary sin her backstory would be enough, it says, "this is a story about individual
guilt." Oh, look: her lover was the very first person to die in Chicago.

But it's a "subtle" political piece like the kinds played on TV all day on 9/11/2011, in which
the Towers fell not because terrorists flew planes into them but because of America's
incessant meddling in the Middle East; the same meddling which, educated people all know,
had nothing to do with the Arab Spring at all. So this is a story about collective guilt, about
how we are all responsible.

If that's the story we're going to see, her sins have to be made general enough and
collective enough to justify a global catastrophe. Hence, though she's blonde and an
unrepentant adulteress, she's also an executive for a multinational mining company that
destroys the rainforests. Now it makes sense why 2M people had to die.

Closing the narrative loop, the last scene is the big reveal, how it all happened: we see
Gwyneth's company destroy a rainforest displacing a bat which infects a pig which gets
cooked at the casino Gwyneth is in, infecting her. Justice is served, madame. Chef
recommends.

II.

The ordinary way to read contagion/natural disaster movies is as an expression of collective

guilt, what did we do to deserve this? Those who survive at the end are either those who
don't really share in the collective guilt (e.g. natives, poor, women, minorities, and, in this
movie's case, the CDC janitor's son) or those who "change."

That's the ordinary way. The reason this reading is wrong is that this movie wasn't made in
1376, but in 2011. Look out your window: those bipeds are narcissists. Narcissism wants
no part of individual guilt, so it for sure as hell isn't going to take the fall for collective guilt.
Collective guilt is created as a defense against individual guilt. The individual unconscious
does not want any part of "we", especially if "we" did something and got caught. The
unconscious only cares about "I".

Gwyneth Paltrow presents us with an interesting test of our psychology. Let's see how good
you are at thinking in binary: when Judgment Day comes, will God judge her more harshly
for being an adulteress or an executive in a mining company?

Oh, you're not religious? Then you are superstitious (-- "No I'm not at all, I'm just kind of
OCD." Is that what the kids are calling it now?--) which means you don't deal in
judgments but in root causes. Ok: why did 2M people have to die? Was it because she's an
adulteress, or because she's a mining company executive? Pick one. You sure? Now why
did her son have to die?

III.

Not knowing the characters makes it easy to focus on collective guilt, which is really
someone else's guilt that you're benefiting by pretending to take on. Not knowing "Beth
Emhoff" means you don't have to parse her individual guilt.

This movie could have been a straight "Beth is horny and she is punished" movie, i.e. an
80s slasher film. But this generation demands a defense against that kind of subversive
thinking. So Beth's guilt is minimized in favor of featuring examples of collective guilt.
Who caused 9/11? Nineteen two dimensional characters we don't know the names of. Ah,
so 9/11 is payback for the sins of "The United States Of America" which means no one is
looking to punish you specifically, because it's not yourfault. It's "our" fault. Which means
it's Bush's fault. Which means we're all off the hook now that he's gone.

But maybe taking responsibility for our collective sins is a noble, selfless act? No. The ego
will do anything to protect itself, including publicly accept guilt for something that causes it
to experience very little actual guilt. "We caused global warming!" Really? It was you?
You drink yourself to sleep because you burn too many fossil fuels? You can't look a person
in the eye because you drive an SUV?

IV.

Even before the virus kills a lot of people, people begin to panic. This is facilitated by the
internet, played by Jude Law, who blogs about corporate greed, "the CDC is lying to you",
and a holistic cure (forsythia) that Big Pharma of course doesn't want you to know about.
(Also, it doesn't work.) But people start raiding pharmacies looking for it anyway. (1)

The virus, in theory, does not discriminate; but the movie makes it clear that information
very much does discriminate. When Dr. Laurence Fishburne and his team at the CDC figure
out that Chicago is next, he retreats to his office and secretly calls his girlfriend, "get out of
Chicago, but tell no one."

But wait, there's a janitor standing behind him. "How much of that call did you hear?" asks
Fishburne. "We've all got people," the janitor replies.

Which is further exemplified by what Fishburne's girlfriend does next: she talks to her
people. "You have to promise to keep this a secret..." And then that people posts about it
on facebook. We've all got people, and they all panic.(2)
 but
first, some shopping

Information is the parallel virus, but that is not a flippant comparison. Totalitarians of the
world, take note: in the movie, information the public has is always bad for them. I do not
mean the information is wrong. Jude Law's info about forsythia is wrong and thus
troublesome; but the CDC's announcements about the virus are all accurate and stuff you'd
insist you have the right/need to know. Yet that information is irrelevant. Having this
information, are you cured faster? Are you better able to protect yourself than the obvious
intuitive maneuvers?

The single reason to offer official information (and the movie distinguishes between
"official"=valid=useless information disseminated via TV and unofficial=false=dangerous
information traveling via internet) is that it sedates people; it is never to benefit them.
Which is why it is more important to the perception of safety to keep the electricity going
(which they do) than the food going (which they don't.) "We've identified the virus, it is
called MEV-1." Oh, so that's what it is. Now we're getting somewhere.

All media is state run media, especially when it's not.

V.

A case study of individual vs. collective guilt.

Cobb's wife in Inception, Mal, in this movie plays a WHO researcher who travels to China to
identify the source of the outbreak. Because of CCTV camera footage, she is able to
observe Gwyenth infecting various other people, and the outbreak can be tracked.

Because Mal is beautiful, she is most likely be going to die. However, she's a) not American
and b) a brunette with an atrocious haircut; which means she's not part of a) the collective
guilt and b) probably not carrying any individual guilt. She could pull out of this.

Right after she and the Chinese researchers discover how the virus spread, she does
something very, very important: she prepares to leave China. She's done with China, China
is only important as a source of information and now of no consequence. There's no way
those hominids could find the cure, and, anyway, there are dying people in the world she
has to get to.

The Chinese researchers therefore kidnap her to a rural village and send a ransom note: if
the WHO wants to see her alive again, they have send a crate of vaccines.

There are the two guilts: her individual guilt is her aloof cosmopolitanism, and her collective
guilt is the WHO not caring about China. In order for this story to play out correctly,
individual guilt must be minimized and collective guilt maximized. 1. Mal has to repent. 2.
The WHO, as the collective guilt, has to take on her individual guilt, i.e. get more guilty.

1. The next time we see her, 45 minutes later-- she is in a makeshift, open air "classroom"
teaching the Chinese children how to read. She is perfectly happy. I'll remind you that she
has been kidnapped. In case the redemption isn't obvious enough, they club you with it: a
lingering wide shot of the "classroom" reveals a huge cross on the roof. Note that
Soderbergh's name is Soderbergh.

2. When the ransom is paid (crate of vaccines) and Mal is freed, she discovers that the
WHO tricked the Chinese: the vaccines were placebos. Horrified, she runs back to the
village, and the message is clear: no one cares about the little people, especially if they are
Chinese. So a lot of people must die, but none of them Mal.

VI.

Another case study:

Dr. Fishburne gets his vaccine, but instead of giving it to himself he gives it to the janitor's
son. In the language of narcissism, that act makes him a hero, and thus guarantees his
survival. In the language of individual guilt, this is repenting for choosing "his people" over
society.

Collective guilt takes on different meanings in different cultures. In America, collective guilt
is always capitalist guilt.

Fishburne's act is a kind of message to global capitalists, "everyone has people they care
about, your interests aren't more important than the working man's." Not explicit in the
movie is the secret to many vaccines: herd immunity, i.e. unvaccinated Dr. Fishburne can
benefit from other people's vaccinations. This is a metaphor for the popular refrain that
global capitalists actually improve their own position when they help the poor because the
poor will buy the goods that make them rich.
Now this is no longer an ethical question, "what is the moral thing to do?" but a cost/benefit
one: "how can you maximize the benefit?" Which is exactly the way you'd want the question
framed if you were a global capitalist. But in so doing one can avoid the nasty business of
taking a moral stance, it frames everything in terms of consequences, comparisons of
utilitarian benefit-- and consequently including individual guilt, which is the whole point of
doing this. Was Gwyneth wrong to cheat? No, she's not a bad person, it's complicated. Is it
wrong to loot? No, as long as you don't enjoy it.

It's interesting to see which position, moral or utilitarian, the movie chooses, because the
movie is a reflection of it's audience's preference for one over the other. What do we want to
be true in 2011?

The position the movie offers is this: Dr. Fishburne gives the boy the vaccination, but keeps
the vaccination bracelet.

VII.

Implied in every disaster movie is "starting over," but starting over isn't the consequence,
but the premise: "in order to start over and do it right this time, we need a catastrophe."

Now recall what is destroyed in a disaster: the unrepentant sinners and those who share in
the collective guilt. What would starting over look like? It would be some recalibration of
modernity. Where did modernity go wrong?

It went wrong with Patient Zero. Now our original Gwyenth problem is reversed: Gwyenth
is not only an executive of an evil mining company, she's also a modern woman. Which
means she can cheat when she wants and suffer no guilt. Yikes. As much as the image of a
banana tree getting plowed by a bulldozer symbolizes a particular aspect of modernity, a
blonde woman guiltlessly getting plowed by some other bulldozer is another aspect of
modernity-- though not the cheating itself, but what she is able to think while she cheats.
"She made mistakes, but she loved you very much," Matt Damon is told at the funeral
home. That's true, and that's what makes it precisely so terrifying: Gwyneth had the
physical freedom to cheat, and the emotional freedom to cheat and simultaneously still love
her husband. A man understands a woman can be duplicitous, but the expectation is
there's still an objective truth to her cheating: if she cheats, she likes him, not me. How
can it be she likes him and me? How can she be two people simultaneously? What am I
supposed to do with that when she comes home? That kind of existential freedom is to
much to allow women to bear, and in any post-crisis world the first thing society does is take
a few steps back into the safety of conventional roles. It happened after WWII and it will
happen after the Great Recession, and everyone will think they made the individual choice
to do it. After the Contagion has passed, Matt Damon's daughter's first order of business is
to express her happiness and love through the last holdout of happily accepted gender
roles: the high school prom.

VIII.

The preference of collective guilt over individual guilt suggests a comforting narcissistic
arrogance: if this global catastrophe is, after all, our fault, then it is also under our control.
We can stop it. That's why these disaster movies are very rarely about some catastrophe
that isn't our fault: that would be too raw depiction of our existential dread. We need the
defenseof collective guilt to explain inexplicable events and offer a path to immortality on
earth (if we act a certain way all will be well). This is especially important for narcissists
who, not able to feel individual guilt, lack a redemptive path towards immortality after
earth. The belief of control over the earth is all they have left.

It is the same narcissism that says, "we're destroying nature," which is a defense against
being merely another part of nature. That it is a fact that we are destroying nature is
secondary; the point is to believe it so that nature becomes a bit player in the movie of
human exceptionalism. That it is a fact that nature is a bit player in the movie of human
exceptionalism is secondary; the point is to believe it so that... and etc, until you
individually have found meaning in the world.

You might think that individual guilt would be infinitely more amenable to modification than
collective guilt-- if it's "your" fault, all you have to change is you. But try telling Gwyneth
she shouldn't sleep with that guy, that it's wrong. "It's complicated," she'll tell you. Fixing
"you", including the sins-- is nigh impossible, because those sins are you, the only way to
stop doing them isn't to stop doing them but to change who you are. "You just don't
understand the whole story" you'll explain in ten million sentences that say nothing. The
part that I don't understand, of course, is how important it is to do do it to keep your
identity intact. But I do understand. That's why I wrote this.

The trick to understanding disaster movies, and life, is to realize that the reason bad things
happen is that we partly guilty and partly wronged, fully at the mercy of other people who
use us and manipulate us; but that we still retain almost infinite power to alter reality and
prevent bad things from happening. And the reason that that is the reason is that the
alternative is there is no reason.

If 2M people die, you can be 100% certain that someone will find CCTV footage of a
hateable adulteress destroying a rainforest, and that she'll get what's coming to you.

---

1. The media's preferred symbol for the disintegration of public order is looting, i.e the
opposite of shopping. When Matt Damon goes into the looted supermarket, he's distinct
from the other looters because he isn't enjoying it, suggesting he wasn't a big shopper,
either. Consumerism was never in his nature, nor sexuality, as evidenced by two ex-wives,
which is why he is the only person in the entire movie who is naturally immune to the virus.
(Another note: in disaster movies, the ability to loot is what separates us from the animals.
Once there's nothing left to loot, the people are then depicted as marauding cavemen,
unless they are reorganized into a strict proto-capitalist economy. Welcome to Bartertown.)

2. Note that this must be in 2011: it didn't seem odd even to me that 51 year old medical
doctor Fishburne has a girlfriend and no kids. In fact, the only character you see married in
this movie is Gwyneth Paltrow, and you know how that works out.
 SEPTEMBER 11, 2011
We Are All Skyscrapers Now

which picture can you see?

On September 11, 2001 I was nowhere doing nothing while 2000 people were dying almost
simultaneously.

A week later we had the Anthrax attacks, which, like the 9/11 attacks, have never been
solved. Whoever the Antraxer was, he did manage to infect one of the 9/11 hijackers, and
so he stands as the only person to have at least injured one of the terrorists.

That was also when we got the text scroll at the bottom of CNN and the definitive end of
actionable information from CNN.

This is something I wrote a few weeks after 9/11. It is what it is. A lot has happened since.

If the TV is any guide, 9/11 is a dramatic miniseries about two buildings collapsing on
firefighters, with the premiere being brought to us commercial free. Gotta build an
audience.

There's enormous coverage, but no news. None of this is news, it is drama, portraits of
courage and sadness. Last phone calls between loved ones, "the last time I saw him was
when...", "when I saw the first Tower fall I..."

And firefighters. Lots of firefighters. America wants its real life heroes unarmed and
unthreatening.

Lots of sadness, but no anger. No one on TV is angry? The Towers didn't fall, they were
kicked in the face. How many politicians do I have to watch cry on TV? STOP CRYING. I
already know it's sad. Don't tell me we are resilient, don't tell me we'll go on, are there
people worried they won't go on? Show me the country has some men in it, show me that
we aren't five year olds.

But we are. Cry on TV and people will think you're sensitive, but bang a fist on the podium
and you're unstable. "He can't control his emotions." What?
According to the TV, the real events of 9/11 happened not on the 95th floor, but on the
ground floor. I've been looking in the wrong place.

People tell me that this coverage isn't about the terrorists, it's about the aftermath, the
victims; that there are other shows about the terrorists.

Separating the TV shows this way fosters a separation between the cause and the effect; we
are focusing only on the effect, because it is very hard for us to get our heads around the
cause. In doing this we are repackaging this event into a natural disaster. Something that
we have no power over, no way to prevent, but something that must by necessity bring us
together in our grief and our loss, and something that we must get past. No sense in
describing why earthquakes happen, so let's delve into the victims' stories.
Observe that the media has unilaterally decided that no American will ever again see the
images of the planes being slammed into the Towers. "Come on, you've seen it enough
times, nothing to be gained from that. Here's a firefighter."

I'm told anger serves no useful purpose. But sadness isn't going to prevent this from
happening again, sadness isn't going to restructure the planet so that people don't want to
do these things. You might say anger won't either, but I'll take my chances.

They say the hijackers were armed only with box cutters. If that's true, that tells me a lot
about how they perceive Americans: they expected no resistance. Not even from the pilots.
Would they have brought boxcutters to El-Al or Aeroflot hijacking?

When Timothy Mcveigh and Terry Nichols blew up the OK City Federal building, the media
went right for the throat, it wasn't a natural disaster but an violent attack to which we
immediately ascribed blame. And they were free to speculate: right wingers, militias,
neo-nazis. But 9/11 is different, we don't know what to do with it so we do nothing with it.
Say "they attacked us" and then off to the victims. You know the names of both OKC
bombers, but you can't name one hijacker other than Mohammed Atta, who is the
designated ringleader because his is the only name we can pronounce.

We don't even know what to call the attacks, so we call it by its date: "9/11." Just another
day that we'll remember where we were when. "That was such a sad and scary day."
Yeah.

"We are all Americans now," announced Le Monde, with no understanding at all. How can
they sympathize with how we feel when we ourselves don't know what we feel? This attack
happened because we're not all Americans, not even us Americans. Just a group of
individuals now slowly distancing ourselves. "I mean, I sort of knew him, I'd seen him
around and all, but we weren't close or anything..."

"We are all Americans" means to the writer at Le Monde: "we could be next." That's all he
cares about. He's right on that count, I guess, dead right-- the next attack has to happen in
a different country if it is to have global impact.

If Le Monde wanted accuracy, it would have announced that we are all skyscrapers now,
each of us standing mightily and individually, who is taller? who is greater? Living in
proximity but not in connection. Waiting to be knocked down.

And when it happens to someone, our explanations will really be about why it didn't happen
to us: well, that skyscraper wasn't built right and that skyscraper was too tall, too proud.
What happened to that skyscraper has nothing to do with me, I'm different, I'm better, and
besides, why would anyone hate me?

Because you're a skyscraper, dummy.

When the towers fell and the pulverized remains of people who might have been your
friends poured through the dust into the streets of lower New York, what did you feel?
Which did you blame, America or Israel? Oh, both. When someone asks you now about
9/11, do you answer "I am sad" or "I am angry"? Or do you externalize your answer and
put it in the past tense, as if the emotion was something that came at you from the outside,
"it was sad", or "I felt angry"? Are you not sad or angry anymore? How long did it take you
to get over the worst attack on America in history? A day, a week? How long before
"cooler heads prevailed"? Do you know people who you think "overreacted" to the
slaughter of 3000 Americans? As others dance while the bodies are excavated in NYC, are
you able to connect with the story? How do you dialogue? Maybe you should cope on this
for a while, until your cooler heads prevail. Go shopping. Have a nap.

I don't want to cope. I want to see the videos of the planes being flown into the Towers. If
we allow ourselves to choose the path of sadness, then nothing has been accomplished,
everyone died for nothing. It will have been nothing more than an earthquake.

I don't want to get past this. Nor do I want it to get past me.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2011

 SEPTEMBER 7, 2011
How To Be Mean To Your Kids
 stabilize the price, whatever it takes

A reader sent me a link to an article written by psychiatrist Steve Balt, How To Retire At Age
27, in which he describes a typical patient in his practice, a 27 year old named Keisha:

During the interview, she told me, "I just got my SSDI so I'm retired now." I asked her to elaborate. "I'm
retired now," she said [boldface in the original]. "I get my check every month, I just have to keep
seeing a doctor." When I asked why she's on disability, she replied, "I don't know, whatever they wrote,
bipolar, mood swings, panic attacks, stuff like that." She had been off medications for over two months
(with no apparent symptoms); she said she really "didn't notice" any effect of the drugs, except the
Valium 20 mg per day, which "helped me settle down and relax."

I misspoke when I said "typical patient." She's slightly unusual for his inner city population,
because she actually graduated high school and even took nursing assistant classes.

She dropped out, however, because "I got stressed out." She tried looking for other work but then found
out from a family member that she could "apply for disability."

A psychiatrist and a lawyer later and she's awarded a pension of $700 a month. No
retirement party, though. And she'll have to buy her own watch.

The rest of his post is a thoughtful back and forth about what constitutes disability, and
whether a) giving them this easy way out isn't actually doing a disservice to the human
being in front of you; b) whether these false diagnoses aren't artificially inflating disease
prevalence estimates; c) the extent to which it contributes to bureaucracy (and cost.)

II.

So when he emailed me the link to the article, How To Retire At Age 27," the reader asked
me a tongue-in-cheek question: "Now why didn't I think of that twenty years ago?"

Thing is, he probably did think of that, or some brief fantasy of something like it, but figured
he could make much more money doing something else. Therein we have the problem:
Evidently, this woman Keisha doesn't think she could make substantially more than
$700/month doing something else, so regardless of whether she is truly disabled or not, her
conception of her opportunities is seriously limited. That's social policy problemo numero
uno.

Note that she even took classes to be a certified nursing assistant, and still doesn't think it's
worth it. So either CNAs don't get paid enough (over SSI) to merit giving up all your free
time to work with the belligerent poop machines at the hospital, or else SSI pays too much
to make that decision even worth considering. There are no other possibilities. Choosing
between those without sparking riots is social policy problemo numero dos.

Then there's a subtle semiotic issue. She calls it "retired." Not disabled, but retired, which
means in the language of social policy she has understood that she has somehow
"worked"/contributed to society to merit some retirement benefits, and also tacitly accepts
she's not unable to work, rather that she's done working. So what could she have done to
merit retirement? The answer probably is nothing. Right? But no one has tried to correct
her thinking about this because, well, it just isn't worth arguing with some unemployed
black woman at a psychiatrist's office because you'll be branded uncaring and racist, not
just by her but by some other busybody with a progressive agenda, free time, and a
government/media job. You will also likely get punched. Besides, you and anyone who
values work as a moral good and an end in itself don't have time to explain it to an unwilling
Keisha, you actually have to get back to work. So she's left with her comforting lies that go
unchallenged-- bellay that: they are encouraged. That's social policy problemo numero
tres.

III.

But now we have to take three left turns to get at the truth.

There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say
what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able
to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would
be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office?
Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like
Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to
tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI
application form asks that exact question.

You will observe the Keisha does not even have the enthusiasm to know what is written on
the most important economic documents of her life. "I don't know, bipolar, panic attacks,
whatever they put on there." She can't be bothered to handle those papers, someone else
is in charge of that. How attentive will she be to the frier? McDonalds doesn't want to find
out.

That specific issue reveals an important bias and misunderstanding America has when it
talks about employment. Yes, there is an issue about people wanting to work but the other
issue is that the global economy is too quick and efficient to tolerate your idiotic car troubles
or your imbecilic grandmother's death or your moronic lack of child care (cue Scandinavia)
or, and mostly, your stupid health. The economy was a Ferrari and now it's only a Honda,
but either way, not much time for absences and no time at all for Keisha's learning curve.
Keisha isn't just unemployed, she is completely unemployable. We can argue whether auto
plants should pay $20/hr or $50/hr, but for certain there is no market for unskilled labor at
all. Let me correct another grand mistake of the politicians and the talking heads in the
media: this problem is likely to get much, much worse, not better, as the economy
improves. There are no typos in that sentence. Read it again.

The jobs employers would be willing to take a gamble on are jobs that pay too little for it to
be worth her showing up at all. Hence SSI. Sure, maybe you could work at Walmart for $7
an hour but they don't offer benefits so ultimately, what's the point? A rich guy may think
he pays his Mexican housekeeper good money, but the fact is if Juanita doesn't show up one
Tuesday morning he doesn't miss a step, which is why he was willing to hire her. You send
the suits to tell him he has to hire her legally, pay her wage taxes and offer her health
benefits and still take the risk she doesn't show up and he'll release the doberman on you
and just hire four high school kids to each work a block of two hours a month. Is that fine
with you? Then go see what Juanita's next step is.

All of this comes down to a very important point: the country's economy understands these
issues on an unconscious level, and it has created a system to absorb 10% of the
unemployment, i.e. pay them off so they don't riot, exactly like Saudi Arabia buys off its
people. Yes, America is a Petrostate, but instead of oil money it's T-bills. However, as is
evident throughout history, rich white people riot too, hell, they'll overthrow a King because
the rum prices fell too much or shoot a President because he wanted a third term; and
they'll for damn sure John Galt the Senate if they think poor people are getting free
handouts, so the system pretends to offer benefits based on medical disability, just as it
pretends on your behalf to be appalled by Mexican illegal immigration even as every
restaurant in Arizona employs illegals, and everyone knows it, including the politicians and
the Minutemen who eat at every restaurant in Arizona, not to mention California, not to
mention America. Dummy, the sign says "Authentic Mexican Food"--oh, never mind.

For fun, let me point that that another 10% of the unemployed in America are relabeled as
"incarcerated", so total you have a real rate of 15-20% unemployment, and this does not
include the unemployable who have been relabeled as "military personnel" thanks to two
endless wars, or those who manage ten hours a week at the Buy-n-Large who are relabeled
as employed and thus are of no consequence; all of which is good because if the
unemployment rate printed higher than "9%" the credit rating of the US would have to fall
to C-. "But you need at least a 3.0 in your major to graduate." There's your grade
inflation.

Psychiatry is the unsuspecting but intentional handmaiden of this process. Never once
thinking it was being pulled into a long con, it self-righteously accepted its grownup label as
"medical specialty" and began ostentatiously fighting for "mental health parity" and the
Medicaid funds that it thinks it deserves, "we care about patients, about people!" And it
comforted itself with the knowledge that 25 medications and nine academic journals must
signify they are scientists, which means that all my Foucaltian ranting couldn't possibly
apply to them. And yet, here we are. Dr. Balt is obviously earnest and even optimistic
when he tries to articulate cause and solution to these social issues, and he's to be
commended for seeing through the Fog Of Prozac; but, lamentably, he is too late for change
to come from within psychiatry. Note that-- and this is neither an exception nor a criticism
of him-- even though he sees this truth he cannot stop, he can't refuse to participate, and
neither can I, or the other psychiatrists who are eyeballs deep in a system none of us
conceived yet all of us are responsible for. The system has been vaccinated against dissent.

I can sense you pulling away from my abstractions, "that's all very clever and all that, but
how does it actually work in real life?" This is what I'm trying to tell you: it doesn't work in
real life. It only works in theory.
He closes, "Using psychiatric labels to help patients obtain taxpayers' money, unless
absolutely necessary and legitimate, is wasteful and dishonest." Maybe, but if you change
the system he will lose 100% of his "patients"; and never mind him, you do not want to
know how the system will relabel the patients when that happens, or who will be in charge
of that relabeling. I am sure he will not believe me. Fortunately for him, he will never
have to find out.

IV.

And this brings us to the essence of the problem, of all of the social policy problems that we
currently face. "How did this happen? How did it get so bad?" The answer is that it has
always been this bad. We didn't care.

Narcissism has been on a steady rise since the end of WWII and went parabolic in the
1980s; all social policies have to be understood in the context of that psychology, that
culture. Hence SSI isn't altruistic but narcissistic, its every (no sic) purpose was not to
serve others but to serve us.

Stop thinking of SSI as money. SSI isn't taxed, and if you recall the First Law of Harbors,
"taxation=representation": not taxing them is the same as not giving them representation.
So for $700/month they don't call you to account for all the rest of the money. "Yeah, but
don't they vote?" HA! You kill me. I meant actual representation: lobbyists.

As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and
Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of
us can go on with our lives. Which means that every unconscious force exists to keep this
state of affairs going until we no longer need it. And if that requires printing money or
releasing oil reserves to keep prices down or insisting there's a shortage of psychiatrists,
"how about some NPs?", so be it, because the system must be preserved, including and
especially at the expense of the future. It's a popular political refrain that Social Security
will soon be bankrupt, but that's meaninglessly obfuscating: it won't be around for the kids
when they grow up because it wasn't for them, it was for the people who were around
when it was conceived.​ There was never any way it could last forever, no credible way
of funding it-- especially the moment productivity went parabolic compared to wages.
 you don't have to be a labor theorist to
recall what else went parabolic at the same time

Don't say that taxes needed to be higher because it was never about funding it, it was
always about temporarily buying their apathy. Truth be told, it stayed solvent longer than it
was supposed to-- one of the benefits of having a reserve currency, aka a private meth lab.
But you knew that, didn't you? Temporary measures, just like a psychiatry that is for the
"management of acute symptoms"-- or are you going to tell me you expect/want it to look
like this in 30 years? Then why is it like this now? And so this is the terrible, awful truth of
it all: we created the system only for us, and will last for as long, but only as long, as we
are alive, and that was as far as anyone ever thought it out. That means that any kids
under 10, rich and poor, will be left to make do with rubble-- on purpose.​ That's what
they will inherit from the Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History of The World,
who say with not the least bit of irony, "may as well spend it because you can't take it with
you!" No kidding. You've created a gigantic Ponzi scheme which is not just morally sketchy
but downright mean to your kids, but what do you care: you'll be dead.

In some Bible story Ford Prefect warns the humans, "two million years you've got and that's
it, at the end of that time your race will be dead" and he meant it as a fait accompli but that
was a guy who took the long view; and when the response came back with a soothing
smile, "well, still time for a few more baths!" that was a guy also taking the long view, the
difference being his long view was exclusively to justify his present frivolity. It should be no
surprise that this second guy's brilliant solution to a fiscal crisis was to call leaves legal
tender and then burn down all the forests. They didn't survive the winter. But the warning
I offer the younger generations who have to clean up our messes even without the benefit
of forests or a functioning psychiatry is what consequently happened to the first guy: he
went mad. It is inevitable.

----

Previously: The Terrible, Awful, Truth About SSI

 SEPTEMBER 2, 2011
"What should I say/do to my son after this happened to him?"

count

From Ask Reddit:

I'm a single parent living with my 15 year old son. On Sunday a classmate of his died. (I will
not say how or where as the last thing I want to do is bring the parents more grief by me
posting it all over the internet.) I didn't know the girl personally but she was in most of my
sons classes to my knowledge. He was very shaken when he heard the news, which is to be
presumed but he has not talken to me since the incedent, he has stayed in his room since
sunday night, I leave his dinners at the door.
Today while looking at the girls facebook, which is crowded with messages, I saw a post
made by my son.
I have never told this to anyone but I have had a massive crush on you since the seventh grade. This
was the year I was going to ask you out. I hate myself because I didn't ask you sooner and I miss you so
much. Goodbye.
I had no idea he felt this way about her as he has never told me. I am starting to think he is
depressed. I keep trying to talk to him but he wont reply. Should I get a psychiatrist for
him. I honestly have no idea on how to deal with this. Please help.

Edit
Im sorry to say that he did the same thing as before, he closed the door before I could
speak. Thank you for all the coments but I am really stuck now.
I know people are saying that I am prying into his life too much, but I need to know if he is
going to her burial.
Just for clarity, I am his father
Edit Again
Hes going to the funeral. I heard his door close and there was a note at the door. "I am
going to the funeral, if you are at work, I will bike there. I will not miss it."
Edit Its about 3 am here, I walked into his room about an hour ago. I just wanted to see
him agian to be honest. He was on his bed sleeping. The room was covered in tisues. His
eyes were bright red from rubbing them.
I was going up to tuck him in when he siad "What is it dad" I was taken back that he was
awake and even hearing him was a shock. I told him that I will drive him to the funeral if he
wants and that he should get some sleep. He asked about work, I siad that doesnt matter. I
kissed him goodnight then left.
I think we had a breakthrough.

II.

These are the four "Best" comments:

Time. Too much interference an attention during a normal grieving process can be damaging (see
studies on the negative effects of debriefing therapies post-trauma). Be there, but let him be. I would
only start to worry if his grades drop, and he continues to isolate himself (I'm talking months later). He
will probably benefit greatly from attending the funeral and connecting with peers there.
●​ PhD student in clinical psych

--

I think sending him to a psychiatrist would make him feel like there is something wrong with him.
Losing someone special always takes time. Whenever you see him give him a good hug. Tell him he can
always come talk to you whenever he needs to, but never force him to talk. He'll come to you when he's
ready, if he ever is.

--

I had a lot of friends die when I was growing up. Between junior high and the end of high school, the
count was closing in on two dozen. I'm not a psychologist or a counselor, but I went through a fair
amount of grief, so take this for what you will.
Everyone deals with grief differently, so it's hard to say how much time your son needs or how this will
affect him long-term. He needs to talk with someone--talking will be like letting poison from a
wound--but he has to decide when and to whom on his own terms. The key is to make sure he has
opportunities.
I didn't have a great family growing up, nor did I have many friends. I was the outcast loner because we
moved to the school after cliques had formed and I didn't go to church, so I didn't have an instant social
connection with anybody. School counselors are usually worthless, and several of the people who died
were the ones I would talk with about serious matters. It was my chemistry teacher, late after school
one day when I stayed to make up a test, who decided to forget the test and just spend time talking with
me. We talked for over an hour and a half and then she drove me home, and that conversation did a lot
to get me through. Prior to that, I had spent 4+ months locked in my room, staring at a wall in the
mental equivalent of shock, just totally shut down. She was open to talking, and that was enough.
So be open to your son. Don't ever try to force him to talk, and don't force him to go to counseling if he
doesn't want. Just provide space and time, and maybe even awkward silences, to give him room to talk.
If he's crying, let him cry for as long as he needs. Don't tell him it's OK or that it'll be alright. Don't say a
damned thing. Just let him cry. Crying's like talking--it lets that poison out and can clean the soul a bit.
PM me if you want to Skype or something, as I'd be happy to talk more. After going through so much of
this stuff when I was younger, I really want to do what I can to help others going through the same
stuff. Let me know if I can be of any help.
--

Just let the kid grieve. Everyone needs time to let out all their emotions when someone the loved dies.
--
I lost a friend at about that age and I can tell you that 15 year old boys are primarily going to rely on
their peers to help them come to terms with this. Seeing that OP's son is a 15 year old in 2011, much of
that interaction is going to take place online and via cell phone.
The best thing OP can do is let him know your there to talk if he wants to (he won't, but it's still good to
hear) and make sure he's got enough minutes/texts on his phone.
--
And the "Best" comment (1061 votes):

It's only been two days since the girl died and he's clearly grieving. Just give him some time to come to
terms with it and let him know you're there when he's ready to talk about it.

III.

Here's the problem with that otherwise well intentioned advice: it isn't for the Dad, it is
about themselves.

The majority seem to think that the son is grieving a dead girl he had a crush on as if he
had a relationship with her, but all of this grief is over a girl he did NOT have a relationship
with. I suppose it is possible that he was desperately in love with her from afar, and that
her death has devastated him because he felt she was The One. But it's far more likely she
represented something to him that her death has either obliterated or made very real.

Note the manner of death isn't mentioned. Hmmm. Let's assume, oh, I don't know, it was a
suicide. How would that change our reading of the son's "grief" and his emotional
connection to her?

Furthermore, no one thought it relevant that this is a son being raised by his father ONLY. I
know we live in a post modern, nothing-is-remarkable period, but I'd like to suggest that
that is odd, 3% of kids odd; and that therefore his relationship to women, to certain types
of women, and to the loss of women, is probably of central but clearly unexplored
importance.

And: he posted publicly on facebook. It's not surprising he posted his grief on facebook, it's
surprising that he posted that he had a crush on her from afar on facebook. He's 15, right?
The age where you are too embarrassed to announce unrequited love? Which means he's
not telling her he likes her, he's telling everyone else a message that is encoded, "I was in
love with THIS girl."

"Just let him grieve", "just give him time" is not good advice, because you do not know the
context of this grief and most of what I am seeing tells me this is not normal grief. I could
be wrong.. Do you want to wait to find out?

So, Dad, if you are reading this:

​ If your wife died, you need to reach out to your son. If it can't be you, or it doesn't
work, you need to find someone else to work through, even if it is a school friend. Even if it
is the parent of a school friend. You cannot leave him to his own.

​ If your wife is alive (e.g. divorced) get her involved. Maybe there's a good reason not
to get her involved, but if there isn't a good reason not to, bring her in. Any aunts?
grandmothers? Sisters? Female friends of his?

If he's drinking, it's not good.

You're his father, not his friend. This may make a certain kind of conversation impossible,
fine, but you still have to represent a kind of man, a kind of strength and presence and
selflessness, "even if you do not want me I am here, permanently, no surprises" and you
reinforce that by constant, honest, non-contrived connections. You don't approach him as a
peer because you hope it will make a connection, you come at him as Dad. He can reject it,
but he needs you to be a Dad to reject. You don't/maybe can't make him feel better, but you
have to offer a foundation for his sadness-- "any lower than this and I'm here." (Tucking
him in and driving him to the funeral was great.)

And, Jesus, no more food at the door, are you Japanese?

IV.

But there's one more piece of information that makes this all more urgent.

Consider you are a 15 year old boy, grieving a potentiality that you loved, wondering where
that leaves you now. You have no place to express this loss, so you put it on facebook.

Now consider you are the father of such a boy, and you also have nowhere to turn, so you
turn-- to reddit. It may be normal for a boy to go to facebook, or a father to go to reddit,
but it is anything but coincidental that a father who is so out of ideas that he is even able to
have the thought to turn to reddit is raising a boy who who is similarly out of connections
and defaults to the pseudo-anonymity of facebook.

This is not a judgment against them, but you have to understand the context and the only
context we have are the words. The father never mentions any other human being except
his son and the girl. He does not mention talking to family, or teachers, or other kids. The
father is not depressed and yet still operates in a tiny universe of two people. The father
himself is Alone, isolated, struggling for a connection to someone and losing his only real
connection to another person. So how do you expect a depressed 15 year old to act?

Both of their universes used to have at least two extra people: the father used to have a
wife, the son used to have a mother, and now the son used to have a potential love. By my
count, the father lost 33% of the population of the universe, and the son lost 50%. No
wonder he's depressed.

Given this-- and, again, not a judgment, just a statement of fact-- given that they both
operate in universes with very few people in it, the father must force a connection to his
son. He cannot wait it out, he cannot give him his space, he cannot let him grieve alone in
his room for a month and let him come out of it on his own.

If forcing that drives his son in typical teenage fashion away from him into the arms of other
kids, good-- at least there are other people in his universe. But if that kid sadly drifts away
from his father, into isolation, he will have lost 100% of the population of his universe. It
will then be too late.

AUGUST 31, 2011

The Wisdom Of Crowds Turns Into Madness

less independent than they think

In PNAS, an article which is intuitively obvious but terrifying to see played out in science.

The "Wisdom Of Crowds" concept is that the average guesses of a crowd will be closer to
the truth than a randomly selected individual guess.

The reason this works is that because the crowd has different individuals with different
types of systematic error, e.g. prejudices. With more individuals, the prejudices negate
each other.

The Swiss study took 144 college students and asked them a series of questions (population
of Switzerland, murder rate, etc). It recorded 5 consecutive guesses, as well as the
confidence for the first and last guess.

I.

The first interesting finding is that the crowd is sometimes so incredibly wrong that the
mean of their responses is just... really wrong. How many assaults were there in
Switzerland in 2006? 10? 100? 1000? 10000? 100000? Those are exponentially different
guesses, so an arithmetic mean could be way off, factors of ten off.
In such cases, a geometric mean is much closer to the correct answer. So, point number
one, when you are crowdsourcing, choose your mean/distribution appropriately.

II.

The diversity of guesses is quite large-- everyone comes to the question with their own
prejudices and errors.

But merely by giving the subjects access to the previous round's guesses-- either the mean
of the guesses ("aggregated information") or everyone's individual guess, the diversity
disappears and everyone's guesses begin to converge.
The first round the guesses were wildly disparate, but as everyone got to see the other
guesses, they converge remarkably.

Why did having the full information (all 12 people's individual guesses) seem to cause less
convergence than having the mean of their guesses? It didn't, really; but also because the
aggregate is only one number that you converge to; having 12 wildly disparate numbers to
converge to is harder. But by the third round, it hardly mattered-- a systematic bias had
been introduced into the crowd, which is ironic since it is systematic bias that the Wisdom
Of Crowds is supposed to negate. Moo.

III.

People following the herd would be boring but not disastrous, except for the other finding.

Since the guesses converge, since other people are converging with you and you can see
that, the confidence in these guesses goes up: a false belief of collective accuracy with no
increase in actual accuracy. "It's unanimous!" Yikes.

Also remember, these people weren't being given an expert's guess to converge to, just
other (regular) people's. As the authors point out, they didn't even attempt to measure
group leader effects, persuasion, talking heads on TV, or twitter.

This is not a trivial problem. It isn't just saying that the beliefs converge; it is saying that
since the beliefs converge along with greater confidence in their "truthfulness", it becomes
more difficult for any individual to not converge as well-- and feel confident about it.

If you do manage to run from the herd you have to climb a high wall. "Can so many people
be so wrong, yet so close together in their guesses? So wrong, yet so confident? Is
everyone insane?"

You can imagine the social implications of a highly energized crowd, or electorate, or laity,
or polity, or tax base, all converging on a "truth" of which they are supremely confident by
virtue of the fact that others believe the same (which is the result of similar convergence on
their part.) This is probably supercharged when you have a charismatic figurehead leading
convergence, and by "charismatic figurehead" I mean media; no one person came up with
this, everyone just knows it's true.

IV.

So much for the paper. Now consider the more general implications.

"Well, I'm going to be an independent thinker and not be affected by the herd and make my
own educated guess." No, you won't.

The moment you have the other people's guesses, you cannot shake that information. Your
"independent" guess necessarily includes that guess in some way, you can't unlearn it.
Either your guess converges towards the herd, or your guess is characterized as against the
herd. Either way, the herd affected your thinking in ways you don't realize. You're part of
the dialectic and you didn't even want to be. That you don't want to be part of it ensures
you are part of it.

The existence of the convergence of ideas, knowing that a convergence exists, either
attracts further groupthink, or sets up a second groupthink in opposition to the first.
Groupthink certainly reinforces one idea; and it can cause the setting up of a second large
idea in opposition, but it makes a third independent idea highly unlikely (unless, again, it
forms in opposition to ideas 1 or 2.)

In other words, in cases where social influence is impossible to avoid, the wisdom of crowds
becomes the madness of crowds even for those who disagree with the crowd. All it takes is
one idiot with a megaphone.

---

How to use your own inherent narcissism to guess more accurately

The special circumstance which causes the wisdom of crowds to fail

AUGUST 24, 2011

Can The Court Force Treatment on Jared Loughner?

my attorney has advised me to punch you

Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people, which
immediately suggested that he was a right wing nutjob, but, apparently, he was actually
psychotic, which is ok because Webster's says those are synonyms.

He was found not competent to stand trial. This means his trial is postponed until his
mental illness resolves enough for him to: understand the charges against him; participate
meaningfully in his own defense; control his behavior in court; etc. See that last "etc?"
That's the part that allows courts to do anything they want to you.

Loughner, however is refusing to take antipsychotic medication to get better. A more

accurate restating of that sentence would be, "it is extremely likely that Loughner's attorney
is refusing to allow him to be medicated, with the hope that trial is postponed forever, or at
least until the attorney comes up with a really awesome defense, or people forget who
Loughner is."

Let's Michael Foucault this whole discussion and recall that psychiatry is a medical specialty
that is also used to set social policy.

Practically, this means that if the court wants to medicate Loughner against his will, they
can. There is a legal process to follow, but it is simple and straightforward and completely
not in any kind of dispute.

There should be no issue.

II.

So I was surprised to read that the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, through Paul Appelbaum, filed an amicus curiae brief in
support of forced medication. Why? Isn't this a non-issue?

In fact, there are two reasons you can forcibly medicate (only) prisoners. The first is Sell v.
US: you can force antipsychotics for the purpose of restoring the defendant to competency
to stand trial.

The second reason is Washington V. Harper, which allows forced medication of psychotic
prisoners in the situation where they were dangerous to themselves or others.

So, again, I was confused. What's the debate?

The APA's brief had two purposes:

1. "When the courts address issues concerning psychiatric disorders, we want them to have
accurate data on the nature and consequences of those illnesses and on appropriate
treatments." The reason antipsychotics have traditionally been disallowed is because, as in
Sell, there are significant irreversible side effects (tardive dyskinesia) that may outweigh the
benefits. So the APA wants to update the court on the real risks, especially of the atypicals.

2. Sit down:

The second key issue the brief addressed was the importance of permitting authorities who have custody
of a defendant to make decisions of forcible medication without having to go through a time-consuming
judicial hearing on the matter.
The brief pretends that the issue is unscrupulous lawyers keeping their poor psychotic
clients psychotic forever, to their great distress, just to avoid trial. Appelbaum would like
Harper to be the standard; Sell is too bureaucratic.

In addition, we believe psychiatrists working in correctional facilities need the flexibility to deal with
dangerous persons without the delay involved in lengthy court proceedings.
The APA assumes that treatment decisions should fall to psychiatrists, but it seems not to
appreciate that these are psychiatrists in prisons who work for the government. There is
massive, gargantuan pressure on psychiatrists to medicate and commit and diagnose
inmates for all kinds of legal reasons. Harper may seem like the more psychiatrist-friendly
standard, but it isn't. You want the standard to be Sell, because you want a way to avoid
the pressure from the government.

The Loughner case is misleading because he is mentally ill and dangerous, but the APA
wants to massage Harper to focus on the dangerousness. Here's a more typical example:
the defendant is a violent rapist who has significant personality disorder but no clear
psychosis ("no Axis I pathology.") He punched his lawyer. Now what? You commit him to
the psychiatric ward because he's incompetent to stand trial and forcibly medicate him
because he's dangerous. But he's not psychiatric! "Yes he is, it says it right there on the
commitment papers: Psychosis NOS." So you ask how he got that diagnosis, and of course
the answer is: we needed it to be able to forcibly medicate him.

I'm not going soft on rapists-- go ahead and sentence him to life. But don't send him to
psychiatry because you don't know what else to do with him.

Doctors are given considerable deference to use their judgment; they are given greater
latitude to violate a person's rights. The government will use the back door of the doctor's
privilege to get what it wants. It is inevitable.

The issue is not whether psychiatrists should medicate people who are obviously psychotic
and dangerous-- you don't need an APA amicus curiae brief for that. The issue is whether
you want to force all prison psychiatrists to be responsible for the "treatment" of every
violent person out there, simply because they are "dangerous."

The APA has always wanted the answer to be yes. And here, again, they do not understand
the consequences of this. I can thus say, according to the strictest definition of the term,
that the APA is completely insane.

Miscellany:

1. In the Harper case, the American Psychological Association filed an amicus curiae brief
in support of Harper, i.e. that forcible medication without a hearing violated the due process
and equal protection clauses. You are welcome to explore the disparity between the APAs.

2. Harper does not apply to civilians. You can force hospitalization on a guy for being
dangerous and psychiatric, but you cannot force treatment on him without a court order.
You can lock him down, but you cannot touch him.
If a psychotic diabetic patient whose sugar is life threateningly high is refusing insulin
because aliens tell him to, upon psychiatric review you can force insulin on him, but you still
can't force antipsychotics on him because the insulin is necessary to his survival and the
antipsychotics are not.

We know that psychosis takes a few days to improve, even if the right dose/drug is hit on
immediately. The fact that it takes days to work means you can't argue they are life saving,
so you can't get past the need for a court order.

I will point out that even though what I've written is true, psychiatrists still routinely force
medication on people, in jails and in hospitals. They're doing it for noble reasons, and I
don't fault them, but it's important to know where the line is before you cross it. And, as
importantly, it is far preferable that a doctor violate the law in order to do what's best for a
patient, then it is for the government to sneak past people's civil rights by hiding inside their
doctors' white coats.

--

Competency to be executed

Then I change my mind: Competency to be executed II

AUGUST 19, 2011

What To Do About Sexy High School Girls Having A Slumber Party

wait, that's not sexy

A case, the summary of which is everywhere:

During another sleepover, T.V. took a picture of M.K. and another girl pretending to kiss each other. At
a final slumber party, more pictures were taken with M.K. wearing lingerie and the other girls in
pajamas. One of these pictures shows M.K. standing talking on the phone while another girl holds one of
her legs up in the air, with T.V. holding a toy trident as if protruding from her crotch and pointing
between M.K.'s legs. In another, T.V. is shown bent over with M.K. poking the trident between her
buttocks. A third picture shows T.V. positioned behind another kneeling girl as if engaging in anal sex.
In another picture, M.K. poses with money stuck into her lingerie - stripper-style.
And up to facebook went the pictures; and the school got involved; and the court got
involved; and now I got involved.

Important to the story, these high school girls were volleyball players. Not important to the
story, but featured in every one anyway, is that they were cheerleaders. We get it. They're
white.

The judge ruled that the pictures were protected under the First Amendment, which is fine,
but then said this, which is weird:

I wish the case involved more important and worthwhile speech on the part of the students, but then of
course a school's well-intentioned but unconstitutional punishment of that speech would be all the more
regrettable.

Why wish that? If it was more important and worthwhile, we wouldn't really have a
controversy. The importance of the law is in these cases that don't have worth or
importance.

II.

The set up is one of free speech, but there's a different game in play.

The judge explained that it isn't true that just any old photo/speech is protected, but speech
that is "intended to convey a particular message" "understood by those" who would view it.
In this case: this is funny(message) to the people on my facebook page who would
understand that it was funny.

The fact that adult school officials may not appreciate the approach to sexual themes the girls displayed
actually supports the determination that the conduct was inherently expressive.
This is where free speech gets really interesting, when it bumps against generational mores.
The only thing "bad" about the speech was that the school officials didn't like it. Nothing
else. Is that enough to allow the school to shut the kids down? No.

But what about the argument that the pictures affected the school or other girls by causing
"divisiveness?" Isn't this kind of like harassment, or bullying, or intimidation, even if it is
not as bad? Wouldn't the "pure" girls feel reluctant to play volleyball with a team of sluts?

Petty disagreements among players on a team... is utterly routine. This type of unremarkable
dissension does not establish disruption with the work or discipline of the team or the school...Consider,
for example. [the case in which] getting a phone call from a disgruntled parent, and evidence that a
student temporarily refused to go to class and that five students missed some undetermined portion of
their classes... did not rise to the level of a substantial disruption.
In other words, get over it. If you don't meet these girls in school you'll meet them in
college or in their 30s in Indianapolis (the whole city is horny.) The fact that you have to
avoid them or deal with them or sleep with them or argue with them is mostly your
problem. I sympathize, sure, and I'm happy to help, but it's still your problem. You can't
change other people, even if they are wrong.

III.

But wait a second: how did the school even see the pictures? Take a moment and come up
with an answer.

...a parent brought printouts of the photographs to the [Superintendent]... The parent reported that the
images... were causing "divisiveness" among the girls on the volleyball team... Separately, but on the
same day... the principal was contacted by a second concerned parent, one who happened to work at the
school as an athletic department secretary.

The school has a problem, and it isn't high schoolers wrestling with their hormones. The
school is infested with rats.

The true social implications of this case aren't about the girls' behavior, but the parents'. To
what extent are they allowed to impose their values on their kids, and, separately, what is
the proper structure to impose these values?

This popular reading of this case is that the school (i.e. government) doesn't have the right
to reach into the private home and control the speech of students, but that evades the
important cause of this case: the parents want the government to control the kids because
they aren't willing to do it. See? It's not just black kids. Parents all over the U.S. have
checked out, can't be bothered and anyway don't really know how to bother. How can I
explain to my daughter that this is bad? I know: Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. School
Dist. Yeah. That'll show her.

The way it should have worked is that one concerned mother calls the other mother, and
she opens up with, "I just want to bring something to your attention" or "Jesus, do you
know what your wenchy daughter is up to?!" and they work it out and stuff gets handled,
and if it doesn't it gets kicked to the fathers, who freak out on their daughters and then
reluctantly agree to talk to the other father about it and settle it once and for all, and if that
doesn't work they can agree to meet in the Woolworth's and Woolco parking lot and punch
each other like girls. I recognize this is all quite sexist, but that's the way it should have
gone down. That's the way it has always gone down.

But the parents couldn't handle this as parents, i.e. as the ultimate arbiter of a controversy,
because they are not practiced at being the ultimate anything. Stripped of all power as
children, and never given either power or responsibility, they drowned in freedom and
looked for a practical solution to their existential crisis: everything always has a higher
authority. Call the school, call the cops, call the government. The joke used to be, "hey,
lady, don't make a federal case out of it!" but that's no longer a joke, it's the preferred
method.

The idiocy of such parents is mind boggling, certainly, but even more compounded by the
message that it sends to their own kids: higher authorities always exist for everything.
Just not God. That's for stupid people.
 AUGUST 15, 2011
Grade Inflation

speculate on the use of a Tardis

Today we're going to talk about the causes of grade inflation. "Wait, is this going to be on
the test?"

You're a professor and you grade the paper a C. The next day Type A Personality Only Child
comes up on you, "how is this a C? I answered the question correctly, didn't I?" Yes, but
you write like a nine year old, 80% of this is the syntactical equivalent of "umm" and
"ahhh", and many of your sentences are minimally altered passages right from Wikipedia.
"But this is a history class. Why are you grading my writing style?"

There's really no good way for a professor to respond to this nut. The depth of his stupidity
precludes any explanation from being meaningful; he will not be able to understand that the
writing is a reflection of the rigor of the ideas which is a reflection of the knowledge of the
material and etc. So you give him an A and head to a strip bar. I sympathize.
Two explanations are commonly offered for grade inflation-- and let me clarify that the
grade inflation people complain about is the kind that happens in the introductory survey
courses. No one worries about grade inflation in the 400 level thermodynamics class. 1.
Universities don't incentivize teaching, they incentivize research, so the teaching suffers. 2.
Students are drunken idiots. While both have merit, let's see if there isn't another
explanation that shrewdly protects the unconscious of most of the players..

II.

Here's a nice graph:

The only surprising thing to me about this graph is nothing. Since no one over 90 is reading
this, let's focus on 1986. What happened in 1986 that changed the grading trend?

Generation X went to college, that's what. Coincidentally, psychological researchers

Twenge et al found that that was the year narcissism on campus began to rise:
And by "coincidentally" I mean "not coincidentally." It's hard to tell a growing population of
narcissists that their schoolwork blows, so you don't: A. Makes sense.

Most people stop their analysis right there, but you should really go the extra three steps
and not just pee in the sink: now those students are 40. They grew up to be the Dumbest
Generation of Narcissists In The History of the World, so narcissistic that not only are they
dumb, but they do not know how dumb they are and cannot be told how dumb they are.
They are aware that there are things they don't know, but they are certain that they have at
least heard of everything that's worth knowing. Whenever the upper management guys at
Chronicle Of Higher Education or The National Review pretend to disagree about the
"classics" or "Great Books" or the "value of a liberal education," after five minutes it
becomes clear that even they haven't read all those books, or most of them, or even a
respectable minority, or three. They've read about them, ok, that's what America does, but
when you finally pin them down and they admit they haven't read it-- which would be fine--
their final response is of the form "there's no point in reading Confessions now since we've
all moved beyond that." Oh. And those are supposed to be the smart ones; everyone else
in the generation thinks that the speed at which they can repeat the words they heard on
TV or read on some magazine's website is evidence of their understanding.

II.

Which brings me to the main point, the other cause of grade inflation that no one ever talks
about: in order for a grade to be inflated, a professor has to inflate it. In other words,
grade inflation isn't the student's fault, it is the professor's fault. A kid can complain and
whine/wine all he wants, but unless that professor buckles, there's no grade inflation. So
the starting point has to be: why does a professor inflate a grade?

Yikes. Now that shudder you're feeling is not only why you never thought it, but how it is
possible no one else ever brought it up? The answer is: every discussion about grade
inflation has been dominated by educators.

The "college is a scam" train is one on which I'm all aboard, but that doesn't mean each
individual professor has to be scamming students; there's no reason why he can't do a good
job and teach his students something that they aren't going to get simply by reading the
text. If a student can skip class and still ace the class, the kid is either very bright or the
professor is utterly useless. Right? Either way, the kid's wasting his money.
And I know every generation thinks the one coming up after it is weaker and stupider, that's
normal. But why would a professor who thinks college kids are dumb turn around and
reward the King Of Beers with an A?

The answer is right in the chart and in a book by Allan Bloom that most college professors
have read about. When that professor who was 40 in1986 was back in college in 1966, he
was part of a culture that believed there are no "wrong answers, only wrong questions", like
"you really think we should we stop shaving?" or "should we listen to something other than
CCR?" And meanwhile the rate of As doubled. So now you have to put up your money: if
you believe that grade inflation at that time masks/causes a real shallowness of intellect and
education, then those students, now professors, simply aren't as smart as they think they
are. Unless you also believe that bad 60s music and even worse pot somehow augmented
their intellect.

And if you accept my thesis that narcissism prevents insight because it is urgently and
vigorously self-protecting, then these same professors are not aware of their deficits. They
think they know the material they are teaching simply because they are teaching it.

The problem is they are grading your papers and they do not know how to value a paper.
Of course they can tell an A+ essay and they can tell an F- essay, but they are pretty foggy
on everything in between. But they do not realize they are foggy. They think the problem is
"the students complain." So they judge essays in comparison to others in the class or they
fall back on the usual heuristics: page length, sentence complexity, and "looks like you put
a lot of work into it."

And worse-- much worse, given that they are supposed to be educators-- they have no idea
how to take a so-so student and make him better; what, specifically, they should get him to
do, because they themselves were similarly mediocre students who got inflated As. Do you
think they got their A in freshman analytic philosophy and said to themselves, "Jesus, I
know I really didn't deserve this A, I better go back and try and relearn all this stuff." No:
they went ahead and got jobs in academia, so that when a student comes to them asking,
"how can I do better?" they can respond, "You need to apply yourself." Idiot. The system
is broken. You broke it.

III.

Here's an example. Say your essay question is, "describe the causes of the American Civil
War." Ok, so far everything the kid knows he learned from Prentice Hall, but something
inside him thinks the answer is: LABOR COSTS. Hmmm. Insightful and unexpected, let's
see what he does with it.

But there's not much he can do with it, there aren't many obvious resources to pursue this
"feeling" he has. He does what he can. It's not that good. C. Grade inflation gives him a
B.

Meanwhile, Balboa the el ed major searches carefully in his textbook and discovers the
cause was... SLAVERY. He airlifts two sentences each out of five other books, asks for an
extension because his grandmother died, adds nine hundred filler words including "for all
intensive purposes" and "he could care less", and then waits in the parking lot to threaten
you with "but this is a history class. Why are you grading my writing style?" He gets an A.

The problem is that the first kid is strongly disincentivized from pursuing his idea, from
becoming a better thinker, in very specific ways.
First, and obviously, since the majority of the students are going to get an A, he just has to
do just as well/horrifically as the average student, and if they're all writing about slavery
with the enthusiasm of a photocopier then if he wants an A he better buckle down and learn
the truly useful skill of masking the words of a Wikipedia page.

Second, he is very nervous about offering a professor anything that he didn't hear the
professor explicitly mention, let alone endorse. What if it's "wrong?"

Third, because grading an essay is subjective, all professors try to make it objective by
attributing value to measurable quantities which are actually stupid. For example: in most
undergrad classes, the bibliography counts for 5%, maybe even 10%. How you (that's
right, I said "how you") going to pad a bibliography with six sources when you can't even
find one to support your thesis? So the pursuit of an interesting thesis is blocked by the 5%
of the grade that comes from something that should count for exactly -20% of your grade,
i.e. if you have a bibliography, you're a jerk.(1) This false value has two consequences: it
"pads" the grade (e.g. the student already starts with an easy +5-30%) so it is easier for
him to get an A. But more importantly, it is now easy for the professor to justify giving him
an A. "His content wasn't that great, but the points added up; and besides: what the hell
would I tell him to improve?"

I can't emphasize that last part enough-- the cause of the ridiculous grading is not the
complaining of students but the convenience of the professor.

This is why if you are in a class and you feel the need to ask, "how many pages does this
have to be?" and rather than look at you like you just just sneezed herpes on his face he
instead has a ready answer, you are wasting your money. I get that you need the degree, I
understand the system, but you're wasting your money nevertheless.

IV.

Take a quick scan of what these academics consider the highest level of academic
scholarship: read their own journals. Here are the first three paragraphs of the first article
("Terrorism and The American Experience: A State Of The Field") in the temporally
coincident month's Journal of American History, and I expect you to read none of them:

In 1970, just months before his death, the historian Richard Hofstadter called on U.S. historians to
engage the subject of violence. For a generation, he wrote, the profession had ignored the issue,
assuming that consensus rather than conflict had shaped the American past. By the late 1960s, with
assassinations, riots, and violent crime at the forefront of national anxieties, that assumption was no
longer tenable. Everywhere, Americans seemed to be thinking and talking about violence, except within
the historical profession. Hofstadter urged historians to remedy their "inattention" and construct a
history of violence that would speak to both the present and the past.1
Over the last four decades, the historical profession has responded to that challenge. Studies of racial
conflict, territorial massacres, gendered violence, empire, crime and punishment, and war and memory
make up some of the most esteemed books of the past generation. Yet on the subject of "terrorism," the
form of violence that currently dominates American political discourse, historians have had
comparatively little to say. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a handful of conferences have
addressed historical aspects of terrorism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its impact on state
building and national identity. Scholarly journals (including the Journal of American History) have
devoted the occasional special issue to examining terrorism's roots and present-day implications.
Within the historical profession, several book-length works have taken up episodes of terrorism,
examining the production of both violence and state repression. Social scientists and journalists have
offered sweeping global histories, tracing the problem of terrorism from antiquity to the present.2
As a result, we have a better understanding of terrorism's history than we did a decade ago, but it
would be hard to classify this surge of work as a flourishing subfield or even a coherent historiography.
Almost a decade out from 9/11, most U.S. historians remain hard-pressed to explain what terrorism is,
how and when it began, or what its impact has been. There is little consensus about how best to
approach the subject or even whether to address it at all. This is partly because the issue poses knotty
political questions: How do we talk about terrorism without reinforcing the "war on terror" or lapsing
into hopeless presentism? It also brings serious methodological problems: Is terrorism a word to be
traced through centuries of semantic permutation? Is it an epithet to be applied to forms of violence we
do not like? Is it a concept to be defined, however loosely, and followed through time?
Like any project that takes its cue from current affairs, constructing a historiography of terrorism
requires caution and a light touch...

If a student wrote this I'd punch him in the bladder and get a good defense lawyer, assault
charges be damned. I've deliberately avoided the easy targets like the po-mo journals; this
is "the leading scholarly publication and the journal of record in the field of American
history" and the author goes on like this for 20 pages. Can you trust this professor to
grade an undergrad paper? The first two paragraphs are filler, meaningless noise in the
guise of a sophisticated introduction. Maybe she can tell an A+ and she can tell an F-, I
have no idea, but is she in any position to know a C from a B? And help you improve? Do
you want to write like her? If you had questions about the history of terrorism, or
terrorism, or history, would you call her?

I picked her because she was at random, but the same forces apply ubiquitously: academic
journals are long, boring, poorly written academic-ese that no one reads because whatever
insights or information they possess are buried in...the syntactical equivalent of "umms" and
"ahhs." Even those who theoretically need journals to do their jobs every day (e.g. lawyers
and doctors) avoid them.

Apart from boycotting any classes taught by these people I don't know what the solution is.
Some professors cleverly include a "class participation" grade, and these professors pride
themselves on using "the Socratic method." Sigh. Asking random students random
questions is not the Socratic method, it's annoying, In order for it to be a true Socratic
method, the professor would have to ask the student to state a thesis, get him to agree to a
number of assumptions, and then masterfully show, through dialogue, how that agreement
undermined his own thesis. In other words, the professor would have to have considerable
fluency with his topic and be interested in each individual student, as an individual. Good
luck with that. (2)

V.

If you reconsider grade inflation not as a function of the quality of the output but rather as
the result of a hesitating lack of confidence about what constitutes good quality-- and again,
I'm talking not about A+ and F- but the differences between the B and C levels where most
"good" students are; and accept that, simply as a numerical reality, these "average"
students are then the ones who (likely with the assistance of grade inflation) go on to
become future academics, then a number of phenomena suddenly make a lot of sense. And
the most important one is the one that students have long suspected but never dared say
out loud: professors do not know the material they are teaching, but they think they do.

An American History professor may be considered somewhat of an expert because he's been
teaching the Civil War for the past 15 years, but he's only been repeating what he knew 15
years ago for 15 years. And every year he forgets a little. How carefully is he keeping up
with it-- especially if his "research interests" happen to lie elsewhere?

I know doctors who have been giving the same receptor pharmacology lectures to students
for a decade. I know they are narcissists, not just because they are too apathetic to keep
up with the field, but because it never occurred to them that receptor pharmacology might
have advanced in ten years. They believe that what they knew ten years ago is enough.
They are bigger than the science. These aren't just some lazy doctors in community
practice, these are Ivy League physicians responsible for educating new doctors with new
information. Yet the Power Point slides say 2001. "Well, I'm just teaching them the basics."
How do you know those are still the basics? Who did you ask?

You think you philosophy professor re-reads Kant every year? The last time he did was in
graduate school-- when his brain was made of graduate student and beer. Think about this.
Hecko, has he even lately read about Kant? Do you think he tries, just to stay sharp, to
take a current event and see what Kant might say about it? No, same notes on a yellow
legal pad from Reagan II. Does he "know" Kant because he's been "teaching Kant" for 20
years? When in his life is he "challenged" by someone else who "knows" Kant? Seriously,
think about this. For two decades the hardest questions he's been asked come from
students, and he's been able to handle them like a Jedi. How could he not think of himself
as an expert?

The sclerosis of imagination and intellect that inevitably happens over time will make it
impossible for him to grade a paper that does not conform to his expectations. I don't
mean it agrees with the professor, I mean his expectations of what a good paper looks like.
Students already have a phrase for this: "What he likes to see in the paper is..."

So when it comes time to write a paper about Kant, it is infinitely less important that he
understand Kant then it is for him to understand what the professor thinks is important
about Kant-- and it is way easier to get through college this way. And if you have the
misfortune of being taught Kant by a guy whose "research interests" are not Kant, forget it.
You're getting an A, and he hates you.

VI.

This stuff matters, it has real consequences. When one narcissistic generation sets up the
pieces for the next generation, and you put the rooks in the middle and leave out the
bishops and hide one of the knights, and then you tell the kids that they lack the
intelligence or concentration to really learn chess, you have to figure they're not going to
want to pay for your Social Security. Just a thought.

Also: TAs are helping grade some of the papers, and some is worse than all. In order to
ensure grading consistency, the essay answer has to be structured in a format that
facilitates grading-- because if the professor can't value a B form a C, how can a TA? So the
answer must mirror the six points in the textbook or the four things mentioned in class.
This, again, means you shouldn't spend any time learning, you should spend it gaming the
essay. So if the essay question is, "Discuss some of the causes of the Iraq War" you can
be dead sure that "some" means specifically the ones the professor thinks are important.
There may be others, but you're taking a big risk mentioning them. The TAs are just
scanning for keywords. As long as they're in there, even in grammatically impossible
constructions, you win. A. (3)

VII.
Here's one solution: abandon grades.

"But we have to have some way of objectively evaluating students!"

Haven't you been listening? You can't just suck the Red Pill like a Jolly Rancher, you have to
swallow it. Grades aren't objectively measuring people, the whole thing is a farce. The
grades are meaningless. Not only do they not measure anything, but the manner in which
they are inflated precludes real learning. Stop it.

"Some grades aren't inflated." But how would anyone on the outside know? Can you tell
them apart? The long term result will be: bad money drives out good money.

"Well, I earned my As." No you didn't, that's the point. I'm not saying you're not smart or
didn't work hard, I'm saying you have no idea how good or bad you are, you only think you
do.

"Just pass/fail? But how will employers know a good student from a bad student?" Again,
you are avoiding the terrible, awful truth because it is too terrible and too awful: when
employers look at a GPA, they don't know anything. The 3.5 they are looking at is
information bias, it not only contains no information, it deludes you into thinking you
possess information. You can't erase that 3.7 from your mind. In what classes, in what
levels, against what curve? Just because employers do it doesn't mean it's useful. They
use sexual harassment videos, too.

Grades do not only offer incorrect evaluations of a student's knowledge, they perpetuate the
fiction that professors are able to evaluate. They can't. Again, they may be able to tell an
A+ and an F-, but a B+ from a B? Really? That's the level of their precision? But a
professor cannot ever admit that he doesn't have that precision, because it cannot enter his
consciousness that he doesn't. "I've been teaching this class for 15 years." And I'm sure it
gets easier every year.

VIII.

Speaking of Iraq: on the eve of the Iraq War many Americans got together to demonstrate.
I'm not in the protest demographic, the only way I'm going to be at a march is if there's
alcohol, but I accept the fact that a protest is sometimes the only way to be heard and the
last resort against a government that has forsaken you. I get it. Ok. So I'm watching the
protests on TV, and a lot of people quite obviously don't want to go to war, and want it
stopped at all costs. And I see a group of people with signs walking behind a long banner,
and the signs and the banner say, basically, "UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS AGAINST THE
WAR."

I've no doubt that there wasn't a little bit of the old Vietnam nostalgia there, but what made
me furious was the signs. They actually believed that identifying themselves as university
professors was helping the cause? Did they think Americans were going to slap their
foreheads, "wow, educated people are against the war, maybe I gots to rethinks this?" Yes,
that is exactly what they thought.

They could not see that they were sabotaging their own cause, that anyone ambivalent
about Iraq would either not think anything or be blinded by white rage, "look at these
mother--" and vote for Bush six more times. These professors were coming from such a
profoundly narcissistic stance that they didn't see this, or they didn't care. They may have
wanted to stop the war, but what was much, much, much, much, much more important was
to be identified as against the war, even if by doing that they were causing other people to
support the war.

Here's what TV didn't show: the next day, those professors went to their classes, taught a
bunch of anxious, restless but bored students stuff that they really had no business
teaching, and later asked them to write essays that could be graded essentially as multiple
choice questions so that they wouldn't really have to read them. If these professors didn't
realize or care that that they were violating their own principles about war merely to
self-identify, do you think they care about you? They have much bigger things to worry
about. A.

---
1. Bibliography, as distinct from references. Anyone who produces a Bibliography without
specific references as some sort of support of the truth of their idiocy is on notice. I'm
talking to you, DSM.

2. An interesting educational experiment would be to come at things form a negative

perspective. "Look, class, Hegel was a complete jerk, and his ideas were infantile
pseudo-buddhism garbage. I'll give 50 points and a candy bar to anyone who can explain to
me why." And see if that doesn't inspire the student to want to understand what Hegel was
trying to say. I don't know if this will work. I know that a disengaged professor saying that
Hegel is a great German philosopher and then reading lecture notes written back in 1986 on
a yellow legal pad very clearly doesn't work.

3. Here's an essay I'd love to read, hell, love to write: "There are numerous "established"
causes of the Iraq War, yet they almost always cite reasons that occurred after 1990.
Please watch the 1975 film Three Days of The Condor. Other than a Tardis, what
explanations could there be for director Sydney Pollack's ability to predict the future with
such accuracy? Please discuss some of the events of the late 1960s to early 1970s that
made the finale's prediction possible."

---

Also: Here is precisely one of these professors

AUGUST 11, 2011

The Nature Of The Grift
 simplified for the purposes of illustration

In The New Yorker, a piece about immigration-- abuse? Cheating?

"Caroline" is a single woman from "central Africa" who, while living in a roach infested NYC
apartment ("sometimes they get in my handbag, but they're small") and working in what I
assume is a Whole Foods (she thinks "organic" is a scam), she works with a lawyer to
complete her application for political asylum. Back home, she was raped and beaten, and
would likely be killed if she returns.

The hook of the article is that she made this up in order to gain asylum. She was never
raped, never tortured, never etc. The article explains that such embellishment is not only
common, but that applicants are often counseled on how to game the system by others
(including lawyers) who have been through the process.

But she's a good person, hard working, she just wants a part of the American Dream that is
out of reach for native twentysomethings. Is it right to deny her? Oh poorly considered
ethical dilemmas, what would the press do without you? The focus of the story--indeed, the
climax-- comes when she finally has her appointment wiith the immigration officer: a cold
hard-ass (read: white) named Novick in a Matrixy/East German/Kafkaesque interrogation
room. Think fluorescent lighting and the hum of alienation.

He wants specifics of her rape and torture, when and where; he wants to know what African
hospital she went to and when. She keeps her story tight; she deflects attempts to pin
down the medical records. She answers questions about local geography. Novick checks a
newspaper to corroborate her story of being in a bombing, but that's where she got the
story in the first place.

So: you can read it as this lying bitch is one step ahead of the law, which is harsh, but it's a
reading. Or, you can read it as officers like Novick can't always detect lying, they do the
best they can. Or you can do what The New Yorker and NPR did, pull the left blinker on the
Subaru and suggest it shouldn't have to be this hard for immigrants to come in. They
shouldn't have to lie. Also: "Mondale '84"

In the end, the officer found her narrative compelling enough and granted her asylum, and she is a
model American citizen by most measures. She has a job, a car and a husband. She goes to church every
Sunday. She pays her taxes, and she's never taken a dime from the government.

I'd bet every dime of every person she's never taken a dime from that it scalded the editors
like holy water to keep the phrase "goes to church every Sunday" in there, but they
probably figured they needed it to appeal to the wingnuts at patriotpost.us and everyone in
a landlocked state who obviously hates immigrants, especially ones who aren't from
America.

All of those readings provide their respective readers with considerable emotional comfort
and reinforce their own moral superiority, which is healthier, I'll warrant, than drinking
yourself to sleep in front of (this week) The Conversation; nevertheless, all of those
readings would be wrong.

II.

Here's an emotional, exasperated criticism from an immigration lawyer:

[The New Yorker story] encapsulated everything about immigration law that is both dispiriting and
outrageous. It is a clarion to new lawyers to keep away from the profession and a motivator to honest
lawyers in the field to want to take a long shower after any day associating with his or her peers or "the
system."

Can't resist low hanging fruit: "This is what motivates lawyers to take showers?? Is this
thing on?"

I get where he's coming from, and I don't blame him for feeling angry about abuses of "the
system", but he's not seeing the truth: this isn't an abuse of "the system," this is the
intended system. Even though it's illegal, the system wants you to lie.

To begin to see not how this is but why this is, pretend that Caroline had made a left instead
of a right and wanted, inexplicably, to immigrate to Greece. She shows up, gets the
necessary binder of paperwork, and of course right there on the cover it says they don't
want black people either. But she's highly motivated. What's the play? Think about the
answer.

The play is: she's got to figure out who to bribe.

The play is: she has to bribe a Greek Novick. And Novickopoulos already expects it.

It is both metaphorically and literally accurate to say it isn't rape or torture, but exactly that
system, that she is trying to escape by coming to America.

III.

The system wants Caroline, the system wants there to be a way for "intelligent" and "hard
working" and "church going" resourceful people to game the system. All of those words
mean "taxpayers." It wants the kind of person who sticks with this tedious bureaucratic
process even if it is all a lie; it doesn't want the person who doesn't bother to try to get
legal. And, most importantly, when you establish the grift as based on the best "rape
narrative", it therefore isn't about the most money. That's what you want to avoid, because
Caroline has none of it, and MS13 has lots of it.

What distinguishes this grift from the overt kind-- of Greece, Mexico, Pakistan-- is that in
the former case the cheat occurs top down, while in the latter case the cheat occurs bottom
up. In Greece, you want a permit? You have to know who to bribe. Bribery may go "all
they way to the top," but importantly your bribe has to start from the bottom and move to
the top.

In the case of American asylum seeking-- and everything else-- the grift is at the top and it
lacks a human face. This story is in The New Yorker, right? So it's hardly news, hardly
investigative journalism. So at minimum, everyone in the business knows the score.
Novick knows that, in general, much of what he hears is a lie, even if he isn't sure/ignores
that he is being lied to right now. Unless you piss him off personally, or flaunt your lying, he
doesn't care about the veracity of your claim exactly, just the internal validity of it.

That's the system. The system favors narratives over truth to avoid the terrible reality of
reflexive human corruption.

IV.

"Internal validity over objective reality? The system wants you to lie? What madness is
this?"

Say you're a gay male asylum seeker. "Back in Brasil they beat me mercilessly, police have
gang raped me. I'm told that I can find acceptance in "Southern Carolina." (Shhh, don't
tell him. This will be hilarious.)

Your documents are all ready. Your day before the immigration judge comes. How should
you dress? Think about this.

(NYT) In the end, Mr. Castro opted for... pink eye shadow, a bright pink V-neck shirt and intermittent
outbursts of tears... He had been advised by his immigration lawyer that flaunting it was now his best
weapon against deportation.

"Judges and immigration officials are adding a new hurdle in gay asylum cases that an applicant's
homosexuality must be socially visible," said Lori Adams, a lawyer

Being gay isn't enough, you have to look gay. But importantly, while no member of the
immigration office can deny you for not looking gay:

Rhatigan [from Immigration] said such behavior by immigration officers would not be condoned. "We
don't say that someone is insufficiently gay or homosexual"

"everyone knows" that you have to dress the part. Like your life depends on it.

The system doesn't want truth, it wants internal validity. That sounds bad, but it wants it to
be based on the force of a narrative because it doesn't want your life to be determined by
the whims of a man with two mortgages or a drug habit or a hard on.

But wait: now pretend you're not gay. Can you... dress the part?
One lawyer recalled a recent client who applied for asylum on the basis of sexual orientation, then
showed up a few weeks later with his wife, seeking help with a green card. In 2009, Steven and Helena
Mahoney pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a consulting business in which, among other things,
they coached straight people on how to file gay asylum claims.

Is it lying? Yes. Is it a grift? Yes. But is the fake-gay married guy more likely to rape a
bus of schoolkids or file quarterly 1099s? That's the system.

V.

The unanswered question is: how? How can a system operate on words alone? "All you
have to do is say you were raped and you're in?" No, of course not, you have to provide
proof. I can't just roll up to the Apple store and say I have $100, I need some sort of
proof that I have $100. Someone has to take my words--- maybe even lies-- and translate
them to tangible proof. So maybe it's the bank, or maybe it's Visa who takes my "lie" that I
have $100, and makes it real for the merchant by forcing me to pay $15 a month until that
lie becomes true.

Caroline is fabricating a rape narrative. Novick wants proof. How does she prove it? What
is the mechanism by which the American system converts words-- truths or lies, either
way-- into physical evidence? What does the system give her-- indeed, demand of her-- as
a means of manufacturing the necessary proof of her rape?

To buttress her asylum claim... she had been attending group and individual psychotherapy sessions, as
part of a program for survivors of torture.... She has individual sessions with a psychiatrist, who
prescribes antidepressants: Zoloft, Wellbutrin, trazodone.... "I throw it away."

Note that she didn't really have any symptoms; the system required her to go as evidence
that she was raped. i.e. psychiatry is not the unintended collateral damage of a terrible
system, it is the necessary part of the dialectical workings of (American) society, it is the
specific way in which theory/lies/abstractions are physically manifested.

By "required" I don't mean codified. There's no rule that says she has to see a shrink. But
she still has to. It will look weird if she goes before the judge without a PTSD diagnosis.
Nor does a person actually need to go to a psychiatrist, but they must at minimum employ
the language of psychiatry: traumatic, depressed, flashbacks...

I do not use the requirement of psychiatry lightly. I mean exactly what I say: psychiatry
makes words manifest into tangible reality.

Remember Castro who was not gay unless he appeared gay-- the reality was irrelevant,
what mattered was the narrative? Even he was in it:

He shared a letter from his psychiatrist confirming that he took antidepressants for the post-traumatic
stress disorder caused by his abuse.

How much did it cost the system to help Caroline game it? 2 therapy visits/month at
$60/visit + 1 "med check"/month @ $50/visit + medications @ $150/month (assuming
generics) = $320/month. However, and this is the point, it made a profit on its investment,
not just in taxes but in "blast radius:" she'll be a positive influence on others, her kids, who
will grow up educated, employable, etc. This is the same force that gives you $700/month in
SSI because that is just enough to prevent you from robbing a Dunkin Donuts or chasing a
dragon, not to mention way cheaper than incarcerating you or turning the Bronx back into a
police state.
The system wants Caroline because she's good for the system. Of course, she is black, but
at least she's African black; and, anyway, you can't have everything.

VI.

No doubt all this talk about "the system" seems too abstract to be real, almost at the level
of conspiracy theory, so let me offer you an everyday example.

Say you get a bill from Verizon or Blue Cross and you're like, wtf? Is this in base 6? So you
call a number that begins with 800, put it on speaker and surf the internet for the next hour
to the background music of genocide.

Finally, Sally comes on, and you know she's going to want to help. Here's what I do every
single time. When Sally says, "Verizon's Blue Cross, I'm Sally, how may I help you?" the
very first thing I say is, "Hi, Sally. I'd like to speak to a supervisor."

Because at the level of a Sally, nothing I can say to her to get her to do what I want exerts
nearly as much pressure as "the system" exerts on her to get her to NOT do what I want.
It's not just that she doesn't have any power, it is that even though she has power, the
exertion of that power in my favor results in negative consequences for her. Is she going to
get promoted if she makes me happy?

My only recourse is to go high enough in the system such that my pressure is greater than
the pressure from the top; where giving me what I want doesn't matter to that level.
Where helping me benefits that person, not hurts them. Sometimes that's pretty high up,
sometimes it's only one more level up, but it is rarely at the ground floor. So I always
bypass it. In small letters on the back of your Verizon bill, it says very clearly, "Rookies
and rubes, please call 1-800..."

But if I was in Hungary, this is the last thing I want. In Hungary, the move is to work Sally
and keep her supervisors out of it, because Sally is cheaper to bribe than her supervisors.

Another example. In The Sopranos, Burt and Patsy try to shakedown a local Starbucks;
apparently they either believe they're in Hungary or that it's 1971. So they tell the
manager about the possibility of tornadoes and smallpox unless he pays up, but the
manager who lives in America just looks at them incredulously and invokes the impassable
authority of the American system. "Dude," he says, and I'm paraphrasing, "every dime is
accounted for by the computer." Not by CEO Howard Schultz; the computer. It's
unassailable because there is no such thing. The computer is "the system," the computer is
the spirit of America. "You can detonate a nuke in here," he continues," Corporate doesn't
care about me. They'll just re-open another one the next day." That's the system. You may
say it's dehumanizing corporate greed, and it is, but on the other hand the system has (for
example) protected the manager from this kind of nonsense and no cops were needed.

Rail against it if you want, but unless you learn to operate within it, then Patsy will have
been right: "It's over for the little guy."
VII.

A final example.

You're in college, and between the alcohol and the orgasms you're not doing well in your
classes. Maybe in danger of failing out. You need to convince the Dean to let you redo the
tests, redo the papers, anything-- just not kick you out.

You're at the computer. You have his email address.

What are you going to write? What is the only thing you can write?

VIII.

The reflexive counterargument is that this system is immoral. It allows cheating; it

supports the primacy of narratives over reality; it shouldn't be like this.

But the system doesn't make moral judgments, it saves those for TV, all of the calculations
are economic, evolutionary. The system isn't immoral, it is amoral. The fundamental
problem is that people are easily corruptible. You'll never be able to close all loopholes, so
you have to decide which ones are the worst.

Am I saying Novick knows he's being lied to, and knows that he's supposed to let her in
anyway? That the judges know that we need more hard working Africans? Of course not.
Yet Caroline got in anyway.

No person or group of people set this up, it developed, logically, through the push-pull of
individual wants and needs in diverse and seemingly unrelated areas. Add up all the vector
forces in four dimensions, this is what you get. A big vector is bribery and personal
corruption; another vector is the size of the medical field and the incomes it creates
(including SSI); another vector wants (hispanic) immigrants in jail because there's profit in
it; another is institutionalized narcissism, where everyone (including judges and
psychiatrists) knows what you say about yourself matters more than what you are... and
etc.

"Not everyone cheats!"

I know. None of this is to minimize the real difficulties asylum seekers have. Only 30% of
the asylum cases are approved. The point here isn't how to get asylum; the point here is
about the nature of the grift. Asylum seeking is merely one example of the same grift that is
operational in SSI, in criminal justice, in getting a mortgage. How does the American
system "fail" at the margins-- allow itself to be gamed? It fails in specific ways and not in
other ways; bribery, for example, isn't rampant. Neither is kidnapping or trading sex.
Before you say Caroline shouldn't be able to cheat, ask why does the American system favor
this kind of cheating?

Don't make a moral judgment, don't ask if it's "right," just sum the vector forces.

Consider also the consequences. If narratives are valued more than reality, or at least serve
as proxies for reality, then right or wrong, what happens when that narrative is challenged?
What happens when society changes course and says, "I don't believe all these asylum
seekers were tortured, I want physical non-psychiatric proof." Or: "I don't believe you all
are disabled, I think you should all be working at McDonalds." Or: "I don't think you all
have any chance of paying this mortgage back, you should be living in an apartments."

What happens is the same thing that happens at the individual level: rage. Now you have
to sum some vectors to decide whether paying them $700 a month or letting them become
Americans is better than the alternative.

The immediate problem is that the grifts all rely on one key element: money. The system
can allow itself to be cheated if there's money to support it, just like a grocer can toss you a
free apple as long as the margins are still good, because ultimately it's good for the
business and hence for the system. But when that money dries up, the institutional grift
has to be closed but it will by necessity open elsewhere. Down the chain. From institutional
to individual. Now instead of Novick being a cog in what looks like a giant carny act based
on words, Novick himself starts demanding a little payout. Uh oh, now all your lies and
diagnoses and credit cards don't matter a lick because Novick just Red pilled everything--
he wants cash. Now the system is wrecked, because the system's inherent cheats fulfilled a
larger purpose; Novick has obliterated the purpose. So the Carolines don't stand a chance;
bribery is the new grift, and no one trusts anyone. Now you have Greece. You can do what
they do, choose your prime minister by heredity and placate the people with long vacations
and low retirement ages, until the day you can't. And then they'll thank you for two
generations of free lunches by rioting.

AUGUST 3, 2011
4 Unintended Consequences of Seroquel's Adjunct to Antidepressants Indication

cutting edge research on this drug should be coming any day now

Part 3 here-- short refresher.

In 1998, I discover something is red. "It's red." Sweet.
In 2010, I discover that same thing is also hard. "It's hard." Nice.
The question is: what is its primary attribute? Is it a Red thing that's hard, or a Hard thing
that's red?
II.
Imagine you did it the other way around: in 1998 you discover it is hard, then in 2010 it's
found to be red. Does that change things? Is the primary attribute based on history, or
something else?
"I guess it all depends on what you use it for." You guess?
III.
Seroquel is that thing, discovered first to be efficacious in schizophrenia (translation:
"antipsychotic") and now found to be efficacious in depression ("antidepressant").
So is it an antipsychotic that treats depression, or an antidepressant that treats psychosis?
"I guess it all depends--" Shut it. Scientists are talking.

IV.
You might think it doesn't much matter what you call it but rather how you use it, but it
matters. If you call it an antidepressant, regardless of mechanism of action, price, or data
it gets slapped with a suicide warning. If you call it an antipsychotic you forever battle a
diabetes warning regardless of the truth of it (see Geodon, Latuda.) And call it the wrong
thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, and your company gets to pay $1B to the
government.

V.
Seroquel is a special case study in the semiotics of psychiatry, because much of the naming
was intentional.

1. Excessively high dosing.

One can't fault the FDA for striking a balance between safety and efficacy. They voted
nearly unanimously "Yes" on its monotherapy efficacy in GAD and MDD-- they agreed it
worked; but they didn't want it being used as commonly as Prozac, so voted unanimously
"No" on safety. So no monotherapy approval.

Recall that one of the monotherapy trials of Seroquel showed efficacy at 50mg. However,
because the FDA chose to go with the adjunct indication for safety reasons, it can only
approve the doses used in those adjunct trials: 150mg. Three times higher than the
"minimally" efficacious dose in a monotherapy trial.

So in choosing an indication out of safety concerns, it tripled the doses used.

The reps are not allowed to suggest you use 50mg, or tell you that those studies exist;
indeed, they aren't told about those studies themselves.
2. Reinforcement of an erroneous mechanism of action.

The FDA wants to "protect the public". They know docs will generalize the indication of one
drug to others in the class. Hence, the FDA's and AZ's interests run in parallel: not all
antipsychotics are antidepressants.

So AZ avoids all talk about mechanisms of action which are shared by all atypicals
(dopamine or serotonin antagonism) and settles on a mechanism which is specific to
Seroquel-- the NET inhibition.
However, as I hope is clear, from part 3, the NET probably has nothing to do with it.
3. Reinforcement of the cult of polypharmacy.

It worked fine as monotherapy; but it's indicated as an add on to drugs (SSRIs/SNRIs) that
failed for over 100 days at high doses.

If the combination works, what then? Was it the Seroquel alone that did it? Was it the
SSRI just taking longer to kick in? Or some kind of synergy? The FDA answer is that since
you don't know, you use both.

But you do know: Seroquel worked as monotherapy in at least two FDA trials. Given this, it
would be most logical to taper off the SSRI after a while, because you don't know two drugs
are better than one drug, but I can promise they are twice as toxic and twice as expensive.
But you won't find that recommendation in the PI or any academic journal. The FDA is
causing psychiatry to move backwards: more polypharmacy; less safety; greater costs.

4. Pharma/academic focus on "bipolar depression."

Seroquel isn't indicated as monotherapy for MDD, but it is indicated as monotherapy for
bipolar depression. Fortunately, 1) bipolar depression looks exactly like major depression
during the episode; 2) it's indicated at 300mg, so you can be guaranteed to get heavier.

From the company perspective, the obvious marketing strategy is to push for "awareness
and detection of bipolar depression" (read: "recurrent major depression is probably bipolar
disorder"), and "incentivize" the reps to have their scripts skew towards 300mg. Farewell,
depression, again.

For example, if Seroquel is truly an "antidepressant" then the competition would be Prozac.
But it isn't; it's Geodon. Reps aren't measured against SSRIs, only against atypicals, which,
in theory, they're not really competing against.

VI. Should we worry about any of this?

Nope. Once Seroquel goes generic, the impact of all of this nonsense will be minimal. Then
no one will care how you use it, at what dose; whether you use it monotherapy or in
combination with nine other drugs none of which anyone cares about either. Do a Pubmed
search on Zyprexa research in the last year. Anything?
Granted, there's probably patients who do care. But.

JULY 31, 2011

The Terrible, Awful Truth About The Debt Ceiling
 in football, when the game is already won, this is called "running out the clock"

The current debt crisis, the one that goes apocalyptic on August 2, the one that is front
page news, all the time, is a non-issue.

You don't need to know any economics or public choice theory to know this, all you need to
do is look at this pic:

Somehow this poor woman has been convinced that the essence of the problem is this deal.
I can't tell if this photo is staged for a photographer standing behind her or she thinks she's
testing Congressmen with giant Zener cards, but she clearly wants this to be about
relationships and non-partisan debate and unity and pride. Somehow she has been
convinced that what makes the U.S. different from Greece is this vote; that what
confounded the Greeks was really whether or not to raise their debt ceiling. "Come on
guys, just work it out!"

She doesn't appear to know how to read, or see, so whatever she thinks she knows came
inevitably from the news media, the one that is now using her as a symbol of something.
So with no other information you can assume the opposite and trade accordingly. (Get out
by Sept 20.)
In this case, it's easy to deduce the real issue, which has no deadline. The popular phrasing
of the real issue is "America's in debt, we spend more than we take in," but a more
meaningful understanding of that sentence is this: we're all on the federal dole, one way or
another.

Debt ceilings are accounting tricks. Whether you make the minimum monthly payment by
August 2 only affects the books; as long as you make that payment you look ok on paper
and so does Visa.

So it is inevitable that a deal will be struck by August 2, because that deal doesn't actually
mean anything. This a is husband and wife arguing about rebalancing the household
budget, each pretending they aren't going to pay the electric until he's agreed to cut back
on beer and she's agreed not to be such a bitch. Whether they do it or not is irrelevant, the
electric's still getting paid. The electric always gets paid, it has to, we need it for the chairs.

Not to mention that no politician wants to be remembered as the guy who made his
constituency go unpaid. Public choice theory will save you by August 2, even as it wrecks
you all the other times.

So when you get the temporary reprieve tomorrow-- and it is temporary-- you should do
whatever you have to to get off the dole; you are getting off of it anyway.

Because one of these days we won't be able to even make the minimum monthly payment,
and, keeping to the household budget analogy, in those circumstances what happens isn't
that the family goes bankrupt, what happens is that the couple gets divorced. Pray on this.

II.

There's a game you should play, and it is analogous to Bloody Mary, where you and your
Tiger Beat reading friends are at a slumber party, and they tell you to go into the bathroom
and hold a candle and look into the mirror, and exactly at midnight if you say "Bloody Mary"
three times a bloody face will appear. And you do it and it works, and you're like, "what
the... did that really just happen?" Then you climb back in bed only to discover your friends
put a tarantula in it.

The game is you take a major population-grabbing news story and ask, "what's going while
I'm focused on this moronity?"

You can try it with Casey Anthony and get Greek austerity and Britain union protests and
the commonplace use of the phrase, "the end of the euro"; but the lead story doesn't have
to be frivolous for the game to be instructive. 9/11 was pretty real but if it weren't for that
we might have learned how entangled the California and Federal governments were with
Enron and energy suppliers in general, and the complicity of Arthur Anderson in asset price
inflation and bubbles all over the world. Instead, we didn't.

Neither is it necessarily a conspiracy or a cover-up, it is simply related to the fact of finite

human waking hours. Unless you're chronically running 20 hours a day, to the likely
detriment of your body and silent deterioration of your sanity, just so you can do things
other people don't have time for like look up the references in the introductions of research
papers or watch Susan Sarandon's naked granddaughter act annoying(ly) in Joe, you're
simply not going to get to everything. There's just no time, your mind can only handle one
lead story a week. "But I do like to get in depth and hear both sides of the issue." That's
why you subscribe to The Atlantic.

It's also fun to play "what's the lead in other countries, where this story isn't?" or "what's
the lead for men/women if this story is the lead for women/men?" because it tells you what
the rest of the world cares about while you're hearing both sides of the J-Lo divorce.

So let's play that out now, what's the lead story if the Debt Ceiling isn't? That one's easy:

Throw in the pic of the protestors:

 and observe
that in contrast to Revolution Facebook, none of those signs are in English-- and sprinkle in
a little "Gunmen attack Sinai Gas Pipeline" and "Dozens Killed As Syrian Forces Storm
Cities" and you have everything that would have previously driven Bush to "illegally" send
the troops and Cheney to "accidentally" shoot his lawyer. The US may have the luxury of
employing "watchful waiting" while Sideways Glasses Guy retweets his Time Magazine
cover and plans on voting in the upcoming elections, but the guy above doesn't look like
he's going to wait for anything. Especially elections.

Right or wrong I have no idea, I only know that when the Debt Ceiling Crisis is averted the
Egypt problem will still be exactly the same and, unsurprisingly, so will the debt. I'm not
suggesting the radicalization of the Egyptian protests are more important than our debt, I
am simply reminding you that both the cause of the debt and the cause of the radicalization
of the protests are more important than the "debt ceiling crisis." If anyone knows Obama's
or Boehner's twitter addresses, send them a tweet.

----

3 Things Wrong With the Egyptian Revolution

The Terrible, Awful Truth About The Tax Cuts

JULY 28, 2011

Why We Are Terrible At Math (And Reading Comprehension)
 There are 20% more girls than boys in the class. If there are...

You're a teacher in a public school. You give your 3rd graders a worksheet of 50 two digit
addition questions, e.g. 43+25. The kid gets 90% of them right. Pass or fail?

II.

Now it's reading comprehension time, you give the kid this:
He gets them all right. So?

III.

The math example, above, is real, and real(ly) scary.

​ 45
+ 24
______
​ 69

So the kid had done an entire worksheet of these. But what was hidden from view was that
the kid had absolutely no idea he was adding 2 digit numbers. He had memorized the
mechanics of the process and nothing else. So when he was asked, "if you have 45 beads,
and a friend gives you 24 beads, how many beads to you have?" he didn't know to put the
numbers on top of each other like the worksheet; what he did was say the number 45 and
then start counting on his fingers, 46, 47, 48, 49.... and of course he ran out of fingers and
had no idea when to stop, so he guessed.

The problem is that as long as he completed the worksheet, you wouldn't know there was a
problem with doing math until it was way too late. If the kid is clever in other ways-- say,
fast at finger counting-- he could easily convey the impression that he understands how to
add 2 digit numbers, and what that means, and so everyone thinks he's progressing just
fine; only to reach a later point when his clever shortcut is too primitive to work. Now
suddenly you have a 6th grader who appears to falling behind. But he was never really
caught up. I suspect that this almost entirely explains Americans' universal hatred of word
problems.

IV.

A second maddeningly infuriating example. There's a summer class of 1st graders with
behavioral problems who are learning to read. Granted a unique sample set, but it's the
only one I have. Ok, so one boy is reading the story of Aladdin.

I notice that he is reading the words but there's no cadence, there's no rhythm. At times,
he'll read the first words of a second sentence into the flow of the first sentence, i.e.
"Aladdin took the lamp. Jasmine polished it." becomes "Aladdin, took the lamp Jasmine
polished. It..."

However, he is reading the words correctly. So? So the only way you can evaluate his
comprehension is to ask him questions, which he answers with little hesitation. Great, he's
reading on grade level. Except he's seen the movie. In the story, the King of Thieves
crashes the wedding and steals stuff, and you ask, "who is this guy?" and the kid says, "it's
Aladdin's father."

"But Aladdin doesn't know this yet, right? He finds that out in the end. Who does Aladdin
think it is now?"

"His father?"
The kid can't be faulted for referencing the movie, but it never occurred to the teachers
(two of them) that this was going on.

It's the same problem with the manatee story, above. A fast reader with poor
comprehension can quickly re-scan the page for the answers. "A+!" Certainly no remedial
training needed here." But that works for a paragraph, it doesn't work for 10 pages. I
accept that he may get better, but he may not; the point here is that a lack of
comprehension goes undetected because he tests well. By the time it is detected, it's too
late.

V.

Which brings me to the real point: it would require the teachers, and the parents, to be
looking for these tricks and shortcuts that kids use, and to "test" the kids in specific ways.
The immediate answer you get is, "look, in a class of 20 kids, there's just no way to test
kids individually like that." That's not the problem I'm citing here.

The problem I'm citing is that the teachers and the parents don't understand math either,
because they used these shortcuts when they were kids. I'm sure adults think they have
excellent reading comprehension, but I hope a survey of the universe quickly reveals that
they don't. They get the gist.

Try this:

There are 20% more girls in the class than boys. If there are 45 boys, how many girls are
there?

Some of you will be daunted by the problem, you don't know where to start. Interestingly,
people who aren't "good at math" try and start with some abstract idea of the total. The
easier way is to start with what you know, and draw it:
I don't know how applicable this method (Singapore math) is to students in general, but it
worked for me and I'm already good at math. And I'm sure there are other methods that
are relevant to specific "hangups." But how do you get parents and teachers to be aware of
them, let alone use them?

I'm told that the system of the day is "Everyday Math." I have no idea what that is, but my
worry is that every system of teaching is designed not to maximize learning, but to facilitate
the teaching. Standardize a process among teachers who themselves lack the deepest,
intuitive sense of the material. I have no idea what the solution is, though I am open to
suggestions.

JULY 23, 2011

Crazy

it works not because everyone is different, but because we're not

Crazy: Notes On and Off the Couch is a new book by Rob Dobrenski, a PhD psychologist in
clinical practice. He emailed me and asked me if I would review it. Note to everyone else:
this is a terrible idea.
The book is about his experiences as a therapist, from the difficulties with fees to working
with sex offenders.
It's a memoir, but once you publish a book readers interact with it in their own ways, pulling
into it things the author hadn't even considered. It stops being non-fiction and becomes a
story.
So instead of reading it like a memoir, let's read it like a story, and see if we can't learn
something about ourselves.

II.

Dobrenski's book is about his work with clients, but it's about two other things.
The second thing it is about is his own therapy with a therapist. It's a parallel story, as he's
helping people work through their issues, he's working through his own.

But this is a narrative, and every narrative has a first thing-- an inciting event. Robert
McKee's Story defines the inciting event as "an event that radically upsets the balance of
forces in the protagonist's life." It's the event that propels the story, without which there is
no story. Rob Dobrenski complies with McKee's directive to "put the inciting event into the
story as soon as possible"-- he puts it in the prologue. It is this: he meets Janet, a
beautiful redhead in his training program, his soulmate, "the one."
And she dumps him.
Now you have a story.

III.

From McKee's textbook of psychoanalysis:

Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the
balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of
life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to
put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various
dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire, trying to restore the balance of life, and they
will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human
beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical
environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be
able to restore their life to a satisfying balance. That, in the simplest possible way, defines the elements
of story.
Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be
worth your time to memorize it.
IV.
So we have a story about a man who loses his soulmate and becomes miserable, Zoloft and
therapy miserable, passive suicidality and eating her photograph miserable, all while
becoming a therapist and struggling to help others.

I'll grant you that he's 25 when Janet comes and goes, so some confusion, soul searching
and drama is to be expected. The issue for us therefore isn't whether his reactions are
normal, but why they are not uncommon. Why do a lot of men go through this, in this way?
How does a therapist do therapy, which is a kind of story? How does a writer do a story
about therapy, a story about a story?
Step 1-- actually, there's only ever one step-- focus precisely on the words.

Here's how he describes Janet:

never before (or since) had I ever believed in the notion of Love at first sight... it was as if the film Weird
Science had come to life and someone had created this physical specimen just for me. Or maybe the gods
had simply decreed that this was the moment I was to meet my soul mate. Something clicked, and I
made a conscious decision to form an indelible bond with her.

Remember: this is in the prologue. This is what starts the story. Of course it's a book and
of course it's written after the fact, and hell, perhaps it isn't even true but none of those
things are relevant because psychology operates outside of time and space. "Well, that
part's not true, I made it up." How can you understand what's true, Dusty? Truth has
seven levels. Instead, just focus on the words.
Which words? Note the words, "conscious decision." That's not a throwaway phrase. If it
was his soulmate, if the gods had decreed it, it wouldn't be a decision any more than you'd
say it would be a decision to win the lottery or fall into a hyena pit. But that he chose to fall
for her, decided that he knew how special she really was, decided to fall into a hyena pit--
then you no longer have a story about unrequited love, you have a story about old school
Freudian masochism. Think about this.
As a small point, he didn't realize it, but at that moment he was exhibiting a form of
"ownership bias" quite common among 25 year olds: since he was able to get this hot girl
and others didn't, this must be a special relationship indeed. If you consider that the
purpose of this ownership bias is the reduction of cognitive dissonance, then what it defends
against is buyer's remorse.

But the point for us here is that even before we leave the prologue of this story or finish the
first session of therapy, we should already understand that in order for him to get over her,
to "restore balance in his life," he's going to have to figure out why he did this to himself.

V.
The other thing of note in that paragraph is the movie choice, Weird Science. Here's a
handy life tip: when someone likens their life to a book or movie, pay attention, that's more
informative than two MRIs and an Amytal interview. Second tip: when they do reference
the movie, the important thing about it is the thing they forgot. So what do we know about
Weird Science?

We know it was made in 1985, which means Dobrenski's sexuality began to form around the
narratives and images of that time, which is why he referenced this move and not Bride Of
Frankenstein or Simone. This is important because when you're trying to understand
someone's relationship to sex, you have know the stories the person uses to value it, i.e.
the stories they were immersed in during their teens. In the 80s, that meant getting not
the hottest girl, but the girl from the higher class.(1) It also divided society along a two
party system, preppies vs. nerds, "beautiful people" vs. "untouchables."(2)

His use of Weird Science was intended to mean, "a perfectly constructed woman to my
exact physical specifications" but that's not what it means. Three paragraphs later,
describing his surprise at her dumping him, he says this:

I was so dumb that I was actually shocked when it happened. But we were meant to be together! Didn't
you see Weird Science?!
I saw Weird Science, all the way to the end, the end where the boys decide they don't want
their perfect woman and make her leave (in this case nicely.) I'm sure Janet thinks she left
and I'm sure Rob thinks she dumped him but I'm all in that he did everything in his power
to make her realize he wasn't right for her, to make her do the hard work of leaving him
since he couldn't cut that cord himself. When you have your perfect woman for the 90
minutes of a movie and you never have sex with her, I suppose it could mean you're just
nervous but it probably means she's not your perfect woman. (I'll grant that the opposite is
not at all informative.) And Rob may have had sex with Janet, but he probably doesn't have
to think hard to find a million other examples of things he did that, in retrospect, clearly told
him Janet wasn't the One. It's hard to depict psychic resistance in a visual story; in dreams
it is done by feeling stuck or slowed, but one solid way to do it in a movie is by making the
character wear pants in a shower while Kelly LeBrock is naked. So Weird Scienceisn't about
getting the perfect woman, it's about realizing you don't want the perfect woman.

Once she gets dressed, Lisa and Janet's entire purpose is to build up their self-confidence;
create some scenarios where they can manifest their identities, and then get out of the way.

The point, however, isn't that Dobrenski's movie choice was wrong, or that he
misunderstood its story. The point is that he chose perfectly, but misunderstood why;
which is why in therapy and in stories, similes aren't accidents. "Lisa is everything I ever
wanted in a girl, before I knew what I wanted." I hear you, Rob.

VI.

But I'm jumping ahead. Let's get back to the story.

Rob is miserable when she dumps him. Janet was perfect, and Janet is gone, into the arms
of a different man. And another man. And another one. And guess what? All the men are
hot. And so is she. And etc.
Or so he imagines. Carol, his therapist, tries to clear him by asking him to describe these
images that plague him, of Janet and her other lovers. So he says,

Janet is in her bedroom... She's gorgeous; she's wearing a negligee that she bought when we were
together. She's smiling and being all seductive." [And the guy?] "He's tall, like six-foot-two, a little bigger
than me. He's good looking. Very good-looking, built and strong.

Carol correctly interprets this all as a self-defeating negatism; he creates a "flawless rival" in
his head that he can never best; which virtually guarantees his ongoing misery. Only when
he understands that this image is unrealistic will he get over her. So, she suggests, try to
take these fantasies to their conclusion. What happens after they have sex? Does the guy
leave? Is she hurt that she was used? Does she go to the bathroom? Etc. Make her a real
person, and not a porno.
In this way Rob slowly gains control of these images and fantasies. "When images become
boring," says Carol, "they go away. And, fortunately, so do your symptoms."
So it helps Rob, but it leaves an unanswered question: why did he have these images in the
first place?

VII.
In "The Ghost of Janet" he describes the sessions that deal with getting over Janet and his
"irrational cognitions," e.g.
She was perfect.
I'llnever meet anyone else.
I'ma worthlesspersonand I don'tdeserve anyone.
I'mnothingwithouther.
The typical way of working these problems is to realize that they aren't true, that they are
self-defeating; that they originate in childhood, that they are the results of insufficient, or
inconsistent, parental love. That's the typical way, and the wrong way.
Tell me about Janet, his therapist asks. What did you like about her?
He describes what he liked about her in detail. We're in a story, so focus on the words:
1.​
2.​ She was fun to be with.
3.​
4.​ "I miss being sexual with her." "I felt good with her."
5.​
6.​ She was good looking, but in italics he writes, All these guys want to be me.
7.​
I hope it is immediately obvious, through this simple exercise of saying in words what you
think can't be expressed in words, what's wrong with his love for Janet: none of those
things have anything to do with Janet. They are all about him. In fact, Janet is pretty much
an inanimate object, a MacGuffin. The therapist detected it as well: "Could she be more
symbolic than real in some ways?" Cross out the last three words and you have it.
This applies just as readily to the guy who is upset/sad/angry that he can't get a beautiful
woman, not stopping to know or care if they should get together. She isn't real, she's just a
plot device to move your story along.
Hold on: it is IMPOSSIBLE to understand you are doing this while you're in it, while there
is a real life woman in front of you, "it can't be all about me, look, she smiles when I buy
her roses!" Which is why doing this exercise is so important.
"But I'm not insecure!" you might say, "I just like hot chicks!" No doubt. Which is why
Dobrenski's summation is perfectly accurate: "I don't believe I need her to feel good about
myself. It was just easier to feel good about myself when I was with her." Nothing like an
accessory to reinforce a brand.
VIII.
Note also that this is definitionally narcissism, but it's not at all abnormal-- this is a totally
ordinary, mid twenties kind of narcissism. It is not pathological. But that doesn't mean it
doesn't hurt just the same.

IX.
Back to the upsetting fantasies of Janet with other men. We know he got over them by
imagining more realistic scenarios. The question is, why did he imagine the unrealistic ones?
"Lots of times I paint a picture that she's a raging slut who's screwing a new guy every other night," [he
says to Carol, his therapist.] "Other times it is her soul mate. Both drive me crazy."

At that point Carol decided to teach me an interesting trick.

"We've talked a lot about how our thoughts influence our mood. People make the assumption, however,
that we always think in words. Here is a great example of how your cognitions are actually pictures.
The images are your thoughts, which are driving this jealous reaction. The good news about this is that
images are just like a film, except you are the director. With a little practice you can make the camera
do whatever you want. Please, take me through one of these images."

And he describes the scenario of seductive Janet in her negligee and the built 6'2" guy
about to plow her.
The trick is that Carol's trick isn't a trick, it is the entire purpose of the fantasies. Carol is
going to help Rob make the camera do whatever he wants, as if the camera was right now
doing something he didn't want, but in fact the camera is already doing exactly what he
wants. The camera isn't making him miserable, it is keeping him from going insane.
If we're in a story, and Rob is, than these fantasies are exposition, they are telling the
audience something. Look closely at these fantasies, at your own cuckold fantasies.
Inevitably in these fantasies there is a fetish object, something that existed in your
relationship. It's seems incidental to the fantasy but it is highly energized, eroticized: a
piece of jewelry, clothing/bathing suit, or a location (car, bar, beach, etc). The sex is the
visual focus, but the eroticized negligee that they bought when they were together is the
true main character of the fantasy.
Men make the sex the focus, while women make the fetishized object more explicit: they
obsess over the ex taking his new woman to the same places; or buying her "the same kind
of scarf he got me"; or saying the same phrases ("that's what he used to call me.")
It seems masochistic, driving yourself crazy thinking about what you've lost, making the
loss even worse by finding the specific ways that it hurts you.
But look back at what Janet was to Rob. What he really liked about Janet was what
<<Janet>> meant about him. In Jerry McGuire, when Renee says to Tom, "you had me at
hello," it's in response to the mushiest yet most accurate line in the movie: "you complete
me." No kidding. So when Janet leaves, he doesn't lose her, he loses what the part of him
she completed. That's what hurts him. The fantasies are a battlefield medic sewing up a
wound of the self with dirty thread and a rusty needle. But at least you're alive.
Sure, on the one hand you've had a huge piece of your identity torn out-- you wanted to be
the kind of guy who dated the kind of girl that Janet represented, and by leaving she's
shamed you, exposed you as not that kind of guy, as a loser-- but on the other hand you
were that guy, and you can prove it: she's wearing your negligee.
That loss of self is what you're trying to recapture with the masochistic fantasies: she's hot
enough to have any guy she wants (and she picked you); she is in total control of her sex,
wielding it for pleasure or for profit however she wants; so when she had sex with you, and
liked it-- it signifies your own value. When some faceless stud undoes her bikini top in front
of everyone, and she confidently flaunts her body-- that's your self-confidence she's
flaunting.(3)
Since you see the fantasies but not the wounded self you think one's real and the other
isn't. The hard part is to accept these fantasies as merelyinformation, as part of the story,
what do they tell the audience? The fantasies aren't the wound, the wound you have to
close is the self: I'm not broken now that she's gone, I'm not a worse person, her leaving
doesn't reveal me to be a loser. The next woman I meet will not know or care that I am
the man Janet dumped. I'm depressed but still whole. I want her to have sex and be
happy, or frankly it doesn't matter if she has sex, because it has nothing to do with me.
When that wound closes, you won't need the fantasies anymore. Or the negligee.

X.

Rob closes his book with parallel stories of endings: ending of his therapy, endings of clients'
therapies, and endings of his involvement with clients' ongoing therapies. Actual therapists
spend offensively little time understanding how and when to end a therapy (Rob and Carol
do it right); and even ordinary humans seem to have great difficulty, anxiety, saying
good-bye, hanging up the phone, not feeling compelled to tack on a "why don't you text me
when you've settled in your new place?"

But knowing how to end things, whether it is therapy or a relationship or a book, is a

fundamental skill that allows us to move on. Otherwise the past is dragged around like a
deployed parachute, slowing your every move and suggesting to anyone who sees you that
you must only just have landed.

Every story has an ending, and the more satisfying the ending the better the story.

------------

1. An example: Molly Ringwald played the unpopular kid in Sixteen Candles, pursuing the
preppie jock; yet in The Breakfast Club she played the popular, "beautiful" type pursued by
marginal character Judd Nelson. She looked exactly the same in both, but her "value" as
sex object (not girlfriend) was higher in The Breakfast Club. She went back to being a
desexualized person (not object) in Pretty In Pink. John Cryer, who was in love with Molly
throughout the movie and eventually loses her to the preppie guy, is compensated for his
loss by the sex object Kristy Swanson.

2. Movies like Heathers and ultimately Mean Girls permanently disposed of this narrative,
and high school movies now generally favor parliamentary style politics: multiple parties
forming coalitions. Teen movies now also downplay the ages, so while the plot of Weird
Science couldn't be redone using 40 year olds, you could flip the ages in The Hangover or
High School Musical and the stories and their themes stay mostly the same. They are both
movies about childish adults, or adultish children, which are the same thing. Interestingly,
Zac Efron's other movie 17 Again believably recreated 80s style power divisions and
objectifications precisely because it was a movie about a middle aged man being 17 again,
i.e. the movie was believably the worldview of such a middle aged man.

3. There is an element of aggression in these fantasies, and the extent to which this or the
other explanation is operational depends on how "whole" you were to begin with.
Unconsciously and deliberately putting your ex in these fantasies, forcing her to have sex
with strangers, forcing her into sex she would not want herself; commandeering her image
without her consent, destroys the integrity of the woman by reducing her only to an object--
all of these are regressive acts. This is a kind of revenge, compensation for the loss-- if I
can't have your love, fuck you. (see footnote 1, above.)

JULY 15, 2011

My name is NotMichaelBay, and I just fucked your girlfriend

objet petit a my ass

The article below is a fake interview intended as parody. I did not actually interview Michael
Bay. The article is written entirely by me in the spirit of humor without any malice or ill-will
towards any of the people or institutions named within. In particular, in no way do the
statements in the article below reflect the thoughts, opinions, beliefs or statements of the
real Michael Bay. This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons living,
dead, robotic, or vermiform is purely coincidental. It's a joke, people.

I'm here with NotMichaelBay, (not the) director of Transformers: Dark Of The
Moon. Thank you for sitting down with me.
Yeah.
I'd like to begin by reading the opening sentence of one critic's review: "Michael
Bay's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is a visually ugly film with an incoherent
plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more
unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies." How do you respond?
By making a fourth movie. This guy sounds like a dick.
But it certainly can't be the first time you've heard similar criticisms.
Come on, you think anyone who said "the movie isn't shabby or painful, but romantic and
wonderfully entertaining" about An Education can be trusted to review my movies?(1)
So you knew this was Roger Ebert? You memorize movie reviews?
I know everything. My game is tight. I'm the guy who sees you and your girlfriend at a bar,
and I roll up and say, "Hi, I'm going to fuck your girlfriend" and you guys just giggle
because you're too much of a pussy to tell me to fuck off. I buy you guys some drinks, tell
a few jokes, next thing you know you're waiting up and I'm inside your girlfriend.
Everybody wins. I give you what you want, I take what I want, and everyone hates me
because it all seems so easy, which is what they want.
So they hate on me, as if they could be me but choose not to. Come on. Haters gonna hate,
and haters' girlfriends gonna cheat.
But audiences have come to expect, well, perhaps not a Les Mistonsor even a
Rashomon, but at least a film which doesn't simply reuse existing footage from
older movies and add in a new robot.

Isn't that just a sign of artistic indolence?

I'm not reuising shit. It's called 'sampling.' Like a rapper. Fuck you.
Sampling? But sampling requires you to take an existing work of art and
reinterpret it for a new audience, infuse it with a new meaning. Is that your
claim?
I claim I sampled the Inception soundtrack for T3.
What did you mean in doing that?
That Chris Nolan's my bitch. Fuck him and his arbitrary MacGuffins.
And there is the ubiquitous complaint that your movies are made for "15 year old
boys." For example, your first shot of Carly [played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley]
has her clad in only a white men's shirt, and you offer a long, 3D tracking shot of
her climbing the stairs-- on her toes, no less, and it appears you've placed the
camera on the floor and are shooting upwards. Some have claimed this is merely
pornographic pandering to a post-pubescent demographic.(2) How do you
respond?
I need to respond to that? Seriously? I put her half naked in a movie, and you want
justification?
Look, Rosie was a Victoria Secret model, right? So I set up the shot the same way she's
shown in a Victoria Secret commercial, because she is a Victoria Secret model.(3)
Ah, you've deliberately made explicit Carly-the-character's semiotic connection to
Rosie-the-actress, making the film's world draw on the real world. Carly the
beautiful girlfriend is "in reality" Rosie, who is known to be a Victoria Secret
model, which is itself another signifier, another character, and so on ad infinitum;
there is no terminal woman-in-herself. Thus 'woman' is merely an image, to
attract the Lacanian gaze; yet because she cannot be represented in any other way
except as such an image she a priori eludes the gaze.
Exactly. And she's got a great rack.
So in doing this, you've uncovered Carly , i.e. "woman", as a partial object, the
objet petit a. Women can only exist as fantasy, the cause of desire.
Her only fucking job before she met me was to get people to look at her; so I gave her that
exact same job but wearing more clothes, and people are acting like I'm some sort of
pervert.
But the difference is that her partial nudity is appropriate in the context of a
commercial to sell lingerie. In a film, it's merely gratuitous.
She's not selling any fucking lingerie, she's selling herself and the brand and the lingerie is
tagging along for the ride. What, I got to draw you a fucking picture?
Let's turn to the story. Numerous critics have decried the meaninglessness of
much of the film's action. Why does the copier attack the office staff? What is the
purpose of the giant Decepticon worm? There are plot holes and inconsistencies--
Woah! Slow down, wildman, those were on purpose. Look, we're all being raised by TV. Do
you think as 4 year olds we really understood what the hell was going on on Batman or
Scooby-Doo? You think your kids can really follow the plot of anything by Pixar? Since we've
been able to enjoy movies anyway, without following the story, there's no incentive to follow
it anymore. And since we have no incentive, we don't get no practice-- and now we can't
follow a story, story gets distracting. Just like a porno. Fucking the most confusing movie
ever made was voted to be... Vanilla Sky. WTF, you're confused by Vanilla fucking Sky?
These lunatics aren't confused just by B plot, they're confused by B roll. So we cut that shit
right out and replace it with something on fire.
You deliberately reduce story integrity while simultaneously enhancing the
viso-auditory immediacy of the experience? Isn't that ultimately self-negating,
even Dadaist?
Explosition, not exposition. That's how we do.
That seems--
In real life, too. President Bush knew we were fucked by history, right? He got there day 1,
opened the Book, and was like, fuck me, this is what's really going on...? And then he
looked at America and said, these fucktards couldn't find Iraq on a map of Iraq labeled
'Iraq', no way are these Raymond loving motherfuckers going to understand anything about
labor costs and the inevitability of falling foreign reserve accumulation. Let's go with
'WMDs.'" A decade of historical analysis later and the deepest anyone's been able to go is,
"they lied, it's really about oil!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Jesus, what asshats. Now every time poor
Obama looks over his speeches he has to say, "no good, too many syllables."
So yeah, anything that has to do with thinking or blinking is edited out in post. That's why it
cost so much to make. But the original script for T3:DOTM is fucking Finnegans Wake, you
can believe that shit.
No doubt it more rigorously explained the giant Decepticon worm?
Fuck you. It's looking for spice.
I'd also like to ask you about the rumor that actress Megan Fox was fired on the
order of Steven Spielberg, who demanded you--
Steven didn't tell me shit, no one tells me shit, I'll kill you and witnesses, fuck that stupid
morally ambivalent alien making motherfucker. I fired Megan to make a point. I replaced her
in the third installment of a huge series with a complete unknown, and it didn't affect the
movie at all.

Well, she wasn't a complete unknown, she was a Victoria Secret model--
You don't know anything about movies, do you? You probably believe it when actors say
they do their own stunts or hate it when the paparazzi surprises them at the agreed upon
time and place. Replaced Megan? I could have replaced every single one of those actors and
actresses with some other supermodels, and the movie would have been better. Fuck that,
I don't even need people, I could have Simoned the whole thing. I did them a favor, they
need me, and when you start forgetting that you're just a motion capture device for better
breast renderings, I kink your feeding tube. Good luck on your audition at Lifetime.
Perhaps a supporting character can be changed, but surely you couldn't replace
Shia--
I could replace him with a fucking glass cylinder of my farts and you'd watch it. Twice, IMAX
3D and cable. You think Dr. Who and soaps are the only ones who can replace these idiots
with other idiots?
But some movies open exclusively on the force of the lead actor. Julia Roberts,
Will Smith--
Ha! And you're criticizing me for making shit movies? Look, there will always be a place for
them, right? Voice work, what have you. "Hey, we got a bad ass talking puma that says
"motherfucker" a lot. Call Sammy J." "We need a sassy, independent, girl who will
immediately and happily conform to the requirements of a patriarchal society in exchange
for material security. Meg Ryan that shit up."
Sure, Julia in the trailer brings the boxes to the box office, but at this point there's so much
CGI used on her she may as well be a fucking Decepticon. Or did you think that's her
natural skin? You don't need big name actresses anymore, you just need some mo to say
"three generations of women" or a montage scene of four divorcees with wine glasses and
dancing in a kitchen of Final Cut Pro vegetables. You're blaming me for the stupidity of
movies? Blame women.
Your argument that women are responsible for bad movies seems untenable. With
respect, your movies aren't even aimed at women.
Hey, fuckly, listen to me, my movies exist because of women, because they've driven men
batshit crazy into 'man caves' and Call Of Duty XI. Did they have giant robot movies in the
1930s and 40s? No, all of those movies had dance numbers. Back when a guy could punch a
dame for overcooking a chicken there was no shame in watching some fool tap dance his
way through WWII. Now these bitches expect you to change a diaper and shave your balls?
Fuck that. Giant robots.
Is all modern cinema then reflexively phallocentric? Does disposable art created
on a background of consumerist capitalism necessitate a misogynist subtext?
I said fuck that. Giant robots.
Do you truly believe that modern males feel emasculated by the rise of the female
underclass?
No guy feels emasculated by women, at all. He thinks men in general are emasculated by
women, but not himself. His rage is that since women have emasculated everyone else, he's
forced to sublimate his own urges to fit into this emasculated society. So he's holding two
contradictory ideas: that he himself is man enough to resist the emasculization that women
impose on men; and simultaneously justify why he isn't the man he thinks he should be. In
essence, he's created the perfect explanation for why he is, and rationalization for
becoming, Nietzsche's Last Man.
So it's a failure not of assimilating a feminine power, but a strictly narcissistic
defense of the ego.
It's also why you're going to see more movies where the action hero is a little girl. They
represent the last attempt at staving off death. First you're going to be a superhero; then
you'll meet a superhero; and finally your kid will be the superhero. And mom has to die in
order for the Electra Complex to be fully realized.(4)
That was-- remarkably insightful...
Bottom line this shit up: everyone loves jive talking robots.
I sense that perhaps it's more than misogynist, perhaps it goes to the level of
minsanthropy, even nihilism? You've offered a critique of the inevitability of art
but the irrelevance of the artist.
Hey, what the fuck do you think I am? I am a great artiste, with a capital
T,I,T,S,A,R,E,G,R,E,A,T. You don't think I could make "good" movies? I went to school at
Wesleyan, I studied under Basinger. I can make anything go triple platinum, anything. I
could make just the poster of a movie and it would win every Oscar in every category every
year, fuck James Cameron and his stupid boat. Do you know what would happen to this
planet if I made a porno? That would be it, done, everyone in the world would drown in
their own ejaculate. We'd have to Noah's Ark two of everything and start civilization over.
Then why don't you make more serious movies, more enduring films? Why do you
choose to make--
Because Obama pays me not to, like a subsidies program, because otherwise everyone else
would go out of business and California would have to be returned to the Pacific or sold to
the Chinese.
The movie is called The Transformers, ok?-- as in I transform you from unemployed to
employed. I'm a motherfucking jobs program, I'm like the New Big Deal. It's a movie about
giant robots, what the fuck do I needs peoples fo? Because: Obama needs to cut the space
program, so I put Buzz Aldrin in a movie. I gets him paids. John Malkovich is a versatile
actor, an artist, but he's not getting paid shit for any of his crap. He calls me up-- boom.
Payday. John Turturro's been in 20 movies since The Big Lebowski. Name one. Can't. SAG
calls me up, boom, his kids go to college. Now he can make shit like Somewhere Tonight
and tell everyone he's not an actor for the money.
No more Matrix? Boom, Hugo Weaving is Megatron. Leonard Nimoy needs new dentures?
Boom, chewing apples like a motherfucking horse, vitamins and fiber.
I own Hollywood, I control destinies, there's nothing I can't do on film. Not only did I give
Frances McDormand a job, I got that bitch to look almost sexual. In 3D. Do you know
anyone else who can do that? You see Fargo? Did you want to fuck her in Fargo? No. But I
guarantee you someone in America saw T3 and jerked off to Frances. Fuck all y'all.
So the future of cinema comes full circle, back away from the cult of the actor to
the primacy of the director. You see a future where even mass consumption
cinema follows the director; we'll choose to see "Michael Bay's new movie" not
"Shia LaBeouf's new movie." This had previously been the privilege of
director-artists-- Woody Allen or Hitchcock come to mind-- but who did not enjoy
mass appeal.
If someone goes to see Transformers because it's "Shia Labeouf's new movie" and that
person is not Shia Labeouf I'll slit my wrists.

Thank you for your time and candor.

This parody is free speech protected by the First Amendment. No videos are hosted on this
site and remain the property of their original owners. The images, stills, and video clips are
the property of their original owners and their use herein is permissible under the fair use
provisions of U.S. copyright law and under the corresponding legal theories of copyright and
intellectual property law around the world. Again, I didn't actually interview Michael Bay,
but I'd love to.

---

1. A much better review of An Education

2.

3.

4. The next phase in the evolution of action movies

JULY 6, 2011
When A Culture Is This Invested In The Lie, The Culture Is Finished
 what does the author all of us want to be true?

The title of the article is called, How To Spot A Narcissist, and it is similar to thousands of
such articles about narcissism by being exactly the same thing.

Here are some sentences from the article, taken entirely at random, see if you can detect
the theme:

Narcissists will be thrilled to hear that as a group they are rated as more attractive and likable than
everyone else at first appearance...

Tucker Max and his ilk stoke our attention and our ire --sometimes in equal measure. They are a
decidedly mixed bag; therein lies one of the many paradoxes of narcissism...

Women who score high on tests of narcissism consistently dress more provocatively than their more
modest counterparts; male narcissists resort to displays of wit and braggadocio...

A cross section of the narcissist's ego will reveal high levels of self-esteem, grandiosity, self-focus, and
self-importance...

Erica Carlson and her colleagues found that college students scoring high in narcissism rated
themselves more intelligent, physically attractive, likable, and funny than others, as well as more
power-oriented, impulsive, arrogant, and prone to exaggerate their abilities!

How can narcissists maintain their inflated self-image even though they know how they are perceived
by others?
In the sexual realm, promiscuity is a key strategy that allows narcissists to maintain control...

And it closes with an offer to self-test using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Go
ahead, take it. Let me guess: you scored low.

Of course you did.

II.

Whether the article is technically accurate is besides the point, the point is why it exists,
why they all exist.

Read the article: who is a narcissist? The narcissist is the other, the unattainable other. It
opens with Tucker Max, who has had lots of sex with beautiful women. Since you chose not
to be able to have lots of sex with beautiful women, you aren't a narcissist, which is some
sort of consolation prize, I guess. Enjoy your Netflix queue.

All of the photographs, except one, are of super hot, super sexy women.
Are you a super hot, super sexy woman? No, you're pretty, but you're not so obsessed with
your looks. And you're obviously smarter than her. Phew. You're not a narcissist. You can
go back to torturing your boyfriend's soul.

Narcissists thrive in big, anonymous cities, entertainment-related fields (think reality TV), and
leadership situations where they can dazzle and dominate others without having to cooperate or suffer
the consequences of a bad reputation.

Not you? You should stop wearing deodorant, it masks the delicious empathy.

There is one picture is of a man:

and it seems abstractly arty enough to be a reasonable depiction of narcissism, except this
is the title of that photo: man looking at his reflection in a broken mirror. Oh, so it's the
mirror's fault. If only this shirtless Effexor success story could get a quality mirror, then he
could see himself the right way. (Who wants to go po-mo?: note that the hot chick has a
perfectly good mirror.)

There is one other photo of a man and a woman, both looking at themselves in hand
mirrors. Get it? That's not you, right?
The photo is a deliberate lie of their/your unconscious. If you want that to be technically
and psychologically accurate, if you want to rock your ego, the proper depiction would be
each one looking at the other person'sreflection in the mirror.
Because a real narcissist doesn't see himself, he sees himself reflected back by the other
person. Is this chick correct enough to be the kind of woman that the kind of man I want
everyone to think I am would be with? "What?" I know it's hard, but you have to do the
work.

III.

The article, like the thousands of others, offers explanations as to why we're often attracted
to narcissists. (NB: that must mean you're not a narcissist.)
They're "attractive," "extroverted," "talented," "dominant".... and maybe these things are
true and maybe they are not but the reason they are mentioned is the same reason there
are always obligatory references to evolutionary psychology, so that you can say: you were
tricked, you were seduced, you were manipulated, as if you had no responsibility in the
matter.

You think you chose your partner for the good qualities and the bad ones are baggage; but
you chose them both because they fit your needs. That the relationship later failed didn't
mean you were getting something from it. "Blaming the victim!" I'm not blaming the
victim, I am observing a universal rule: the common denominator in all of your failed
relationships is you.

I've written well over a hundred words about who is or isn't a narcissist, not to out them but
to force you into the condition of self-reflection, to force you to ask, "do I do this to other
people?" Is this me?"

My next sentence was going to be, "spotting a narcissist won't do you any good," but even
that statement is a hedge. The spotting is a deliberate defensive maneuver. "That guy, and
thus not me!"

Spotting a narcissist will get you nowhere because the problem isn't the narcissist, the
problem is you.

---

Read this: A Generational Pathology

JULY 1, 2011
Jezebel Proves Scott Adams Is Right
 (note to lawyers: I made this, not Scott Adams, and falls under parody, so bite me.)

Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, sparked a feminist controversy of sorts, and then he asked for
feedback from:

Judge

Psychologist (professional)

Logic Professor

Scientist

etc, by which he meant: men.

And he got a lot of feedback

If you already know the controversy, skip right to III.

II.

Now consider human males... Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating...
The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems
right. Obviously we shouldn't blame the victims....
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are
shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable... Whose
fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn't ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that
brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, "Here's your square hole"?
That's Scott Adams, writing the not original "men are oppressed in a female controlled
society" argument. Men would naturally be raping and pillaging and wearing horn helmets,
but the world's not set up that way anymore, and its not set up that way by women. They
have all the power, and they have restricted men from acting on their penile instincts.
Here's is the prototypical "feminist" response/censorship petition, from Change.org:
Scott Adams, has written a blog insinuating that the act of a man raping a woman is a natural instinct
and that society is to blame for these things, not the man who committed the rape.

Which isn't what he said, but, whatever.

III.

Let's start with Jezebel, who, despite having the moral high ground and being staffed by
people who are paid to practice writing about this sort of thing, completely botch it. If you
want to increase understanding or bring people together, do not do anything close to what
Jezebel does here.
Jezebel's response is typical of the way Americans argue politics and social theory: straw
man and appeal to authority. It's obvious the writer finds Adams's blog offensive, and I will
accept that she wants the world to be a better place, but no where does she make even an
attempt to articulatewhy she finds it offensive. After she quotes Adams, she writes:

Wow. Trying to make it sound like your argument falls under the category of "gender theory" while
saying that "boys" are pretty much designed to be rapists and we'd better get used to it is...I don't even
know what it is anymore.
And nothing else. There are other words, sure, but just like the above none of them refute
his point, they're just ad hominem padding, "he's a jerk for thinking it." I'm sure your
regular readers agree, but for the dummies among us, can you perhaps explain why?

Which leads me to suspect that she doesn't actually know why it's wrong, only that it is
wrong. And to escape detection, she offers deliberate misreadings like "he's justifying rape"
so that she can follow it with "'Nuff said."

Here's the very practical problem: Adams is not alone in thinking that women are running
the culture and men are being emasculated. If Jezebel's goal is simply to insult him, fine,
but tremendously boring. But if their goal was also to promote a vision of social equality,
they've done the opposite. All they did was bully and insult him. "You're a jerk, accept it! I
said accept it!" But that power is precisely what he's complaining about. So not only does
it not convince Adams (or anyone else) what he's saying is wrong, it confirms for him he is
right about them.

IV.

Salon pretended to offer a reasoned response. Three paragraphs of fluff, then in the fourth
paragraph she begins:

There are two important rebuttals to be made here.

Ok, finally, please proceed:

First and foremost: thanks for all the gags about casual Friday, but Scott Adams sounds like he's lost his
freaking marbles.

Hmm, interesting and unexpected point. And second?

Second, as a colleague pointed out recently, remember the old sexist argument that women weren't
qualified for positions of power because their lady hormones would make them act all crazy and
emotional?...You don't hear that one so much anymore, do you?
Adams, in contrast, represents a different extreme -- and extremely lunkheaded -- version of an
alternate line of sexist thought. And in his own clumsy way, he articulates something many of us have
heard repeatedly over the course of our lives, an argument that boils down to boys being boys. Left to
their own devices, men apparently would just go about raping and pillaging all the livelong day, with
occasional breaks for grilling and watching ESPN. They're just being men, and doggone it if this pesky
thing called civilization keeps getting in the way.
That's not a rebuttal, that's unfunny sophistry. She's basically saying, "not all men are
rapists." Again, no one disagrees with that; but the more nuanced reworking of Adams's
arguments is whether civilization is the only factor that prevents humans from falling into
violent anarchy. After the fallout settles, should we should expect more rapes and murders,
or the same number? That's a very interesting question, one that goes to the heart of the
justice system vs. poverty.

But rather than have that discussion, Salon merely states, as self-evident, that Adams is a
lunatic.

That, in a backwards and poorly articulated way, is Adams's point. Why is he required to
justify and clarify and hedge and explain, yet Jezebel and Salon can make it axiomatic that
he's wrong? Because they control society?
 ( made by me, not Scott Adams)

Jezebel and Salon have utterly failed to convince anyone who was not already convinced
that Adams is wrong; and have reinforced to Adams, et al, that women are running the
culture. If you want to swing back at me that it's not Jezebel and Salon's job to change
people's thinking, fine, but then what the hell are people doing reading Jezebel and Salon?

It's probably unnecessary but still completely worth pointing out that the only reason
anyone is offended by Scott Adams is that he is Scott Adams the famous cartoonist, and not
Scott Adams the retail manager at Best Buy.

IV.

So what is wrong with what Adams said? What argument might convince him that he is
wrong, or at least help him release some of that anger?

Adams seems to be believe that men are naturally sexually aggressive, and women/society
put limits on their natural impulses. This is what Jezebel got wrong: he doesn't believe this.
He wishes this.
And when he says society is a "prison" for men's natural urges to penetrate random women
like in caveman days, he is not really complaining about this prison. That's what he wants.
He wants it to be true that society is cockblocking him.
Because if that is true, then it isn't his own inability to score chicks that's limiting him. "I'd
love to just walk up to some hot chick in a bar and just take her home and bang her," he
might think, "but society doesn't let me." Really? Dude, you need to switch bars.
Not being able to easily and fluidly pick up women is maddeningly destructive to many men,
not tempered by other successes in their lives. We hear the refrain that media images
create unrealistic expectations of women to be hot, etc, but the flip side is that some men
can't understand why everyone else seems to be able to hook up easily, freely, fun-ly, while
they're in the corner all boiling rage. Confronted with this, they have two choices: I'm
inadequate, or the Matrix is against me. Men who don't want to kill themselves choose b.
Notice carefully and repeatedly that I didn't say "have sex with." The point isn't the having
of sex, the point is the convincing of someone to have sex with you. That, and not the sex
itself, is a measure of your value as a man. The value has to be determined by someone
else. If she thinks you're worth it and she doesn't know you, then you must be. The sex
part is fun and best done standing up, but irrelevant.
There are men who sleep with three dozen women and still think they can't pick up girls,
because they have an explanation for why each one didn't count: she was drunk, she was
on the rebound, she was slumming it, she was trying to make her boyfriend jealous...
Note that Adams is a world famous cartoonist... and it is still not enough. Neither is the fact
that he's convinced at least one woman (wife) to sleep with him ("that doesn't count, she
loves me.") Why? Because he hasn't allowed those legitimate successes to define him
("that's not who I am"-- which is also why he is reinventing himself as a blogger), and so
he's trapped in the mind of a pre-cartoonist nerd, finding a scale for his self-worth in people
who don't know him's eyes.
What Adams doesn't realize is that this world controlled by women, who prevent his
fulfillment and happiness, does not exist; and that he thinks it does drives women, and at
least a few men, bananas. But it is absolutely necessary to his survival that he believes it
exists, or else all is lost.
I'll bet he has little cartoons taped to his office wall. He should replace one of those
cartoons with a little yellow post-it note upon which he should write, with a Sharpie, seven
words: you are being lied to, by yourself.

----

Why is Tracy Morgan in trouble a second time? It isn't what he said.

JUNE 27, 2011

Is The Cult Of Self-Esteem Ruining Our Kids?
 what does the author want to be true?

The article is called How To Land Your Kid in Therapy, it's in The Atlantic, and this is how it
dares to start:
IF THERE'S ONE thing I learned in graduate school, it's that the poet Philip Larkin was right. ("They
fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.")
Get the rum, we're going to need it. No, all of it.

I.
Lori Gottlieb is a writer for the various outlets that pose as intelligent-- Slate, NPR, Salon,
whose demo is people who use the word "inappropriate" and know there are no wrong
answers. She also wrote a book called, Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good
Enough which roughly coincided with her never marrying anybody.
Other than submit articles to The Atlantic, she did something else that a lot of confused,
directionless people do: she became a therapist. Easy, everybody, hold that thought for a
minute, we'll come back to it.
But soon I met a patient I'll call Lizzie. Imagine a bright, attractive 20-something woman with strong
friendships, a close family, and a deep sense of emptiness. She had come in, she told me, because she was
"just not happy." And what was so upsetting, she continued, was that she felt she had nothing to be
unhappy about. She reported that she had "awesome" parents, two fabulous siblings, supportive friends,
an excellent education, a cool job, good health, and a nice apartment... So why did she have trouble
sleeping at night? Why was she so indecisive, afraid of making a mistake, unable to trust her instincts
and stick to her choices? Why did she feel "less amazing" than her parents had always told her she was?
Why did she feel "like there's this hole inside" her? Why did she describe herself as feeling "adrift"?

I was stumped.

I'm not surprised. None of those variables have anything to do with happiness. Any way
Lizzie has of identifying herself based on something she's done rather than something she
has or is? Any of those characteristics a verb? No? (1-- read the footnotes later.)
So I'm not surprised Lizzie is unhappy, the question is whether Lori, as her therapist, should
have been surprised.
Maybe she was, maybe she wasn't but she spends 4 pages explaining that kids today are
coddled, given everything, protected from harm/hurt/failure and squeezed into bike
helmets, and this has the terrible effect of creating wandering, unfulfilled, depressed adults.
Too-perfect parenting has made the kids soft.
That may be the thesis of article, and it may be factually accurate, but boy oh boy is it not
at all the reason she wrote it, or why it's the cover story for The Atlantic.

II.
In order to understand what is the real cause of the ruin of children, what makes them into
"narcissists" (her word), you have to look carefully at why this story is in The Atlantic. I
don't think even the lifetime subscribers in Westchester, NY turn to The Atlantic for the
current scientific data in psychology, and no one turns to Gottlieb for parenting advice.
They're coming because they already know the answer they want to be true but want it
stated more eloquently. What does it say better than its readers could, that confirms their
own beliefs?
Let's go through it. When confronted with Lizzie's unhappiness, what is the first thing
Gottlieb considers?
Where was the distracted father? The critical mother? Where were the abandoning, devaluing, or
chaotic caregivers in her life?
Bad parenting, ok, fair guess. But, as the title of the article reveals, it's actually good
parenting, overparenting, coddling. Do we all agree? Please observe that while this may be
the opposite problem, it is in fact the exact same psychic solution: unhappiness is not your
fault, it's caused by someone else. Jot that down, we'll come back to it later.

Consider a toddler who's running in the park and trips on a rock... some parents swoop in immediately,
pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying....
"Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing [the kids'] anxiety for them their entire childhoods,"
[psychologist] Mogel said of these kids, "so they don't know how to deal with it when they grow up."
The above consonants and vowels completely correspond with the preferred logic of Atlantic
readers, but I'd like you to consider, for a moment, the kind of atrociously malignant parent
that does not rush to comfort their toddler "even before she starts crying." Are you raising
a ninja? "I just let her feel the burn, get used to the sight of blood. Builds character."
Pass me that hammer, I want to build your character.

No one who doesn't eat human flesh would let their kid cry and do nothing. So what is the
purpose of this logic if it actually defies reality?

Take a second and consider the likely offenders of this style of "too-perfect," rush to protect
overparenting. Do they have mullets? No. Live in Daytona? No. Do they read Sports
Illustrated? Guns & Ammo? No, they read The Atlantic.

So the purpose of this article can't be to suggest to its readers they are terrible parents, and
anyway they already suspect they're overparenting and that it is bad. They're turning to
Gottlieb and The Atlantic for therapy, to be told that they are indeed overparenting but it's
understandable... you have good intentions.

III.

And there's an awesome, unintentional subtext: parents are overinvolved with their kids
because they want what's best for them, but this has the perverse effect of harming them,
and so........... it's ok not to be. Why don't you get a facial?
It is certainly ok/infinitely preferable not to spend so much time with your kids. But saying
you're doing it because it's good for the kids is like saying you're getting an Asian massage
because it's good for Asians.

IV.

They didn't rush because the kid can't handle pain, but because they can't tolerate the kid's
pain. They rushed to the kid's side because it protects the kid, yes,, but primarily because
they can't handle the anxiety of it all. What's my role as a parent? What do I do?

I go through this because Gottlieb wants it to be true that the cult of self-esteem is ruining
our kids, but the cult of self-esteem has already ruined the kids who are now adults. It
produced her and her peers. And now they are raising new kids, well or badly I have no
idea, but their main preoccupation isn't with raising better kids but with self-justification.
This fact is completely lost on her.

As a parent, I'm all too familiar with this [entitled kids with too many options.] I never said to my son,
"Here's your grilled-cheese sandwich." I'd say, "Do you want the grilled cheese or the fish sticks?"... He'd
come to expect unlimited choice.

Guess what six words she says next.

When I was my son's age, I didn't routinely get to choose my menu, or where to go on weekends--and
the friends I asked say they didn't, either. There was some negotiation, but not a lot, and we were
content with that. We didn't expect so much choice, so it didn't bother us not to have it until we were
older, when we were ready to handle the responsibility it requires.
This is laughable coming from anybody, but is she unaware that she's written several books
describing her own childhood psychiatric visits and teen anorexia? And serial dating
culminating in nothing? If I were a therapist, I'd label this as "poor insight."
The kid's problem isn't that he is offered too many choices at all. The kid's problem is that
his mom believes these choices are the thing that will ruin him, that's where she sees
danger, not TV or Xbox or learning violence is always wrong, but in choice.
There's no insight about the dynamic effects of a mother who feels compelled to offer him
meaningless choices-- that she is discharging the anxiety of her own indecisiveness onto her
kid. Fish sticks and grilled cheese may not seem like heavy decisions but there are
consequences nonetheless, and if she doesn't have to bear them, she'd just as soon pass
them on to a four year old.
I wasn't there, but I will bet ten thousand dollars that every guy she has ever dated has had
the following interaction with her:

Guy: What do you want to do tonight?

Her: I don't know, what do you want to do tonight?
and:
Guy: I'm at Blockbuster, what movie do you want to rent?
Her: I don't know, what movie do you want to rent?

Jesus Christ, just say Officer And A Gentleman and let me get out of this death spiral.
Since she chose to go with doctor supervised immaculate conception, the kid now gets the
job of sounding board for dinner choices. You know what choice she'll never offer him? The
choice to fight back on the playground or disagree with her. Being given the illusion of free
choice when all of the choices are meaningless or terrible has a name, and they used to
think it caused schizophrenia, so grant me that it probably drives some kids to therapy.
A similar phenomenon is the parent who "has" to quit smoking, or drinking, or cursing, or
whoring, or whatever, "now that I have kids." So noble. Nothing better than making the
kid a living replacement for your own hysterectomized superego. There is absolutely no
chance, none at all, that your resentment of him will ever come through in your
interactions. ESPECIALLY not when your kid one day tries these things himself. Impossible.
Your parenting is rock solid.

V.
Along with the article, The Atlantic includes a video clip of Gottlieb interviewing another
therapist. They did this because they are trying to kill me. If you want your head to ignite,
fast forward the video to 1:05 and watch the next nine seconds, then call Universal Studios
and tell them you're the next Ghost Rider.

It's worth watching the video, but here's what happens: brown haired Gottlieb introduces a
smiling white hair and glasses Dr. Mogel, who responds:

Mogel: Hi, Lori.

(cut to Gottlieb)
Gottlieb: I just wanted to start off and say, it seems like this idea of ordinary is so----
(cut to Mogel)
The moment Gottlieb gets to the word "ordinary," Mogel nods her head vigorously in
agreement and then starts writing something down. WTF is she writing?? a) it's an
interview, b) Gottlieb hasn't even said anything yet, and c) Mogel's the one being
interviewed!
So obviously it's a nervous thing, a reflexive gesture, sure, I get it, but what you and she
don't get is that every time a therapist writes something down it's a nervous thing. They
write to discharge their anxiety of too long looking into a person's eyes and it not leading to
either "I love you" or "I'm going to kill you." I know this is going to run me afoul of every
comfy-chair therapist in America, but there is no reason to write anything down, ever.
You're not a detective, you're not looking for coded messages or lost time, the patient is
there for answers and the structure of your relationship is itself the answers. Why does she
like me? Why does she get bored/angry/expansive when I do this? Why did she continue
with a therapist who is so uncomfortable around other people that they need a yellow pad
as an emotional shield? Seriously, that's not an accident at all, answer that question and
the therapy is done, the patient is cured.

We can discuss good and bad technique later; the point here is to establish that these two
people are creating "environments" that are safe for themselves. It may also be safe for
the patient, it may be labeled as "for the patient" but I hope it is evident that the real
impetus is the comfort of the therapist. With me so far? Ok: that's also how they parent.
"Many of us went through psychoanalysis, and we learned the minutiae of despising our parents and all
the horrible mistakes they made."
What kind of psychoanalysis did this woman pretend she went through? Only a two year old,
a 16 year old or a narcissist hates their parents because of the less than perfect things that
they did, and that anger, not the effects of the parenting, is where the focus of the therapy
should have been. And yet:
Let your kids hate you sometimes, it's good for them. You don't have to always have them agree with
you or have them always like you.
Note the phrasing-- this is good for the kids, which is actual kids, not the
adults-that-were-once-kids. Adults' anger gets to remain justified.
And it's a lie anyway. Sure, it is good for the kids, but is there anyone who can't see that
the primary reassurance is for the parents who can't handle being hated by their kids?

VI.
That Lori Gottlieb has had a life marked by free agency, drifting around from interest to
interest, job to job, relationship to relationship; and having the unique luxury, first by
parents, then by writing talent, of being able to afford such wandering; and that it all leads
to therapy, not just as a patient but ultimately as a therapist-- is not at all an accident.
The old adage that shrinks go into shrinkage to figure themselves out sounds awesomely
correct except that it's incorrect and inawesome. They go into it so they don't have to
figure themselves out. Best way to avoid judgment is to become the judge. Overruled. I
said overruled.
The therapist has a sanction to create narratives, and there's nothing better than being able
to create a narrative that also defends your ego from all manner of attack. Actually, there is
one thing better: be a therapist and a writer for The Atlantic. Now not only do you get to
create the narrative, you get to make it the accepted wisdom. "I don't fall for it, I don't
read The Atlantic." It doesn't matter if you read it, if anyone reads it, an article's
publication in it makes it the default intellectual position of middlebrow America, and so if
you want to disagree the burden of proof is on you, eat it. She wrote 500000 words
justifying her depression as her parents' fault but her overparenting the result of "wanting
what's best for my child" and now no one else has to, because it passes into conventional
wisdom. "Oh, smart people are spending less time with their kids to watch Weeds."
It's the same way that an advertisement for a TV show you'll never watch can change the
way you think about sex, because you think it is how everyone else thinks about sex, and
now suddenly it is how everyone thinks about sex. The commercial-- not the show-- made
it true.
Gottlieb wants it to be true that overparenting and artificial self-esteem is causing kids to
become narcissists, but that's all defense. Overparenting doesn't cause narcissism,
narcissism causes narcissism.(2)

Here's what a therapist should say: "too perfect" parents who coddle and overprotect their
kids aren't doing it for their kids, they are doing it for themselves, in defense of their own
ego; and that, not the bike helmets, is why their kids end up adrift and confused. The
problem isn't that kids are too wussy to go out and play, but that their parents do not trust
themselves, their generation ("if I graduated Wellesley and I'm this stressed out, that other
mom must be a pedophile"), their impulses and instincts, so kids must be dandelions made
of cotton candy in a rainstorm made of lava, which makes no sense yet it makes perfect
sense: paranoia. Ego vs. reality, and you can't appraise either. And then one day your kid
is punched by some bully raised by Nascar fans or baby mommas and you shut down the
school because you think the problem is the bully. The problem is you. The bully may have
punched your Edward in the belly but you mobilized a school district to DEFCON 2, who has
more power? Who is the biggest bully?(3)
The problem is you are in therapy not to become better parents or to do better work but
to... to what? Do you have any idea?
More than likely kids overcome all this, everybody finds their own way, but to those who feel
stuck the only solution is to forsake all attempts at figuring out who you are, conveying who
you are-- because you aren't anybody yet-- and just accomplish stuff, yet be ready to
discover in 50 years that the sum total of your life's real accomplishments may be very
different than what you expected, and it must be enough. In the irreplaceable words of
Marshall McLuhan: "there's nothing God hates more than some mofo with a cable
subscription running out the clock."
That'll be $250. You can pay at the window.

You may also like:

Marry Him! Or Don't

------------------------------------------------
--- Footnotes:

1.​ I've made this point before, but worth repeating: chronic, non-medical insomnia is a
similar symptom of a lack of completion, accomplishment. All the usual suggestions
(read a book, light exercise) are temporary accomplishments, which is why they
work; and the other maneuvers (surfing the web, watching TV, drinking) are
searches for something accomplishable. And nothing says accomplished like a
Pornotron orgasm. Night night.
2.​
3.​ A technical correction: the typical premise, articulated by Twenge (top of page) is
that artificially elevating kids' self-esteem makes them narcissistic, grandiose. But
narcissism is not synonymous with grandiosity, not even close, and anyway high
self-esteem should make them happier, not more anxious. More accurately, the
unhappiness comes not from thinking they are better than they are, and not even
from the inevitable future failures, but from not being sure how good they are, if
they are good at all. They are not sure what is supposed to define them. "How can
you know what kind of a man you are if you've never been in a fight?" The important
thing wasn't to win. The reflex defense of existential anxiety is to define yourself
against something, not "I am this," but "I am not that." And where this is most
harmful is the avoidance of guilt. "Yes I did this, but I am not the kind of person
who does that, you don't know the whole story..."
4.​ Before you remember/reinvent how it was back in "the old days", here's the "sad"
truth we just need to accept: we're never going back to the old way. There was a
time you could slap your bitch or paddle your kids, and right or wrong you can't do
that now and you will never be able to again. It doesn't matter if a little ass pinch at
the office does improve productivity and morale, or treat zoster or prevent
communism, it is never coming back.
5.​
6.​ And the moment the nerds responded to a couple of wedgies with overwhelming
firepower, the moment they made the bullying "this shit just got real" real for
everyone else-- right or wrong, sissy or not, bullying was done forever. If you're 11
and you punch a fat kid, let alone a gay fat kid, it's game over for you, they cancel
your subscription to Weekly Reader and set you up for home schooling. Unless
you're in an inner-city school, of course, and then you get wrap-around services, 6
years of Adderall and extra time on tests. We can spend the next 60 terabytes
arguing whether this is progress or regress or whether America is soft or turgid, or
we can stop wasting time comparing today to the day and just get on with the
regular business of ordinary life.
7.​
 JUNE 20, 2011
Louis CK on being a dad-- the hidden piece of his happiness

It's no secret I love Louis CK. He's funny but insightful in a way only comics can be.

And certainly sacrificing yourself, subsuming your own "dreams" and focusing on the dreams
of your children is a thesis entirely consistent with this blog.

So I write this with that love declared upfront.

Here's the missing piece of his PSA about being a father.

A while after his leg fell asleep on the toilet, and before he had that epiphany to flush down
his own personal dreams and devote himself to his kids...he had a divorce and moved out.

I have no doubt he is a great father. But-- and this is a big but-- it is much easier to go all
in with parenting when the courts obligate you to give the kids to someone else every night.
Don't yell at me, divorced parents, I'm not criticizing you, I realize you have other burdens.
But if he hadn't had the divorce, I doubt he would have made this PSA.

So this isn't a judgment on him at all. Maybe he's able to focus so well on his kids because
there's no reason to try and steal moments away. He knows he will have a blocks of time
that are free of the greatest killer of creative work: interruptions.

And maybe modern married creative couples need to create a system or regular "breaks," I
have no idea. What I do know is that it is much easier to be two kinds of people at different
times, then be two kinds of people at the same time.

JUNE 18, 2011

If this blog were a book you would give to someone else, what posts would you want in it?
I'd like to take some of these posts and compile them into a book.

The posts would be reworked, sent to an editor, etc.

What I'm looking for aren't necessarily people's favorite posts, or posts that hold up best
over time. I'm looking for those posts you wish you could send to someone else, except
that they don't read blogs.

Submit your suggestions any way you'd like (twitter, fb, comments here, email).

Thanks for helping me with this.

 JUNE 16, 2011
Are Antipsychotics Overprescribed To Kids?

does this make me look like I'm keeping an eye on waste?

10 year study of inpatient kids: 44% got antipsychotics. Is that a lot? Yes. It's a lot.

And most of the time, not even for psychosis. 44% of the PTSD and ADHD kids got
antipsychotics.
You can wrack your brain trying to figure this out or blame the usual suspects, but the
answer is right there in the article:
Variables associated with antipsychotic use [included] male gender, age 12 years and under, being
nonwhite, and a length of stay 13 days or longer.
You'll observe that none of those words is "diagnosis" or "severity."
The cause of these high levels of medications is so simple you'll recoil from the truth of it,
but pour yourself a drink and take it like a man: the kids showed up. That's it. The kid is in
front of you and you have to do something, now, that results in an acute change. Not better
grades 4 years out, or less sadness over the teen years; change the sleep tonight, make the
kid less hyper now, and when it "stops working" you can up the dose or change the med.
It doesn't matter what the diagnosis is or what the symptoms are, really, whether he ate his
dog or got a C on a test he's going to be getting something at qd and hs because that's
what you get when you put psychiatry as the cornerstone of a Multidisciplinary Treatment
Team.
When a kid is presented to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist is pressured, obligated, to do
something pharmacological. If a psychiatrist looked a single parent a joint away from a nap
right in the eye and said, "nope, he's acting out because of X, Y, Z, and medications aren't
going to fix this" that doctor will get his head handed to him by parent or by lawyer. Justice
will be done, you negligent elitist.
And the simple reason why the kids showed up is that the parents and the schools and the
cops and the courts were told that's where you go when a kid punches another kid or
becomes hispanic. That's why outside the oakwood offices of the private docs the shingle
says "Practice of Psychiatry" in Palatino Linotype, but get within fifty blocks of a black kid
and the whole thing is labeled "Behavioral Health" in what I think is Erasermate.
This is why reducing antipsychotic prescription is a Chuck Grassley political diversion, if the
kids don't get antipsychotics they won't get nothing. The problem is the overprescription of
prescriptions.
I get that when a 15 year old starts up with cocaine it is a bad thing. But is it automatically
true he has ADHD or BPD and needs medications? Check the map:

There's a very large system in place for not doing what's best for people, it is expedient and
simple and the law but nevertheless ineffective and counterproductive in the long run. The
trouble is, this system screws it up for people who actually need it. Just because a 10
minute med check is perfect for the vast majority of patients who don't have any psychiatric
illness, doesn't mean it'll work on the kid with prodromal schizophrenia and the crying
parents who look at you like, wtf? Are you kidding me with this?

---

An Epidemic of Mental Illness

JUNE 8, 2011
An Education
 Thanks, Jenny, you made it all possible

This is the movie poster for An Education:

If this looks terribly adorable, then there are spoilers below. If not, then there are no
spoilers below. Take a minute and think it over.
The movie is about a 16 year old girl in 1961 Britain, in her final year of "gymnasium" or
A-Levels or sixth form or whatever they call it over there, wanting to "read English at
Oxford."

Her father, an unsophisticated, stuffy, and concrete man, wants her to go to Oxford. Period.
Not learn Latin or study mathematics or play the cello-- which he insists she do-- but do
those things solely because they will get her into Oxford. He relaxes in a suit and tie and
drinks only on Christmas. In other words, he's an American parent. Yes, just like Amy
Chua, which is why your reactions to them are identical.

She wants to go to Oxford, too, but is perplexed and resistant to the purposeless of her life
so far. Is the only point of cello just to impress the Oxford interviewer? She wants to live,
read books and listen to jazz, go to Paris and Rome, eat good food in restaurants. That's a
quote.

It helps that a) she is extremely pretty with not one single hint of threatening sexuality-- so
that women in the audience can identify with her; and b) super-intelligent and witty, so that
the same women can assume that because of a), they are also b.) It also give the male
audience a comfort zone-- since she's not sexy, there's nothing creepy about me liking her.
The absence of sexiness is vital to the misunderstanding of the movie, and to its appeal.
We'll come back to this.

This is a movie about teenage rebellion, in the past. Whenever teen rebellion is depicted in
present day, it's teen becoming worse. When teen rebellion is depicted in the past, it's teen
trying to be better. NB: movies are made by adults who have kids.

So our mythic hero receives The Call to Adventure. I'm going to try to describe it in the
most neutral language possible, so as not to influence you, but I'm going to fail. Sorry in
advance.

As she's standing in the rain one day, a man, about 35, in a purple sportscar drives up and
offers her a ride home.
At first it's platonic, but gradually they fall for each other. He is sophisticated, worldly,
eventually takes her to Paris, loves the Pre-Raphaelites, likes both jazz and classical, is the
perfect gentleman. He has two equally worldly friends, a couple, and the three of them
introduce her into a world full of life. The one she longs for.

But at the midpoint the plot twist comes: he's a thief. And a slum lord. And married. And
now we get to see that she's been tricked into throwing her future away for something that
isn't real.

The question for you reading this right now is whether this is a "plot twist," or is this "duh"?
The movie makes his duplicity be the reason the relationship fails. But the relationship was
doomed immediately, duplicitous or not, from the moment this psychopath pulled up in a
sportscar and asked a 16 year old to get in. Of course I understand why she'd fall for it, but
that doesn't mean the audience is supposed to fall for it. In my imagination, the audience is
looking at each other like wtf? seriously? But if the internet is any guide, people reacted to
this as if it was a puppy rescue on CNN.

"So what, if I see a 16 year old standing in the rain in my suburban neighborhood, I can't
give her a ride home?" It's very simple: if you're nervous about it, for her sake let her
catch a death of cold. Just because bin Laden was married to a 16 year old doesn't mean
it's okay for you.

I've watched the movie twice to be sure I'm not insane, though admittedly this is not a valid
test. Yes, they slowly drop small hints that he's not who he seems, but I am certain that in
the beginning, the viewer is not supposed to detect anything wrong with their relationship.
The only reason I assumed that the three of these sophisticates must also be cannibals is
because I, me, can't believe that three adults who lure a 16 year old girl into their fold
wouldn't obviously be cannibals. My personal bias.
The point I am making here is that this is decidedly not the bias of the filmmakers, and that
is very, very, very creepy. And lazy. Didn't they see Twilight before they shot a remake of
it?

II.

If David's arrival on screen is creepy, the father's presence is nothing short of

preposterously offensive.

The movie wants you to see that he only cares about appearances, not her soul. He is the
worst, utterly the worst, thing a Hollywood director can imagine: he is bourgeois. Here's a
media protip: the words "bourgeois" and "American" are always completely interchangeable.

In being this, he is blind to his daughter's true nature and an accessory to child rape. He
grills and insults some poor teen who asks her out, but because David is a higher class
person, he doesn't try to find out anything about him, doesn't ask if he's on a list, lets him
take Jenny out late and on overnight trips. He practically shaves her vagina for him. The
father never even asks David's last name. In fact, his only reservation about David is that
he is... wait for it... Jewish. Oh, no matter, David charms the anti-semitism right out of
him. Yes, it was that easy.

Naturally, when it is discovered that David is married, her dad gets angry. He wants a
confrontation, so he mans up: "right, if you won't do it, I will. I'm still your father."

"Oh, you're my father again, are you?" she says in the only line that makes sense in the
whole movie. "What were you when you were encouraging me to throw my life away? Silly
schoolgirls are always being seduced by glamorous older men, but what about you?"
That's your life lesson. The unique problem of raising kids is that not only will they hate you
for not letting them do stuff, they will hate you for letting them do stuff they later regret.
Choose accordingly.

III.

I don't blame 16 year old Jenny for falling for the charismatic and sophisticated older man,
of course I get it. And, to a point, I am not even surprised that the parents fell for him
either; they wanted "the best" for their daughter, and he looked like the best. I can't do
anything about misreading a stranger.

But what is their fault is that they misread Jenny. They never listened to Jenny's words.
They may be good or bad people, but they failed as parents in this specific way.

Every time she explains why she loves David, or why she wants to marry him, or leave
school, she says something like this:

"I want to read books, and listen to jazz, and go to Paris and Rome, and eat good food in
restaurants."

None of those things are descriptions of David. She may think she loves him, but to anyone
who listens to her words it's clear she loves the world he offers. That's not a reason to love
anyone, in fact, it is proof you do not love him. However much the parents want her to
"marry well," they should have heard these words and realized that she didn't love him and
that it inevitably wouldn't last. That was their responsibility. David, if he was any kind of
man, should have noticed and let her go. And any intelligent women seduced by the
prospect of a man's new world should describe her happiness in three sentences and count
how many times his name comes up, and then return the ring.

IV.

The movie pulls off a clever trick: even after you learn David is a cad and a liar, you don't
really ever hate him. And that's because you all Anglos have forgotten how to hate. You
think your lack of hate is a evidence of your own sophistication and maturity; just as Jenny
doesn't hate him, she goes beyond him, you do, too. But you're not being honest.

Imagine the exact same movie, everything the same, but filmed entirely from his
perspective. He sees a girl in the rain, and makes his move. Now you easily hate him, now
you see him as a bad person. So why the change of heart?

Similarly, if Jenny had been portrayed as superintelligent and witty but also as extremely
hot-- that single change and no other, e.g. played by Megan Fox, you would have
immediately detected the corruption at the center of the movie and stoned David and his
purple car.

So the reason you don't hate him in An Education is because you are deliberately not seeing
reality objectively, you are choosing to see it entirely from her eyes, or have so identified
with her that they are your eyes, which makes David merely a supporting character. That
inability to value people as individuals, good or bad, to appraise their worth independent of
yourself, is a characteristic which is excusable in a 16 year old girl, and inexcusable in
anyone else.
V.

It's evident to me that the filmmakers did not understand the true meaning of the tale they
were telling, and I soon discovered why: they were telling a tale that had already been told
by someone else. Lynn Barber, a writer for the Observer, wrote the original story about her
own experience as a 16 yo Oxford wannabe falling for an empty Tiffany's box. The stories
are very similar, except for their final lines. This is how the movie ends:

So I went [to Oxford], and I probably looked as wide eyed, fresh and artless as any other student. But I
wasn't. One of the boys I went out with-- and they really were just boys-- asked me to go to Paris with
him. And I told him I'd love to see Paris. As if I'd never been.
You can imagine her winking at a knowing audience.

Here's how Barber's story ends:

What did I get from Simon? An education... My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for
sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent,
straightforward boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one
eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank.

Barber grew up. Jenny didn't. But the movie thinks she did. The movie is called "An
Education", but Jenny didn't get one. She is like so many other women who have deceived
themselves into thinking they are wise. She's still in her movie, ready for a sequel, same as
the original. Jenny won't ever be happy; fortunately for her, she's not real.

MAY 31, 2011

3 Important Things About The New Wikileaks Controversy

um, yeah, this is the best picture from 2007 we could find for today's Guardian
Last week, Frontline did a documentary on Wikileaks which blew my mind. In it I learned
Bradley Manning is gay. And short. And nothing else. No wait, about ten minutes in I
learned I hate Frontline.

enemies of the state

I didn't think anything could make me an Assange supporter, but it turns out that the enemy
of my enemy is my friend. That's right, I'm Alone.

I.
Assange wanted to leak to the NYT, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. However, he wanted
the NYT to publish first to avoid the U.S. charge that he was leaking info to foreigners, i.e.
take advantage of the 1st Amendment. But the NYT wanted Wikileaks to publish first, so
then it could simply report on what was leaked, rather than be a leak.
These are probably legitimate concerns except for the fact that Wikileaks and the NYT are
having this discussion explicitly. I'm not a lawyer but isn't that racketeering? It is like a
bunch of mob guys discussing who should be the one to do the hit based on their parole
status. Assange:
There was collaboration from beginning to end in terms of timetabling, researching stories, talking
about how to understand data, etc., etc., embargo dates, the works. [NYT editor] Keller has tried to say
we were just the source; they were a passive recipient... in order to protect themselves from the
Espionage Act they needed to be completely passive, or be presented as completely passive.
One man's collaboration is another man's conspiracy. So any collaboration between a journalist and a
source, between one media organization and another media organization, can be viewed, the Attorney
General Justice [sic] [Eric] Holder says, as a conspiracy that flows through.
Assange is diabolically clever, I wouldn't expect anything less from the self-aggrandizing
Cobra Commander. He's made this "collaboration" the point. Since they collaborated, the
NYT can't pretend they were passive recipients, so they must therefore defend the
legitimacy of such collaborations in general.
He's holding the press to task: your job is to keep the government accountable.
But they're terrible at it, as evidenced by the fact that while they were "collaborating," while
they had all this juicy info sitting in front of them, the story the Times chose to run was one
about... Bradley Manning.

The New York Times must stand

up, and it must hold the line of the traditional form of journalism, because if it is not
protected, it will be the end of holding the national security sector to account!!!

II.
Remember Climategate? Sarah Palin had a public orgasm and 4092 commenters blew up
like Scanners. Climategate was the set of leaked emails that appeared to show climate
scientists hiding data against global warming to suppress the critics; a global warming
conspiracy.
"Climategate is an interesting case [says the Frontline interviewer]. What's the intent that you had
when you leaked the Climategate e-mails?"
The truth needs no policy position, so there does not need to be an intent. We have a framework, and the
framework has an intent.
This is exchange is so powerful it takes days to understand it.
First, Assange didn't leak the Climategate emails, which makes one of these two people a
fibber and the other a fool. Assange did, later, host the data after the initial leak; and since
it doesn't affect the next point, let's just move on.

III.
"Climategate is an interesting case [says the interviewer]. What's the intent that you had when you
leaked the Climategate e-mails?"
The truth needs no policy position, so there does not need to be an intent. We have a framework, and the
framework has an intent.

Assange believes that truth needs no intent, which is obviously false. Without a context,
the truth can mislead. Excluding the context on purpose, when you know that it will be
misunderstood, is often as good as lying. This has always been my/everyone's concern
about Wikileaks.
But note the interviewer's question: "what's the intent you had?" That sentence is
everything that's wrong with the press. Here are the assumptions the interviewer has
made:
1.​ He assumes Assange believes in "global warming." Why would he assume this?
Because Assange is anti-U.S. government. So to the reporter, anti- U.S. government
and belief in global warming go together.
2.​ If Assange believes in global warming, the interviewer assumes Assange wouldn't
want to release those documents because it would hurt the cause. Even though
Assange has repeatedly said how he wants "everything" public, the reporter assumes
that Assange would only want to release things which complement his own personal
biases. In other words, he assumes Assange is going to be like him.
3.​
Which is why his incredulous follow-up question is
But if you believed that we had a climate problem, that man was contributing to rising greenhouse
gases -- I don't know, do you believe that's a reality?
He's stumped, exasperated. Why would you hurt your own case? I mean.. you don't doubt
global warming, do you??????
That's the difference between Wikileaks and the regular press. For the reporter, climate
change is not a scientific question, or else it wouldn't matter what cables get released. It's
a political one, in which competing narratives are bolstered by circumstantial evidence and
appeals to authority and control of the debate.
Assange picks up on this and replies:
I do not think anyone working outside of climate science understands whether that is true or not,
because people simply do not understand all the complexities. Rather, instead we look to see who is the
most critical voice. What are the motivations behind those people?
Assange just dropped a truth bomb about science, evolution, psychiatry, energy policy,
economics, etc: since most people have, at best, a college level understanding of the
science but not nearly enough to appraise it themselves, the debate about science is really a
political debate-- no, a religious debate-- adorned with the trappings of "measurements"
and "data."
I would have preferred we try to "elevate the debate" and talk about primary sources; but
he seems to think that won't work on the public. So Assange will use intent as a proxy for
truth, the closest approximation in the absence of really understanding what's going on.
The reporter thinks that intent is the only thing that matters.
So you publish the truth regardless of what effect it's going to have on the debate? Fair?
Read that quote again. And again. And again. This man represents the Fourth Estate that
decides what truth you're allowed to read.

IV.

How can an organization go about doing things it shouldn't do, but wants to?
...we got hold of Guantanamo Bay's main manuals, we discovered that there were sections outlining
how to keep information from the Red Cross and how to falsify records in relation to Red Cross visits to
detainees. And this really surprised me... who would be foolish enough to put in a military manual that
that sort of deliberate fabrication...?
But I came to understand why: that if you have a center that is devising policy, the center of a military
[or a] commercial organization, and it wants to have that policy widely implemented, including by
grunts, then it needs to go down in writing, because otherwise you just have Chinese whispers
occurring, and the grunts can't work out what it is precisely that they are meant to be implementing.
Instead, [the grunts will] conduct behavior that is purely in their own interests, and the central policy
gets distorted.
That's what the Cobra Commander thought, too, which is why he structured it like a
traditional military operation. Regardless of whether your orders are good or bad, the only
way to have them reliably executed is to make them official.
So that's a rather interesting understanding of how organizations really only have two choices to deal
with transparency. The first choice is they can simply stop doing things that embarrass the public, so
instead of committing an unjust act, commit a just act.
Pass. What else you got?
The other choice is that they can spend more on their security... they can take things off-record, speak
orally and continue with this course of unjust action. But if they do that, they will become inefficient
compared to other organizations, and they will shrink in their power and scale. And that's also great
because unjust organizations are in economic and political equilibrium and competition with just
organizations.
It is very easy, very easy, to decide whether what Wikileaks is doing is right or wrong. I
don't mean you'll decide correctly, I just mean it only takes you a second to decide. Just
like it took you with WMD and climate change.
The hard question to answer is what happens now that Wikileaks is a reality. The wholesale
release of secret documents is now part of our cultural foundation, like porn, coffee,
cohabitation, English, pants, driving, football. These things will be with us for generations.
Assange thinks that this reality itself-- not the documents themselves, but the ability to
access secrets, reduces the size and power of governments. Is he right?
If online porn can be seen as the wholesale leaking of sexual secrets, then its effect on
traditional sexuality-- good and bad-- may serve as an analogy worth pondering.

---

The WSJ wants Assange indicted for competition

MAY 25, 2011

Second Life Is A Second Chance, Which Is Why It Fails
 my avatar

A man makes a documentary about Second Life, the online immersive experience, as a way
of commenting on the larger issues of internet addiction and escaping from reality. Is the
movie good? No idea. Are you about to be lied to? Oh yes, bring a sandwich.
This is what The New Yorker wrote:
Ingenious... suggests the porous boundaries between the fictive and the concrete, the power of
role-playing in defining real identities, and the risky self-discoveries that may result.
Which, like everything else in The New Yorker, means Bush invaded Iraq under false
pretenses. And Variety:
A peerless study... every thread here raises a provocative question about the ethics of online
interactivity, and serves to demonstrate the Web's ability to both facilitate and destroy human
relationships... a chilling window into the psychology of the internet-obsessed.
There is something presumptuous, not to mention deluded, about a print magazine that no
one reads claiming that a movie no one will see is a peerless window into something anyone
can access anytime they want.

II.
Ponder that flippant run-on sentence for its hidden truth. Who judges whom? What are the
criteria for becoming a judge? It's not popularity; nor the sophistication of the staff and
writers; or the insight of a director. In the hierarchy of authenticity and truth, which one is
at the top? Why can Variety call someone "internet obsessed" but no one can call Variety a
"comic book" which, as I am about to show, it is?
There's plenty to be said about the people obsessed with the internet. But Variety cannot--
not will not, but is physically unable-- to discuss it, because-- well, let's not get ahead of
ourselves.
This movie doesn't represent a "window into internet addiction." It represents the narrative,
the way other people who are not internet addicted are going to think about those who are
addicted.
So here's the obvious one, the typical narrative of the "normals": on Second Life she's a
Fahrenheit 500, in Real Life she's a fat chick.

Dramatic music, and scene.

The script, the editing, the music, all indicate that this is the message, to "normals": "hey
you guys, be careful when you log on to the World Wide Web, people aren't honest."
Catfish, another documentary style movie about facebook, was also presented in this way.
By normals, for normals.
If you saw Catfish, you cannot help but be struck by the obvious: that normal guy is
complete douchebag. But he can define himself as normal in comparison to someone else;
and the bigger the scale of this comparison (e.g. a movie) the more true it is. So, phew,
he's not a loser for falling in love with a facebook profile, let alone driving to Canada or
wherever she lived without telling her first, no, she's a loser for lying to him about her
appearance. Oh, that makes sense.
 he photoshopped her into his naked pic to show how real he is

But since he made the movie, it's his version that is the default. Yes, you can disagree with
him, but the burden's on you. Suck it. So, too, this movie: the message throughout is:
"normal people are not like these people."
I accept it's not their responsibility to be fair and objective to Second Lifers. But don't for a
second think you're understanding anything about SL users. All you're seeing is the
filmmaker's bias in HD: there's real life, and fake life, and these people are pretending to be
something they're not. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
The thing is, no one on the internet cares if you're a dog, unless they are interested in
bringing that world into this one, which they are not. I run a quasi-anonymous blog, and
for the most part no one cares who I am because it isn't relevant to their reading of this
blog; and my ego isn't wrapped up in having people know it, so we're all cool. This movie,
much less Variety, cannot comprehend this state of affairs at all.

III.

The film shows a man and a woman finally meeting in real life after a long time together on
SL. They are almost normal because they want to bring the relationship into the real world.
So the man says to the camera, "it's a relief that when we finally meet, she is who she says
she is." What could he mean by that? Of course, duh: she generally resembles her avatar,
i.e. she's hot.
I think we've all been on the receiving end of a westbound Aeroflot flight praying Katya
looks like her profile pic, so I don't necessarily begrudge this guy his relief that she weighs
less than he does. That's not what makes him insane. This is: Second Life is completely
fake, yet what attracted him to her in the first place was her sexy avatar. If her avatar was
of a fat chick, he never would have connected with her on Second Life.
That's the thinking of someone who isn't "addicted to the internet" who still thinks it
somehow reflects reality. Those SL clothes are fake; that SL hair is fake. The way she SL
kisses is pure game programming, not some derivative of her emotional experiences. Yet
somehow he thinks it's telling him something about the real her. Does he think that's air
he's breathing?
People who escape from reality into SL have a set of problems, obvious problems. But the
people who want it to mirror this one because this one hasn't given them what they "want"
are truly nuts. Why are you reproducing this reality in that one? The black woman above
says her in-game job is to create houses. Why? There's no point. Your avatar doesn't
sleep, doesn't shower, doesn't anything. I may think it's a waste of time, but the only
reasonable thing to do on SL is to walk around and meet other people, create fantastical
spaces, experiment. Using Second Life to shop at an American Apparel is like dropping acid
in order to defecate.

IV.
Everything wrong with Second Life and other online diversions can be summarized by this
picture:

On Second Life, you spend a lot of time looking at yourself.

V.

But give the director his platform, let the subtext become raw text: What the hell is wrong
with these people? What could possibly make them want to give up their real lives in favor
of nothing?

I wish they had just asked that explicitly, but then the movie would have to be redone with
the cameras pointing in the opposite direction.

When your wife withdraws into 8 hr/d of Second Life, are you completely blameless? Is
there no human marriage she could have been in that wouldn't have resulted in her making
the jump to cyberspace? Louis CK: "When someone says, 'I'm getting divorced,' don't
'awwwww' them, because it's a good thing. No good marriage in the history of the world
has ended in divorce." Or in immersion in Second Life. Or constant facebook. Or porn. Or
etc.
Don't confuse longevity with good. A marriage can last forever as long as the two fleshbots
don't have to interact long enough to hate each other.

"Our real life partners don't know what we're up to," some man says as his avatar makes
out with some other avatar by a pretty lake. "As far as they're concerned, it's just some
kind of game that we play."

I don't need 3D glasses to see what's going on in this guy's life. He may be a tool, but
that's not why his wife doesn't take the game seriously. His real life wife doesn't take it
seriously because she doesn't take her marriage seriously. She doesn't notice he's on the
computer all night and distant all day? Or doesn't she mind, because she's too busy with
her own self-absorbed lifestyle, her void filled with [insert junk food here]?
Look, if you're going to make a movie about something you should at least make sure
someone hasn't already written the book, twice. The conceit of this movie is straight out of
Baudrillard, but the director apparently doesn't know it. Second Life is fake, but it's
fakeness is overt. While we shoot spitballs at the users of SL like jocks at a 9th grader in a
14ft scarf, the true purpose of SL, for us, for those who don't use it, is to make us think that
the real world is, indeed, real. That we're cool. It disguises the fact that the world outside
of Second Life is equally fake and manipulated, but in 3D. The real world marriage is fake,
the words they say to each other are fake, the politeness is fake, the ideology is fake, and
don't get me started on the shoes. Nothing about it is real.
I know, I know, when "Gallifrey84" kisses "ChasteForJondalar", it's just SL's software
simulating a real kiss; but back in the 3D world when that guy kisses his wife, that's even
more simulated. It isn't even acting, which would at least arouse someone watching it.
This "real" kiss is an instinctive, rehearsed simulation of what they saw on TV or used to do
in the past. And no one would get turned on watching it. "But at least the lips are touching
in real life." So what? Your lips are real, you aren't. So?

VI.
Second Life, as an immersive experience, fails because it isn't immersive, it's only two out
of the seven senses (penis and vagina). So it is certainly a poor representation of real life.
But FF three or four generations, maybe we get some holodecks or a fully functional Matrix.
Now what? Are they running towards something cool or running away from something
that's not? You can't get the answer without evaluating the thing behind them.

The reality of it all is simple, which makes it very difficult to fix. These aren't sick
individuals, it's a sick society. People are being squeezed like silly putty by the fist of
branding. We see the "losers" oozing out of "reality" through the fingers-- some of these
losers go to Second life, some to porn; but there's the others who are squeezed more into
"reality," into branded clonocity, their existence depends on no one looking at them from the
outside and noticing that they aren't actually individuals. "Huh? What does that mean?
What? Speak English!"
i.e. for example: most hot chicks, in order to be hot, copy something a celebrity wears;
remember the Rachel-do? No problem, they look hot in it; but their delusion is that they
are referencing Jennifer Aniston and not the millions of other women with the exact same
haircut, i.e. that they draw their identity only from the celebrity's identity-- "This look really
says me!" Yet sit along the wall of the bar and the conclusion is inevitable: yes, you're hot,
but you don't look like Rachel, you look like the other hot chick right next to you. And,
bafflingly, you did it on purpose.
If she looks at you with sudden realization; or if she says, "I know, but I still like it," she is
free. If she looks at you like you don't get it, like you're insane, get out, you're in the
wrong bar, neither of you will ever be happy.
 MAY 16, 2011
How To Write A College Application Essay Or Personal Statement

Sometimes you know something but the full significance never makes it to consciousness,
because your very soul rebels against the implications: we've been doing it wrong all this
time?

NYMag: You've Got Mail: Inside a top college's admissions room. That college is Sarah
Lawrence. Ring a bell? Some of you silly people will remember that Blair on Gossip Girl got
rejected from there, but anyone over 30 will no doubt remember The Simpsons:

Mr. Thai [Thai restaurant owner] to Bart: Put flyers on doorknobs. Then I get more business.
Send daughters to small liberal arts college. Swarthmore. Maybe Sarah Lawrence. Call professors by
first name. Dynamite!

Bart later tosses them in the dumpster, and when the restaurant owner finds out:

Mr. Thai: You a quitta! Quitta boy! Now restaurant fail. Children go to state college. Serious students
powerless against drunken jockocracy. Baseball hats everywhere.

Sarah Lawrence evaluates a student's performance in three spheres: academics, writing,

and "personal", defined as extracurriculars and "other background." I'll leave the merits of
"other background" to The Weekly Standard. The issue for us here is the college essay.

Read this:

Standardized tests are supposed to correct for the ways high-school grading systems vary, so to make
up for that, Sarah Lawrence's committee uses a sample essay graded by a high-school teacher to
determine the curriculum's rigor. But the samples also tell something about the readers. "I had one
essay that said how awful Twilight was"--the essay was about damaging themes of female
submissiveness in the series--"and I was like, 'Admit her!' " says Melissa Faulner, a 2006 grad on the
committee. Whereas what the readers wryly call TCML essays--"theater changed my life"--are looked at
more skeptically.

No doubt, NO DOUBT, critics of higher education and multiculturalism will jump on the
implication that the committee leans left, way left, and will favor those applicants with
similar predilections. WRONGINGONTHEFLOORLAUGHINGMYASSOFF. Read it again, you've
missed something crucial.

'Admit her!' " says Melissa Faulner, a 2006 grad on the committee.
Still don't see it? There's a very good chance that the only person who will ever read your
college essay is 25 years old.

II.

In every college admissions website, they are referred to as "Admissions Officers." While I
didn't assume they were in the military, I suppose I did assume they were... old. er.

And some are, I guess, there's got to be an Admissions Dean in the building somewhere.
But the average applicant is writing an essay that he thinks an adult with a suit and three
kids would want to read. Instead, it's probably being read by someone who can't wait for
the new iphone and still bites their nails. Ten grand says they think Jon Stewart is "a
freakin' political genius."

But surely there are some adults on the committee? The article focuses on Tom Marlitt,
director of West Coast Admissions. They don't give his age, they give a physical description.
Media-- and The New Yorker is probably the wost offender of this-- offers a physical
description of their subject as a code about their character in exactly the way the media
would never allow a regular person to do. If they profiled me it woudl start, "Wearing a
disheveled undershirt clutching a rock..." and leave it to you to make an objective
assessment (="drunkard, likely unbalanced.") What they say about Marlitt is: "a
spiky-haired man in all beige." That's media code 50 year old acting like a 25 year old.

Look, nobody likes 25 year olds more than me, especially ones that are too pretty to get
into Sarah Lawrence. And there's little sense in arguing the merits of college admissions
being determined by a 25 year old vs. a 50 year old when the whole college game is a carny
act that works only because we agree to pretend it does, runs FIFO, and is subsidized by the
government. It is what it is.

But if 85% of the applicants have already been weeded out before it gets to the committee,
and they have been weeded out by a 25 year old, or a 50 year old who thinks he's a 25 year
old, it would make more sense to write an essay for a 25 year old. Not for a 50 year old,
which is what most people do, employing the maxim, "What essay would make my Dad
happy?" So you get: quote from some uncontroversial famous person; affirmation of one's
heritage/parents; generic sycophantic praise of the school; vague promises of changing the
world.
Admit him!
Before you write your essay, profile your Admissions committee members. They, not "the
school", are the ones accepting you, and writing an essay for a theoretical "Admissions
Officer" is like having sex with a theoretical "vagina." Yes, it means you'll be submitting
different essays to different places, but this kind of information may save you from
describing how much you admire Kissinger's foreign policy:
 If
you're targeting a(n actual) 25 year old, i.e. someone who through no fault of their own has
been conditioned to prefer brevity, appeals to emotion, and branding, here are the words
you want to include in your essay: "sex" (as self-expression, not conquest), individuality,
curiosity, hypocrisy, naked. 25 year olds have hypertrophied BS detectors, so nothing
contrived. Bonus if you can include some dialogue in your essay, everyone loves a
supporting cast. Triple points if it can be read ironically, or if it is funny, especially in a
self-deprecating way.

MAY 14, 2011

The C Team

back in the day

Monday was the 8-11 girls' soccer ("you know, it's really called football") tryouts for the A
and B teams.

Her father had watched the practices. She was good, but was she A team good? It
depended on the day. Precise and aggressive one day, distracted and chatty the next day.
Some days she owned the ball. Other days she had to pee. And she was picking her
fingers a lot.

He had given her some helpful advice: dribble up the right sideline because those right
footed girls will have a harder time getting the ball away from you. Also when you kick on
goal kick knee height, force the goalie to have to bend down.

He also told her that Hannah Montana ("Dad, that's not her name") was the evidently the
dominant player on the other team, and when it looked like Hannah was going to go after
the ball her teammates would hang back and out of her way, but that meant the ball was
unguarded. That was a good time to go after it.

It was the kind of advice he wished someone had given him back when it was his turn.
II.

Ok. There were four obvious A teamers, leaving seven spots. Call it 6. If Jane and Sue
made A team, she'd definitely make it. Kathy and Claire were older and if they got picked
because of seniority then there'd be only two or three open spots left. Tight.

The Dad said this: whatever team you make, you have to earn it everyday. You make A but
don't keep up, they'll send you down to B. Make B but work hard, and they'll move you to
A. (That's life, he thought. That's what this is all about anyway.)

Besides, they're not going to let someone too good be on B for very long because they'd
dominate the game. The coaches want everyone to get a chance to play. (Sophistry in the
service of the ego. That's life, too, but it's not a lesson he wanted her to have to learn.)

III.

Tuesday: no call. But Kathy heard: A team. Wednesday came: no call. Claire got A team.
Wednesday night: Hannah Montana found out she was B. That made no sense. Other
mothers checked in, they heard A team was filled. "I guess she made B," they apologized in
advance.

Then there was the news: there were too many girls. Or plenty of girls. So the coaches
created a C team. Uh oh.

Thursday came.

Then Friday.

Then Saturday.

Then Sunday.

Then Monday.

She went into school: everyone else had heard. "What'd you get?" Claire asked.

"I don't know."

"Oh. My. God. That means you got C team!"

She picked her fingers a lot that day. If she made at least B, she promised herself she
wouldn't buy a soft pretzel with the milk money and wouldn't throw out more than five of
her grape unless... unless she finished all her carrots. And she would stop trying to control
everything.

When she got home her Dad was already coping with the news. "I'm so sorry. They said
you made the C team."

She started not to cry. "That's okay," she said. It wasn't.

IV.

This is another one of those times you make it as a parent or you move out because your
presence is a biotoxin to everyone in the family. So: as terrible as it was, he could use it to
make her into a better person. First the obvious lesson: failure happens, nothing is
guaranteed. Life is competition. Parents and the government can't bail you out of
everything.

Ok-- facing her classmates and having to tell them that she was C while still maintaining her
dignity-- without hiding behind "we're all special in our own way"--- there was value in
that. "What should I tell everybody at school?" she asked. "(Can I lie?)" No. "Just tell
them: 'I made C team. I don't know how it happened, I feel pretty awful about it, but I'm
going to make the most of it.' Whenever you talk, be straight."

And of course she could get better. Let's face it, she hadn't worked that hard. It's not like
she drilled every day in her yard. Getting on A with only Saturday practice could easily
make you think you're better than you are, more deserving than you are, and when the
inevitable failure comes from boys or grades or lotteries it crushes you right through your
paper foundation. Next thing you know you're 15 and one of your friends has an older
brother who knows where to get some pot and how to have sex without getting pregnant.

Starting from C and and getting to A is the biggest accomplishment, it's what makes you a
man. Or woman in a man's world.

V.

"You have lots of potential. Nothing is set in stone. You're still young. Practice, practice,
practice. You can be anything you want." He had plenty of advice, quite practical. Keep it
coming. In this way he might avoid the thought: this is another thing at which she will not
be exceptional. The thought came anyway.

He had never wanted to be a soccer star, he hadn't even played very much, but at 50 it was
inevitable that he would never become a soccer star. Now his daughter wasn't going to be a
soccer star either which meant that he had failed at soccer twice. Another closed door just
got boarded up.

One by one his daughter failed or lost interest in the things he had never done. There was
no time left for him to be exceptional at anything though his daughter represented a wide
open future with millions of open doors. But she spent the first years of her life closing
them. "How would vous like to go to un Francais immersion camp?" he had once asked.
"French?" she had replied, reaching for a door, "I don't know..." Slam.

The only thing left for him was to become father of. "My daughter is a soccer star, " he
wouldn't have to say, everyone would just know it about them. And he'd sit at the practices
and give her advice and then afterwards a quick snack and off to violin, because she had
the potential to get to Julliard if she practiced, and, crazy passing daydream, one day People
would do a story about him.

But it wasn't going like he had imagined it would. Somewhere in his brain he had thought
that maybe his daughter's success would keep him from getting old. He had never been
able to get off C Team, and the last thing left that he might be excel at, fatherhood, he was
proving to be as mediocre as in everything else.

When you are a narcissist, children, even the good ones, are a narcissistic injury. That story
almost never has a happy ending, but it does end.

VI.

There is no redemption for him because the point isn't his redemption, it's hers, and you
either get that or you don't. Most people don't, which is why there's a C team at all.

When she said, "that's okay," of course it wasn't, and something in his brain shorted and he
was able to resist all of his best impulses and instead just hugged her and said, "there's not
much I can say to make this better, but I love you all the time, all the time. So there's
this." And he opened a bag and pulled out the next Harry Potter movie which she had been
begging for every day, ("please please PLEASE!") but at those times he had pretended to
be the Dad that People would one day profile, "you have to finish the book first because I
want you to learn that the books are always better." Shut it, old man.

Sometimes when a little girl is sad you just... fix it. And this time it made her smile so
much and for so many reasons and after dinner they sat down together and watched it.
That was all. It was about a boy who didn't have a mom or a dad, and he had to make it all
by himself, and he did.

Soccer wasn't going anywhere. But she was.

MAY 5, 2011
Osama Bin Laden Has Been Killed

but he says...

Early Monday morning I heard the news: "Navy Seals have killed Obama." Ha. I knew
what they meant.
The view from my chair: my very first thought was that this was a scam. How convenient.
Any pictures? No. Video? No. Body? No, that was dumped in the sea. Sea? What sea?
Pakistan has a sea?

The more I watched the various news anchors gloat about Obama and the Special Forces
and "the turning point in the war" the more I became convinced I was being lied to. I've
seen Fog Of War, Network, Three Days Of The Condor and Independence Day and I know a
long con when I see it. Unless I could see the imprint of the bullets, and put my finger into
the wounds, I wasn't going to believe it.

But something nagged at me. Why was I so suspicious? Why did I need to see the body for
myself? What was it that made me think there was something deeply wrong with the story
I was being told?

And then the answer hit me: I drink too much. Rum. And I don't sleep. I'm also not a
very good person.

Did I really need to see the body to believe he was dead? It was information bias
supercharged with arrogance: I'm going to be able to tell it's him? Me? Really? Forget
about CGI and make up and look alikes-- they could show me a picture of a female puma
and say it was bin Laden and my only contribution would be, "damn, dialysis is hard on a
mofo."

II.

The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem. Ok, I have a problem, but it's
not all my fault.

It's impossible to hear the news about his death and not feel some sense of payback; but
it's also impossible not to hear the news reporting and not want to punch something
electronic.

None of them reported the story. I don't just mean how much they got wrong, I mean
every one of them used it as an opportunity to explain how awesome they were.

Some examples, not too many, you need your strength:

Start with the media outlets and politicians that were fooled by the fake bin Laden death
photo. I'm not concerned that they were duped, fine, female puma, but I am very
concerned that they didn't google the photo to see if it was a fake?

Congressman Scott Brown said, "Let me assure you that he is dead, that bin Laden is dead
-- I have seen the photos."

Ok, so he was fooled, fine, the guy doesn't work for Adobe. But why did he then say about
the photos, "If it's to sell newspapers or just have a news cycle story, no, I don't think they
should be released." What? How did hesee them, remote viewing? He saw the photo on
the internet just like everyone else-- or does he think he has a secret internet? Actually,
yes: he saw them on his Blackberry, which is totally different.

What this shows you is that there's an airhead gap between politicians and journalists and
the rest of humanity. They have not yet connected the world of the internet with their own
world; yes, they're aware their internet is the same as ours, but they think they're seeing
something we can't see by virtue of who they are. They're privileged. And they're going to
remind you of that special privilege every chance they get, which is why you see so many
news reports about news reporters.

I'm exaggerating? This is what Scott Brown then said, out loud, to people with
microphones:

[President Obama] made the ultimate decision and he made a bold decision. I have a handwritten note
to him to that effect.

That's where his head is at. Bin Laden is dead, and he is bragging to the press about a note
that he wrote.

The myopia isn't exclusively self-aggrandizing; sometimes it's just ignorant. This morning,
Senator Schumer was interviewed on CNBC "live at the WTC site." As he's crowing about
"yes, we have increased electronic surveillance but there hasn't been another attack," he
adds, "remember, right after the attack we were all worried this area would become a ghost
town. Now look at it... young people are moving into high rises." Do you see? He thinks
the young people are finally over their fear. But those young people were in high school
when 9/11 happened. They're don't remember it as "yesterday," it was two lifetimes ago,
and right or wrong they're not afraid of "another attack" in the way a 40 year old is. Do you
expect a person who has no intuition about "young people" to be able to think long term, for
the benefit of three generations out? If you show him the digits "2097" he gets vertigo and
falls down.

III.

Over at basic cable the Mayan Calendar was coming to an end. CNN jumped at the chance
to offer breaking news-- about which they had no actual information, much like its reporting
on 9/11. But you have to fill the time; so they ran a seven page story, only three sentences
of which had anything to do with bin Laden's death. CNN did, however, make up for it by
running a poll:

Do you think bin Laden is in Hell, or don't you think so?

a) in Hell
b) not in Hell
c) don't believe in Hell
d) not sure

It's been a long time since I infiltrated IVCF to penetrate a girl, but isn't publicly answering
this question in the affirmative 1 Cor 4:5 proof that you lack God's grace? I'll save you the
look up: yes.

Fox News was in a full blown existential crisis: "yay he's dead! Whoa-- son of a bitch,
Obama gets the credit?" It was as like a man thrilled that he finally got his hot wife to have
an orgasm, but unfortunately it was by letting a black man have sex with her. That's right,
Fox News is a cuckold. They dutifully gave Obama credit for "giving the order" but
reminded everyone that it was Bush era policies (and later waterboarding) that gave us the
intel. See how I said intel? That makes me sound smart.
Jon Stewart isn't a news guy. I know this because he keeps telling me he's not a news guy,
yet 1.6M people get their news from him and there's is no detectable difference between
him and Keith Obamaman. Here's what Jon Stewart said:

Last night was a good night, for me, and not just for New York or D.C. or America, but for human
people. The--

Stop the tape. Nobody move, stop, have a drink, I insist you really meditate on the
enormity of this man's monologue. Why is it such a good night? It has to be duh, right?

The face of the Arab world in America's eyes for too long has been bin Laden, and now it is not. Now the
face is only the young people in Egypt and Tunisia and all the Middle Eastern countries around the
world where freedom rises up. Al Qaeda's opportunity is gone.

Ad hominem is not my style, but here it can't be helped: this man is an idiot. This is what
he wants us to believe he believes? Right before he closes his eyes at night he says to no
God, "phew, now Americans can look at Arabs more realistically?" Never mind that who he
thinks "the young people in Egypt and Tunisia" are bears no resemblance to actual young
people in Egypt or Tunisia or anywhere on the planet except his audience, none of whom are
in Tunisia, and none of whom will every rise in revolution to fight for freedom, ever. Not
unless Steve Jobs tells them to.

The whole thing, from the politics to the news reporting, is set up not for the conveyance of
information or truth but of image and feeling.

IV.

In this content vacuum, in this total avoidance of substance in order to project personal
image, how can anyone be faulted for not reflexively distrusting everything they hear?

It doesn't help that the government and media want me to believe it's not staged, that they
wouldn't stage it, even as they stage stupid things that don't need to be staged. When you
watch the President give a speech, you're watching him give a speech. When you see a
photo of him giving a speech, you are seeing a photo of him re-enacting the speech he
gave-- just for the still cameras.
"No, you're misunderstanding. It's not a great system, but the cameras are too loud to use
during the actual speech. There's no other way to get the photo." No, you're
misunderstanding: no one cares about the photo. Do you really believe we want a fake
photo of an event you couldn't attend? Oh.

V.

And then there were the slips of the tongue:

"Obama has been killed in Pakistan."

"President Obama is dead."

It happened enough times for it to be significant, and, as usual, significant in a way that the
media missed.

What everyone wanted it to be was evidence of a Freudian slip: an unconscious desire

pushing itself into verbal expression.

But that's not what a Freudian slip is, really. A Freudian slip serves the purpose of
discharging energy, either anxiety or desire, whose origin is unconscious. If Blake Lively is
nude and says, "would you mind helping me get dressed?" and the guy responds, "oh, sure,
I would love to bone you!" that's not an unconscious desire, that's a perfectly conscious
desire that he accidentally said out loud. If he says it, the unconscious slip isn't that he
wants to bone her, but that he wants to tell her he wants to bone her. In other words, he's
scared of her; the slip discharges that anxiety.

Substituting "Obama" for "Osama bin Laden" is straight up cognitive psych, yo. Substituting
a less common word for a more common one is a Freudian slip; a more common word for a
less common one is a problem choosing what word to choose for a linguistic unit. Not

"<man> is dead."

but

"<word for arch-nemesis or bad guy> is <word for expired>."

In the Mad Lib that is his brain, "Obama" is more accessible for "bad guy" than "bin Laden."
I'll let you work out the implications.

VI.

What's going on that people are so suspicious-- or so sure-- just because it happened
during Obama's Presidency? Grant me that you stick Bush in there, and everyone switches
sides.
"People have good reason to be suspicious, the government has a track record of lying to
us." Agreed. And I don't need to be reminded that Afghanistan has a trillion dollars worth
of precious resources like lithium and adamantium that we'll need for future facebook
phones. They can't tell us they want that, so they pretend it's for something else. Right?

But the practical problem is that when we are forced to divine the "real" motivations for
politics that changes the behavior of the politicians in unexpected ways: it doesn't make
them less likely to wage war for oil and say it's for democracy; it makes them more likely to
do it in secret. Hence your new CIA Director, supporting mercantilism one special op at a
time.

This is the pattern of abuse. Your father is manifest superego, if he tricks you or hurts you
enough and you don't trust him anymore, then you can't trust anything. So you either find
a proxy for a superego-- a boyfriend, a religion, political ideology, Dianetics-- or you recede
into the comfort of narcissism. You surround yourself with image and images, you create
narratives that pretend to explain reality but really protect your individuality ("I see what
they're up to, man!") And you rot from the inside out, which is exactly the state of affairs in
America. No outside force can touch us, but they don't need to. They just need to wait it
out.

"Then they should just release the photos so we can trust they're telling us the truth!" Slow
down, Thomas, that won't help your faith, which is the real problem here. "It's a start."
You're not listening. Not releasing the photos is getting you in the habit of not expecting
photos to be released. Having terrible information mangled by the news media is getting
you used to having terrible information mangled by the media.

Of course I think bin Laden's dead, because I haven't yet lost all faith in "the system,"
though a lot of people can be excused for being suspicious of a government that cries wolf.

But when you repeatedly elect a government that cries wolf, the problem isn't the
government, the problem is you.

APRIL 28, 2011

What Should Really Be Done For Autistic Children?
 if only he had been diagnosed earlier

Though not my field, my recent experience (N=1) lead me to ask myself, and now you, a
terrible question.

There are numerous modalitlies and medications and theories that are used to help autistic
children. You try to find a treatment program that suits the child and the family, and you
begin; then ordinary life intrudes: missed appointments, effective medications aren't well
tolerated; unforeseen consequences, etc.

So I wondered: given unlimited resources, unlimited access, the best "clinicians" available in
the world-- what could be done? I don't just mean rich parents; I mean someone like the
president of the United States, with enough clout to be able to command the attention of
anybody he wanted. What's the best possible outcome? It seems like we should know what
that is before we move to a general approach.

For ease of discussion, let's just take the simple(r) case of a high functioning Asperger's
boy. Bill, age 6, has social delay, speech and language delay, motor coordination problems
but most major milestones hit appropriately, and no intellectual deficits. Struggles with
empathy, with articulating emotions, acts out when frustrated. Fails the Eyes Test.

Is there a theoretical maximum to improvement? I can predict remission, "cure," in

depression. Is it possible to take Bill and make him into an adult who would not be detected
as ASD on objective testing? (Let's leave aside whether other people can tell there's
"something about him.")
If the answer is yes-- that using the best of the best of all of the world's resources a child
can eventually "lose the diagnosis"-- then the terrible question I asked is, does the
treatment itself cause even worse damage?

Here are some of the structural problems of the treatment:

0. The diagnosis will make the parents want to try and help the child. This is
axiomatic. No parent with access to services will be told their kid has a diagnosis of "PDD"
or Asperger's and say, "not interested, let's wait a few years and see how this goes." Once
a diagnosis is made, the psychiatric juggernaut is activated.

1. The race against puberty. That's how long you have to teach meaningful coping
strategies before the gigantic burden of sexuality and adolescence hits you in the face. So
let's agree that the majority of the work has to be done in childhood; parents won't wait.

2. Do you tell the school? Remember, these parents do not need the school to access
services, they can get them on their own. Should they tell the school anyway? We talk
about stigma, but the more dangerous and pernicious force is the contextualization of all
behavior. Even if we predict "remission" by age 18, the existent diagnosis of ASD alters how
they see him. If the kid fights another kid at recess, it could just be a fight, but it will be
impossible for the school to see it as anything other than a manifestation of autism. The y
may not treat it differently this time, but the kid is always going to be operating from a
defensive position.

3. The treatment harms self-esteem. Sending a 6 year old to psychiatry and etc is fine,
but as the kid gets older and understands the social interpretation of psychiatry, it is likely
to be a blow to his self-esteem. (True?) And as the kids get older, they may make fun, or
just treat him differently. Does treating autism lead to marginalization, poor self image,
and... depression?

4. The treatment is necessarily ab-normalizing. The best treatment probably includes

different things, e.g. play therapy, social skills group, horseback riding-- again, I am
positing access to the "dream" treatment plan. All of those things take up time. When does
the kid get to watch Secret Of The Kells and play Legos instead of "you only have time for
one, we have to get to Dr. Miller's by 4"? At some inflection point the treatments are taking
time, energy and interest away from ordinary activities. Does he lose by not having them?

5. Other parents. Posit again that this treatment works, it makes the kid completely
"normal" by age 16-- as defined as undetectable on objective testing. He has, however,
been long identified as in intensive treatment. When the kid is 16, what parents are going
to allow their daughter to go out with "the autistic kid?" I wonder if parents would much
sooner let their daughters out with the "odd" kid (who never got treatment) then the
perfectly normal kid with a diagnosis.

Etc. Certainly at the low end of functioning services become more valuable, but at some
higher end of the spectrum... does intervention cause (un)forseen consequences?

Neither is this a question about "too much of a good thing." The question is: is the mere
activation of the psychiatric infrastructure more harmful than helpful? If Bill Gates had been
diagnosed... then what?
 APRIL 25, 2011
Hop, With Russell Brand: A Life Lesson For 4 Year Olds

"Hop? I'm not watching that." Well, your kids might, so you'll want to know what narrative
America is using to raise them. You may not be interested in pop culture, but pop culture is
interested in you them.
The Easter Bunny runs a huge candy factory, staffed by little chicks, and they make easter
baskets and deliver them on Easter morning. It's the family business, in operation for "four
thousand years," and he wants his son, EB, to take over ("someday, son, you will be
crowned king of the Easter Factory!")

But the boy, EB, played by Russell Brand, is a slacker-- running a business isn't his bag,
man. So he sneaks out one night and heads to-- where else-- Hollywood.
The set up is basic enough but remember this is 2011. Kids don't set off on adventure
anymore, especially those who stand to inherit the motherlode. And what's up with that?
How do you make a 2011 American audience accept the existence of a corporate monarchy?
How do you make transferring an enormously important institution to the oldest son okay
with the 9% unemployment crowd, angry at corporate perks?
There's other trouble, too: while the bunnies have been at it for 4000 years, so have the
chicks. Generation after generation, they've been working in the factory with no investment
in the company, no chance for advancement.
So how do you make feudalism palatable to Americans? Answer: make the bunnies British,
and it simply won't occur to the audience that there is anything odd about the arrangement.
So the Easter Bunny is British. Never mind he's a German creation brought to us by the
Amish.
They put Santa Claus at the North Pole. Where should they put the Easter Bunny's
headquarters? Remember-- he's British. No guess? Easter Island. They access the massive
underground candy factories by entering a secret door in the base of the statues.
Now, you can be forgiven for thinking it's just a clever/lazy use of the name, but they didn't
put Christmas on Christmas Island and make Santa's tagline, "Crickey!" So is there anything
else we should know about Easter Island?
Well, the folklore of the land has it that there were originally two groups of people on Easter
Island: dark skinned Polynesians, called Short Ears; and early white settlers/enslavers
called Long Ears. You can take it from there.

II.
Over in America a parallel story is unfolding, but instead of feudalism it's more late stage
capitalism. Successful Dad has a successful adult daughter, and the rule in movies is if you
want to depict a woman as successful, you make her super hot but put her in glasses or a
suit jacket. "I just got a promotion!" she announces at the dinner table as the buttons on
her blouse strain to contain her success. But Dad also has a slacker son, Fred, who's 30 and
has no valuable skills. But unlike EB, Fred has no legacy to inherit, and he doesn't want to
leave home.
Wait a second, who's that other kid sitting there next to the daughter?

There's an extra daughter there. She's Chinese (=successful), I put her at 8. Why is she
there? If the son is 30, figure that they adopted her around his college graduation.
Hmmm. You almost think they adopted her because Fred was such a disappointment, and
you think this partly because the only thing she says at the dinner table is, "sometimes I
think you adopted me because Fred was such a disappointment." Hush, child, "that is a
very hurtful statement!" To Fred. Crickey. It's a scene that would cringe you into tetanus if
you weren't distracted by the blonde with the successes. Phew, scene saved.
Personal note: it's a kids' movie, so they have to sterilize everything. So we have a table
with four adults eating a sumptuous meal, drinking from goblets, but not one person is
drinking alcohol. Are there families in America that simply don't drink? I don't trust
anyone not on probation who doesn't have wine at their table; and, while we're at it, I don't
trust any man who drinks milk. Keep your hands where I can see them and no, I am not
letting my kids come over.
So while creepy Dad drinks iced tea with lemon, he gives some advice to Fred. Guess what
the advice is: settle. "Forget about 'great', just settle for a job that's good." Where have I
heard that before?
Mom agrees: "settling is fine," she says wistfully. And she looks away dreamily. This may
seem like a throwaway line except that delivered by an attractive middle aged woman it's
drowning in innuendo. America isn't the land of hopes and dreams, it's the land of no
prospects and settling. Remember this, we'll come back to it.

III.

We have to think about the dichotomy between the two families. The Easter business is
serious business. It's a family business, sure, but a huge one, employing innumerable
chicks. But "someday, son, you will be crowned king of the Easter Factory" is the kind of
thing Huffington Post puts as a headline to make you hate white people.
Any chance we might inadvertently identify with the chicks? They're basically indentured
servants. Minimum wage, no benefits. Don't Americans resent dynasties, nepotism? One
chick-- the foreman of the factory-- wants to be the next Easter Bunny and retool the
factory to make some chick-friendly treats. He tries to impress the boss with his skills, his
ability to run the business. He works very hard, he even hops and wears bunny ears to
show how serious he is.

Meanwhile, EB, the true heir, couldn't care less about the business, he squanders his
advantages and turns up the music. So the chick gets resentful of EB and you can't blame
him: "enjoy your life of privilege," he mutters under his breath.
So even though post-Crash Americans might naturally identify with the chicks over the
rabbits, in the movie the rabbits have to be the good guys and the chicks are the bad guys.
So what do the chicks have to do to earn our hatred?
I wish I was making this up: they're Marxists. The main conflict comes when the chick
leads a worker's revolt against the Easter Bunny and take over the means of production, so
right away you have the worst kind of bad guys. Now make that hatred visceral, make that
chick different from us, make it natural to hate him. Making him a black chick would have
been way too obvious and racist, so they went with the next best thing: they made him
Hispanic.
That's right, the bad guy in this movie is Carlos, complete with Hank Azaria's Dr. Nick
Riviera Mexican accent, the face of organized labor. That's what we call a bad guy.
IV.
Let's turn to page 60 in the script like any good studio exec would. What's the pivot, the
script's sell?
Fred and EB have interrupted Fred's Chinese sister's school play. She's Peter Cottontail, and
sings, terribly, the bunny song. That would be a cheap Chinese copy of the original. It
irritates EB, who stops the show and starts a duet with Fred that culminates in a full
audience sing along of "I Want Candy." It's great, it's American, and everyone's thrilled.
Well, maybe the little girl would be sad that she was interrupted and upstaged? They don't
show that. My mistake-- they feature it.
I can accept a talking bunny, but I can't envision a scenario in which a grown man interrupts
a school play, hurting the feelings of a little girl, that does not result in his being stabbed in
the neck. But everyone in this movie thinks it's great.
She may be dressed like a bunny but she's a chick, a stand in. Remember, she's not the
star of the family, is she? She was just there to keep the family afloat until he got his act
together, and now that Fred's stock is on the rise we don't much need for her services. She
is, after all, Chinese. And cut.

V.

EB gets his big chance to play drums on David Hasselhoff's TV variety show. He's in his
dressing room, and a production assistant opens the door to tell him he's on next. The
production assistant is (human) Russell Brand. EB says under his breath, "hello, who's this
gorgeous devil?" Get it? Yes, we get it. But take it at face value: why would EB find a
human male gorgeous?
Remember, EB's arc requires him to escape his legacy and do what he wants (drumming);
and Fred's arc requires him to find a career in a land where there aren't any. So, in the final
resolution of the movie, Fred decides he wants to be the Easter Bunny. That's what he's
going to do with the rest of his life. NB this is a hereditary monarchy and he's not a bunny.
Also NB the actual Easter Bunny and his son are still alive. So?
So EB and Fred form a partnership, hmm, an odd sort of partnership, officiated by his father
who says this:
"Place your fingers on the Wand of Destiny. By the power vested in me, I pronounce EB and
Fred O'Hare... co-Easter Bunnies!" And everyone cheers.
Where have you ever heard the words, "by the power vested in me?" That's right, it's a
domestic partnership, a marriage of sorts, and rather than try and un-pc figure out which
one's the girl and which one's the boy simply observe that person B finds actualization by
completely subsuming his own identity into the business of person A, who in turn gets the
leisure time to pursue other interests (like drumming.) That, my fellow 4 year olds, is an
American fairy tale.

(reposted/edited from partialobjects)

 APRIL 24, 2011
Why Do Autistics Score Poorly On The Eyes Test?

"I think she wants me." Wrong.

Asking what's lacking in an autistic kid is like asking what's lacking in a car. Fuel efficiency?
Horns? A duck?

There's no consistency in diagnosis, even though the diagnosis is immensely reliable. That
means that ten doctors will all agree a person has "ASD," but that person may look nothing
like the other people all who have reliably been diagnosed. This makes offering them
treatment even more difficult.

So we have choices: try to refine the diagnostic criteria, or create separable categories, or
dig backwards in time to find the "neurodevelopmental deficits" that existed in common.

Trouble is, even an identical, genetically determined, structural pathology-- e.g. "larger
cerebellum"-- may result in different phenotypes as each kid will learn different strategies to
cope. How, without the eye of God, am I supposed to tell if someone has it?

II.

"Reading the Mind in the Eyes" Test was devised by Simon Baron-Cohen, and revised in
2001 to improve sensitivity. The test is widely employed and widely criticized, but it's
useful to understand his logic first.

The test is 36 pictures of eyes like the one above. The woman's eyes, above, have choices:

a) decisive
b) amused
c) aghast
d) bored

The test is here-- but DON'T TAKE IT until you read this whole post first. A similar version
for children is here, using the same eyes but different words:

a) made up her mind

b) joking
c) surprised
d) bored

Here is a distribution of scores generated with normals:

In this particular study, the "high functioning autism" group scored 21.9 +/- 6.6.

What does Baron-Cohen think this test tests? One starts from the assumption that ASD is a
neurodevelopmental disorder-- i.e. a "static encephalopathy." Something happened early,
and though it may not be progressing, it is a physical limitation.

The point of this test is to be able to detect, even in a person who appears normal, whether
they have this "static encephalopathy." Do they have true deficits in social cognition that
occurred early but have been masked by learning?

Hence the Eyes test. The test is NOT testing the ability of the person to read faces or
interpret their emotions, that's exactly the opposite of the point of it. People can have
learned adaptive strategies to get at the right answer. This test is supposed to be immune to
those tricks.

This test was conceived of as a test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the
other person, and "tune in" to their mental state.

Importantly, this requires that the person understand their own emotions and have
language to articulate it, which is what Baron-Cohen and others believe is the core
deficiency of ASD: the "absent self." So to do well on the Eyes test, they must not be
alexithymic. You can't interpret the eyes as "judgmental" (lacking the "hints" that come
from the mouth, forehead, context, etc) unless you understand that emotion in yourself.
The relationship between alexithymia and low Eyes Test scores has been directly measured.
For example: do psychopaths have difficulty "tuning into" the mental state of others, or can
they do it just fine but don't care? I've always felt the latter, and so I'd predict psychopaths
do fine on the Eyes Test. They do. (Which, BTW, speaks to the legal question of sanity.)

III.

Is the test flawed, i.e., does it really detect these pre-learning deficits? Lots of ASD people
do well on it, especially women, so the test may not be very sensitive after all. Can we at
least say that those who score poorly do have the deficits in social cognition? That the test
isn't particularly sensitive, but it is specific?

I have very little experience with ASD patients, but I had occasion over this holiday break to
cover an ASD unit. An occupational therapist was explaining this test to me, and we
showed some of the eyes to a 6 year old boy with ASD who was hospitalized (his second)
for behavioral dyscontrol. The kid got several wrong, for example this one:

Baron-Cohen's theory of autism is predicated on a reduced ability to imagine the thoughts

and feelings of the other person substantially because they cannot recognize them in
themselves.

So I took the ones he got wrong, and three others that he had gotten right, and asked him
to guess again, but this time I told him to imitate the eyes himself. Doing it this way, he
got them all right. All of them.

Obviously, this surprised me. Admittedly, it was a slow process, but of interest was why it
was slow. I watched him "get into character"-- it took five or so seconds to sculpt his eye
muscles, individually, into the proper configuration, but once he had done this the answer
came easily.

Which tells me that this kid has the ability not to "learn adaptive strategies" or "fake it till
you make it," but truly access his own inner state and then apply it to others, i.e. to truly
empathize. What he seemed to be lacking is... practice?

So now I ask you to take the test yourself; when you click "Get Score" it will show you the
ones you got wrong. Cover the words, look at the numbers, and then go back and try to
imitate the eyes for the ones you got wrong. Did it help?
---

You might also enjoy:

Are You Good At Reading Faces?

APRIL 15, 2011

What Is A Real Man?

nope

"Real Men Don't Buy Girls" pretends to be a PSA against child sex slavery. What it really is
an effort in rebranding.

In this clip, you see Ashton Kutcher. If you had to find 300M Americans to be on a list of
"Real Men," and every person in America except for Ashton Kutcher had been eaten by a
giant squid, Ashton Kutcher would still not make that list, ever. This isn't to say he's a bad
person-- he stuck with Demi (admittedly, not hard to do) and seems to have done right by
the Willis kids-- but he's not in Jung's Psychological Types.

In the clip he's disheveled, unshaven, he's wearing a knit cap, he has dirty socks-- real men
don't care about their appearance. But he can't even fake it; his stubble is carefully
maintained, and I don't know any guy in the world who has an extra pack of socks available
"just in case." No guy buys socks unless they need them right now; if you see a guy picking
up a pack, he stepped in a river. You see a guy buying underwear, he's going to put them
on in the car.

Real Men, as defined in these ads, means 35+yo men acting like 10th graders. All of the
men in the PSAs-- Justin Timberlake, Jaime Foxx, Bradley Cooper-- are unmarried. Kutcher
is technically married, but in the PSA he "isn't." Yes, he's wearing a ring, but the room is
obviously only for him. There are no decorations; the only visible book is "Travel As a
Political Act" which they give you free at high school graduation. There's a crumpled shirt in
the corner, waiting for Saturday when he can take it to his mom's.
Here's Bradley Cooper reprising his Hangover look, and you can tell he's a Real Man because
he eats breakfast cereal. Meanwhile, he eats it out on a deck that no guy has and crosses
his legs the way no man ever does.

I know Jaime Foxx is a real man because I saw him in a Kanye West video pretending to be
Ray Charles singing about bitches. Also, he drinks beer because that's what real men do;
never mind he puts the beer to his lips like he's a bulimic actress fumbling her way through
a Doritos commercial.

All of these "real men" are pretending to be what they think a "real man" is. But it's clear
that they have no idea what that means-- so they go for image.

The end of the ads puts each actor's face in a picture, and then cuts to other real men-- Die
Hard Bruce Willis, Cowboy Tom Selleck, Han Solo Harrison Ford. Those are all fictional
portrayals of real men. But by putting Jaime, Bradley and Ashton next to them, they inherit
the branding.

All of this is conscious, purposeful emulation of images. If I don't shave; if I act like John
McClain; if I am single-- then I am a real man. It doesn't work. The ads grossly reveal
how obviously they are faking it-- even though they actually are real men. What makes
them not real men is precisely the conscious pretending to be a real man.

That last part is the important piece. Here's an example: the one thing Ashton Kutcher has
done in his life which is indisputably evidence of being a real man is that stayed with Demi
and helped raise and support her kids. Say whatever else you want about this egomaniac,
that is a real behavior that is of real consequence, that is the essence of "real man." But
Ashton himself doesn't see that-- he even tries to hide it. None of these people do. Maybe
because they're actors, maybe because they are part of The Dumbest Generation of
Narcissists In The History Of The World-- they cannot help but put appearances over
behavior.

Note also that at the end, it is a woman, a super hot It-Girl like Jessica Biel or Eva Longoria,
who judges what a real man is. That gives themconsiderable power. We the viewers
understand that it is their sexiness that lets them be the judges of men, but did anyone
notice that they also become the ones to judge who is a real woman? Hence their
endorsement of Arianna Huffington and Randi Zuckerberg(?!) And in that endorsement, the
It-Girl brands herself as not just a pretty face-- smart by association-- after all, she was
smart enough to choose Randi Zuckerberg and not some dumb model. It's transparent and
patronizing, and a lie. Does she actually believe she can convince men that Randi
Zuckerberg is a "real woman" just because she said so? The answer is yes, she believes it.
Since she can judge men, she can also judge women.

So what have we learned from these ads? Real men are image; real women are hot, or
liberals.

---

See also Does The "Real Men" ad work?

 APRIL 12, 2011
J Crew Ad Promotes Something That Some Call "Transgenderism"

I love how natural she looks

The kid is Beckett, the son of the woman in the photo. Look, he's wearing pink.

Media commentator Erin Brown of the Media Research Center also had strong views, calling it 'blatant
propaganda celebrating transgendered children.

'J Crew, known for its tasteful and modest clothing, apparently does not mind exploiting Beckett behind
the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics.'
Before you jump in with your own ideas, ask yourself a question with a very obvious
answer: do you think that photo is real?

People are arguing over it like it's hidden camera footage of this woman's house. Do you
think this scene wasn't staged? How many takes did it require?

Look at the ad carefully. What is it selling?

You probably think it's the shirt, but there are two products there: the shirt and the nail
polish.

Look carefully at that nail polish, neon pink. It doesn't exist, not in that exact color,
anyway. The color's name is "Short Shorts," and thanks to the magic of Photoshop it
doesn't have to look like this:

Look at
those crayons. Those are artificially enhanced colors.

This isn't to say it isn't trying to promote transgenderism, or it is; but as an ad it's telling
you something about you vs. the products so we may as well listen.

II.

It's Saturday, you don't have to dress up for work. Yay! Hold on, that doesn't mean you're
allowed not to dress up. No sweatpants for you.

The woman in the ad is attractive but not in a vulgar, sexual way. Supremely comfortable
with herself, her life. It seems effortless. And she's the president of J Crew. And she has
her son with her. She's the product. The image. You don't like the polish, fine, J Crew has
other stuff to make you into her. In other words, she is you, the aspirational you. The kind
of you that can say this:
She doesn't put her kids in front of the TV so she can get a minute to poop. She doesn't
have to.

She's the product, all those things around her are accessories. The polish is an accessory,
and its color has been enhanced to better broadcast the message. The kid is an accessory,
and he's been enhanced to broadcast the message. Clean, vibrant, simple, alive, happy,
fun.

What's going on in the ad? Now it's 11:30 (Beckett sleeps in on the weekends, of course)
and the art project is done and the coffee (french press) is so good it doesn't need milk or
sugar. Giggle. Lighthearted fun ensues, and the boy gets his toenails painted. Now,
obviously, he's a boy and he's not the kind of boy to get his nails painted pink, it was all in
spontaneous fun. But it's not like anyone's watching, it's in a safe environment, where you
can do whatever you want and no one makes assumptions. Dad's not there. She can just
throw her hair in a bun and be the kind of beautiful women like. "I love Anne Hathaway."
Me, too.

How much you wanna bet her nails aren't painted neon?
Of course not, that's not her style. She's not the kind of successful and stylish mom who
would wear neon pink, either, but sometimes it's fun to play. HA! That is fun. So why
even buy the neon and the orange behind it if you're not going to wear it out? Oh, because
it's fun, frivolous, like the crayons. The nail polish is crayons. And because, precisely, if you
wear it, it doesn't mean anything.

III.

"But surely J Crew must have known this photo would be controversial?" Ummm, duh.

And controversy is publicity and blah blah, marketing 101. But the controversy serves to
establish who you are not. First, if you're offended, you're probably not a woman. Do you
see any men in the ad? It depicts a safe, comforting place for women. He's not home.

Or you're not an attractive woman. Erin Brown of the Media Research Center might be a
supermodel but she sounds ugly, doesn't she? Or old. Yuck. Nothing clean, simple, or
vibrant about that. Her Saturday's probably involved planned defecations. That's not you,
the J Crew consumer.

"But don't you always say "if you're watching it, it's for you." Why is Erin Brown watching it?
Because the ad gives her a way of defining herself. Everybody wins.

"But now there's a possibility the kid may become gay, or transgendered." The word you
focused on is transgendered, the word J Crew wants you to focus on is possibilities. The kid
with the painted nails is young, doing something out of the norm. He embodies
possibilities, so J Crew embodies possibilities.

If there is anything "bad" about this ad, it isn't the transgenderism, but the Desire. You are
different from her, but you desire to be her.
The problem is that your desire doesn't know the difference between real you and the
aspirational you, and it relentlessly pursues the Symbolic. Desire is never satisfied, it is
never fulfilled.

That's what J Crew is banking on.

APRIL 8, 2011
The Abusive Boyfriend

not pictured

He doesn't hit you, he's not that kind of abusive.

And he's not mean, or controlling, not like that. No, not really.
But he's careful to make sure you don't notice that a certain movie is on tonight, and he's
deftly avoided ballroom dancing lessons with you. And he walks you the other way if he
spots one of your friends, or any billboard with Gabriel Aubry on it.

He's not jealous, he just doesn't want you... distracted.

He has no problem admitting that other men are attractive ("I'm no Tom Cruise"), but never
the men that you yourself find attractive.

He's never mean or disrespectful to your friends when you're out together (he goes
reluctantly, but for you), but later he reminds you of how you're better than they are, and
when they do things "like that" it's silly/wrong/beneath you. He never says you can't go out
with them, but there's always a coincidental reason for you not to. "Oh.....
well..................... I had a special night planned for just the two of us..."

How sweet he is, once a month he buys you a new CD, classical music, with a flower,
though now you don't really listen much to the music you used to like.

He is always with you, always in contact with you. Even when he's not there you hear him
in your head like a voice over. You've even said to him, "sometimes I'm about to do
something that I would have done before I met you, and then I hear your voice and I think,
"well, Tom would say XYZ" and I realize that I shouldn't do it after all, and I feel so much
happier having that part of you with me" and he nods knowingly, yes, he says silently,
you're learning to be a better person.

No one else who knows you understands why you're with him.

But you're not unhappy. When you're with him, alone, things are usually great. And he
loves you, there's no question. Maybe you think he's worried you don't love him? But you
do, how can you express that to him, so he believes it, so he doesn't have to feel
threatened by anyone else?

Save your breath, that's not what he's worried about. He has a different class of dread,
because he is, after all, really smart, and perceptive. He has, deep down, that feeling that
you're not really compatible, and he may even know he's not good for you-- he may suspect
he's actively clipping your wings so you don't get away.

He tells himself that he's keeping bad influences away from you, protecting you from "your
old self." But he doesn't completely believe that-- he is,after all, perceptive-- he secretly
knows these "bad" things are better for you, they are more you. He knows you'd be happier
with them. But then there'd be no room left for him.

What's he sure about is that this is the best there is. Other things, different things, may
make you temporarily happier; more money, a trip, more freedom, a bigger dick, laughs
with friends, but in terms of your life, your soul, this is as far as you need to go.

He will help you pursue any goal, any happiness, as long as it does not compromise your
relationship with him. He will give you everything and allow you to do anything, as long as
nothing makes you wonder if he isn't manipulating you, as long as nothing makes you
wonder if another kind of life is possible. Not a better life, just a different life. He'll take a
bullet for you on instinct, but if another man innocuously tells you he's alsointerested in art
history or compliments your hair, then you'll relentlessly over months be presented with
subtle reasons why art history is a fraud and you need a haircut. Attacking the man would
be too transparent.
But why so much energy controlling the world? Why not just let things be and see what
happens? Is he so afraid things will get worse?

No. He's afraid things will get worse or they will get better. He is afraid of change, any
change, not just because the relationship may change but because if it changes then he
would have to change. Into what? How? With what resources? With what net? Once
change has happened, doesn't that mean other possibilities were obliterated? It is his
possibilities he is trying to beat down with your sclerosed dreams.

All that matters is keeping the relationship intact. Even if you both end up miserable, better
misery and stability with him than the tachycardia of something else, something unknown,
something he can't control or defend against.

Do you know this guy? You think you do.

This is what you need to know: the boyfriend I'm describing isn't Tom, the hipster who's
number one on your speed dial. And no, I'm not directing this at you, man-boy, I'm not
saying you are doing this to your woman, though you may be. At any moment there is only
one person in the room no matter how many people are in the room, and that one person,
you, is lugging around the same man you've lived with for years. The abusive boyfriend I'm
describing is your unconscious, and Tom has nothing on him, though Tom has, through the
hypertrophied intuition of damaged men, figured out how it all works.

The unconscious doesn't care about happiness, or sadness, or gifts, or bullets. It has one
single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo. Do not change and you will not die. It will
allow you to go to college across the country to escape your parents, but turn up the
volume of their pre-recorded soundbites when you get there. It will trick you into thinking
you're making a huge life change, moving to this new city or marrying that great guy, even
as everyone else around you can see what you can't, that Boulder is exactly like Oakland
and he is just like the last guys. And all the missed opportunities-- maybe I shouldn't, and
isn't that high? and he probably already has a girlfriend, and I can't change careers at 44,
and 3 months for the first 3/4 and going on ten years for the last fourth, and do I really
deserve this?-- all of that is maintenance of the status quo, the ego.

You think you're with Tom by accident? You were set up.

And when all else fails, it will beat you down with apathy. Or the Monday night lineup. Or
pot. Or-------------------

The men, or women, aren't lying to you, and you're not even lying to yourself. You are
being lied to, by yourself.

APRIL 7, 2011
After You Shoot Three Women, Who Should You Call?
 dressing the part

The rule in media is that if they mention your middle name you killed someone, so Thomas
Franklin May is nominally guilty.
His ex-wife put out a restraining order against him, so he drove out to where she was and
shot her in her car. She was 36. He also shot a nearby 63 year old woman and a 94 year
old woman, I assume so they wouldn't turn into Agents.
It's hard not to judge a book by its cover when the book is wearing a big America # 1 t-shirt
and a Harley Davidson cap even if that is the mandatory uniform of Alabama and he drives
a Jeep. Why is this idiot in sneakers?

Police did not release a motive. "We really don't know what's in a person's mind when they do
something like this."

Yes we do, same thing every time: "It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks."

About three hours later, when city officers already had left campus, a man driving a white Jeep Liberty
with the same tag number police had released as the suspect's pulled into the parking lot where the
shootings occurred. Photographer Todd van Emst, who was taking photos of the scene for The
Associated Press, said the man asked to use his cell phone. Van Emst said the man gestured and said he
"did all this."

Uh oh, someone broke the fourth wall. It's hard to believe that a man with a white Jeep
Liberty needs to drive back to the scene of the crime to make a call; and anytime anyone
asks to borrow your cell phone you should assume they're running a short con, duck. No,
Thomas Franklin May chose to go to the media. Did he think they'd be sympathetic?
Doubtful. They'd let him go? No. He loves the liberal media? It's Alabama. He went
because he figured they'd do what he needed them to do: soft ball the bad guy and publish
his side of the story.
The media will drop a blonde in a war zone without a moment's hesitation, but what they
don't like is a gunman out of context, and this guy was way the hell out of context. So
rather than sitting him down to figure how this can be Bush's fault, they called the cops.
And then this happened:
After members of the media called 911, police arrived within minutes, knocked the man to the ground
and handcuffed him, van Emst said.
If it takes you minutes to drive to somewhere to knock someone down, you probably didn't
need to knock him down. Not that May didn't deserve it, but in truth knocking him down
was van Emst's right, not the police's. Read that again. The police have a partial
monopoly on power because they promise us to use it judiciously, when necessary-- but we
often forget that we humans retain a special right for scenarios, like the scenario of a
homicidal maniac in a white car (protip: if not female or Asian = INSANE) coming up to ask
to borrow your cell phone. That guy you're allowed to hit, if you can.
The point here is not that the photographer should have tackled him. The point is the more
police get to use our right of force, the more we become afraid, or even forget, to use it
ourselves. The result is that the tenuous duopoly of force becomes a monopoly. Rates will
go up.

II.

But as much as May's outfit reveals a lot about his thinking, it also affects his thinking, or do
women not feel any change in personality when they wear Louboutins? Well, while you
ponder that link exchange take a look at the Navy Seal arresting May-- that's standard
police attire. What the hell kind of town is Opelika that the cops wear sneakers because they
expect to be doing a lot of running? That guy came dressed for Two Men Enter One Man
Leaves, and goddam if he's not going to get a front incisor as a souvenir for his kid.
This is the full, uncut banner picture at the top of the website of the Alabama Department of
Public Safety Highway Patrol Division:

Where's the highway? Is this steganography?

Note that this banner is for the state police's website, i.e. this is their idea of public
relations. I don't fault them for preparing for Red Dawn, but why tell us this is who they
are? If this is who they want us to think they are, how will their actions mirror this desire?
Not to mention recruit the kind of people who think 24 is a training video which it was, until
season 4, then it kind of got weak.
Listen, I've been to Mobile about a thousand times, and every time I've wanted air support.
Parts of it are tough, I get it, and off topic I will mention that if you're married in Mobile it is
100% certain one of you is cheating. But all that paramilitary gear is after the crime
stuff--it helps them catch the bad guys but does not Protect & Serve you from the bad guys.
(Note that this guy already had a protection order against him.) Where your head is at,
how you carry yourself, who you think you are all affect your behaviors, and vice versa
(vee-kah ver-sah.) Get dressed.
I get the police's position. There's such a huge anti-police, anti-government philosophy that
cops don't know if a guy is going to squirt them with a bottle of HIV just on principle, so if
there's a homicide suspect who is still standing you make him not be standing, and then you
can explain he has the right to a totally ineffectual public defender.
Thomas Stupid May is going to get what's coming to him, because this is, after all, Alabama.
But May was in uniform. What would they have done if he was wearing an America Is
#965868 t-shirt?

---

More on the Alabama shooter

The iPad and The Death Of Techno-fetishism

APRIL 1, 2011
Observations Afterwards

the real test of your soul's strength is whether you are trying not to see it

As most know, I was the "victim" of a hold up of sorts, a "patient" came in with a gun and
etc, long story short is I'm still here.
But I made some observations which are worth telling.

1. Despite spending almost 20 very personal minutes in the room with him, I cannot
remember what he looks like. I know he's a male, I have a sense that he's about 6'1", and
that he has dark hair, but... that's it. If he came up to me in the street and offered me a
sandwich, I'd take it. I know the hair was dark, but I can't remember if it was buzz cut, or
short, or...

I can't remember what he was wearing. Blue and white shirt? Can't remember.

I do, however, remember his sunglasses, I can even remember a hair on one lens. The
glasses were so prominent and unusual that they took my attention away from everything
else, and, I reconstructed the physical appearance of this guy around his glasses. I believe
that if he was not wearing those glasses I'd have remembered his face or his clothes
better-- thought it's possible my attention would have been focused on the gun.
Now I know why they rob banks wearing Nixon masks.

2. As further evidence: I had his chart. I studied it after he was gone, and for sure I knew
his name-- until Monday, when I discovered I had, for the entire last week, remembered his
last name incorrectly. Not misspelled it-- completely a different last name. And when
someone recently corrected me, I didn't realize I had made a mistake-- I was genuinely
shocked to see I had memorized it wrong. I thought they were wrong.

There's been 20 years of good research on the (un)reliability of eyewitness testimony--

generally warning against the transference and distraction effect, and the universally terrible
idea of offering a witness one suspect and saying, "is this your guy?"

Most have seen the gorilla walking through the basketball game video, but watch it again:

The problem is that our attention is weaker than our memory, and selective attention to one
thing is at the expense of others. And no, it doesn't help that the girls are pretty.
Practice can mitigate this, but not extinguish it. And even someone like me who prides
himself on his cool and his 133t perception skillz still gets tripped up. I'll repeat something
important: I didn't forget his name, I really believed it was something else. I would have
vigorously defended that belief. "Are you guys insane? You think I'd forget his name?"

3. I had wondered if, involuntarily, I'd be nervous to go back to that same office. Would I
be hypervigilant? Would I have involuntary physical responses to the area? Would I dream
about it?

No, none of those. When I awoke the next morning, it felt like it happened a decade ago. I
went back like nothing had ever happened. I've really tried to understand why this is so I
could propose it as a solution to other people who want to get past it, and what it feels like
to me is that I was acting in a play a long time ago, playing the part of the doctor-victim,
and now I'm onto a new role.
Reinforcing this is my feeling towards the guy with the gun: that if I saw him again, I
wouldn't be afraid of him or even angry at him, but like he was an actor in a new role. Why
would I not be afraid of him?
I've tried to parse this out, what allowed me to get over that so quickly, and I think I have
the answer. Maybe this will help someone else.
4. What's my pivot point? What's the thing I keep coming back to, over and over?

If I run the fantasy version in my head, where I can imagine myself doing anything I want,
the thing I do differently is I get the door open sooner. Whether I yell at him and he does it
or he forgets to close it or someone comes in, the focus is that the door gets and stays
opened. When the door was open, I felt like I was no longer under his control. That was
the difference between having power and being powerless.
And so when I commanded the woman to get a copy of the insurance-- i.e. to open the door
and leave-- and it worked, I had (perhaps the illusion of) power. He wanted her there, but I
told her to leave, and he didn't stop her. I won that mini-battle. And even though it closed
again and he remembered he was insane, when I run this over I am "proud" of myself for
being able to control the situation and get her to leave.
So what it comes down to, at least for me, is finding the one specific moment where I
exerted some power, where I was not powerless, and it made up for everything else.

Which explains the lack of hypervigilance or worry about going back: sinceI had some power
the last time, I'll probably have some again. All of this may be an illusion or a psychic
defense, but reorienting myself away from my powerlessness towards a single instance of
power completely changed the emotional memory of it.

Results may vary.

MARCH 28, 2011

The Lululemon Whydunnit

bad gamblers play not to lose

AP:
An employee at an upscale Maryland yoga clothing shop is accused of killing a co-worker who found
suspected stolen merchandise in her bag, then trying to conceal the crime by tying herself up and
blaming the attack on two masked men.

[Prosecutor] McCarthy said Brittany Norwood, 28, spun an elaborate ruse to convince authorities that
she and the dead woman, Jayna Murray, had been attacked inside the Lululemon Athletica shop in
Bethesda where they worked.

Terrible and tragic and etc, but at least intelligible, a linear internal logic. Norwood is
stealing, gets caught by coworker and now has to make a decision: fold and lose
everything, or go all in on one last hand and maybe get out of this.

That's the gamble: is it worth a life, is it worth going to jail forever, to get out of a retail
theft charge? It is if it works, I guess.

II.

When you read enough news reports, you get to understand the code words. [Murder AND
"upscale neighborhood"] always means domestic homicide (usually murder-suicide) or
"non-white." Google it if you don't believe me.

The codes aren't conscious attempts to communicate unspeakable info to the reader, they
are unconscious manifestations of the retinas of the writers. It's how they see the world,
and after a while, you can tell how they see it by how they describe it.

"Make a left at the traffic light." "Make a left at the strip bar." Two different people.

So unless the two women were dating, this upscale neighborhood killing means one of them
is going to be black or Asian. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

III.

When Norwood was found the morning of March 12 inside the shop, she told police that she and
Murray, 30, had been sexually assaulted by two masked men who came in the previous night after
closing time. Norwood was found with minor scratches and other wounds, her hands and feet bound.
Trouble is, when they examine the women, there are no signs of rape. A week later they
figure out it was Norwood.

[Prosecutor] McCarthy offered new details about what happened before Murray died, saying she had
been asked by a store manager to check Norwood's bag for stolen merchandise. Murray called the
manager that night to say she believed Norwood had been stealing.

That same night, after the store had closed, Norwood told Murray she needed to get back into the store
because she left her wallet. When the two returned, they argued over the suspected theft, McCarthy said.
Norwood then picked up some sort of weapon inside the store and used it to beat Murray for as long as
20 minutes throughout the shop, McCarthy said. He said Murray sustained a severed spinal cord and
blows "too numerous to count."

Oh, ok, it's this movie plot. Norwood didn't kill Murray to prevent her identity from being
exposed, because Murray had already turned her in to the manager. Norwood killed her
later that night. Now it becomes a revenge story. Still terrible, but at least it makes
sense. Revenge taken as murder, and then Norwood stages the scene and concocts a story
about masked men to trick everyone. So she's no longer going for four aces, she's trying to
bluff. It's a longshot, but no one would wonder why you tried it.

IV.

Except-----------

When Norwood was found the morning of March 12 inside the shop...

-------except rather than leaving the store, rather than staging it as a robbery/murder and
then getting the hell out of there so that no one would even think about her, Norwood
stayed behind and pretended to have been a victim, too. She stayed there all night until
the manager came to open the store the next morning.

That's not the behavior of someone trying to get away with something, that's the behavior
of someone who wants to pretend to be someone else: I'm a victim. She thinks she can
win, as long as she can trick you into going easy on her.

That's called a hustle, trying to convince seasoned players that you're someone that you're
not. And when it fails, you get in a lot more trouble than if you just folded early and come
back to play another day. Trouble is, hustlers don't hustle to win, they hustle because they
don't know any other way to live.

MARCH 24, 2011

The Fall And Rise Of Rebecca Black

agreed: bomb Libya

For those of you without an internet connection, Rebecca Black is the 13 year old nobody
pretending to be a 17 year old nobody who wrote a song and made a video that everyone
hated almost instantly. But haters gonna hate, yo.
Even Autotune couldn't repair her nasally, off key voice. But, and but, is it the worst song
ever? Is it worth 30M hits of venom and disgust?

Break it down by parts and look at them. Music? Off the rack pop music, indistinguishable
from anything else. Lyrics? Probably below average, but no worse than "la la la la la la la"
which is Kylie or Dannii Minogue, depending on the decade you last ejaculated. Singing?
Again, below average but worse than Ke$ha or the entire Colbie Caillat portfolio? Shut your
mouth.

Video? Standard illogical mandness, why is a 13 year old girl going to a party like she's been
doing it for years? Is she an emancipated minor? No one can say, but does it make any
less sense than the Black Eyed Peas having a dance off to a song they didn't write and have
no business sampling? Unlike that video, when I watched "Friday" it never crossed my mind
how urgently the video needed a speeding box truck and an oil slick.

No. None of the parts adequately explain the level of hate. And that's because the hate
isn't directed at any of the parts, or at the video, or even at her, but at what she represents:
another spoiled rich white girl that has a video made for her, and releases it like she's as
good as her Daddy's money pretends she is.

II.

No, no judgmental statements from me, not yet, I am merely giving substance to that
hatred so you can understand the rest.

No one hates Rebecca Black for her music, you hate her because she's spoiled, because she
has opportunities in excess of her talent and the ability to create what superior artists will
never be able to simply because they lack the economic resources or maybe even the free
time that Rebecca has plenty o'. It's hard to get to the studio when you've got an 8am
down at the main office. Welcome to America, no one said it would be fair, in fact, no one
said a damn thing at all, they just showed you the pictures on the TV commercials and we
inferred the rest. Meanwhile, no one's yet recognized your talent. Rebecca's Dad forced us
to recognize hers, and she wins even by losing, but he's one guy. Are you so angry at this
one guy who gamed the system?

If it was just another battle in the Class War, so be it, another perfect proxy for our fury is
sure to get upmoded on Reddit so save some energy for later.

But then something happened: Rebecca announced on Tuesday's Tonight Show that she was
giving the proceeds from the video to charity, to Japan relief funds. Well, you might say,
she may suck and she may be spoiled but at least she thinks about things bigger than
herself and for a 13 yo that's not bad. And just like that, the tide turned, the haters slowly
became challenged by the respecters? defenders? enablers? and comment after comment,
blog after blog, article after article, her selflessness overshadowed her posited lack of talent
and now...
Slow down.

The problem with that narrative is it doesn't match the calendar or the numbers. Even as of
now, haters trump respecters 10 to 1, though admittedly it's changing. And the support for
her predates the Tonight Show appearance-- e.g. Lady Gaga calling her a genius, Alan
Colmes stating "she has a wonderful voice."

The tide didn't turn because she gave the money to charity, the tide turned because it hit
critical mass where it was no longer cool, no longer original, no longer branding, to hate
her; it was cooler to like her. None of that has anything to do with Rebecca Black-- did she
remaster the audio? get implants?-- it has to do with how we form opinions in the age
where instantency matters more than consistency, let alone logic. That's right, I invent
words.

That's America, that's how debate is done in America, that's how we decide all of our
questions from who blows as a singer to which blathering dictator we should
oppose/depose/impose. We don't have beliefs, we don't have positions, we have reactions
to other people's beliefs, to other people's positions. As long as you can be shown to be a
free thinker opposing the tyranny of the majority's insightlessness then you can look like a
hero, and if you have to pull a 180 in a week or so to do it, party on. No one will
care/remember what you did last party. Just remember the rule of opinion, of media: speak
early, and often, and if you have to drag a 13 year old down or dramatically alter foreign
policy for the next quarter century to lift yourself up, hey, it's all good.

MARCH 23, 2011

Bad At Math

how much is this worth

The following story is fiction. Any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

The doctor was at work doing the usual, which means patients, and a 20 year old hispanic
man bursts through the door and right away the doctor knew he was in big, big trouble.

The man wore sunglasses, the kind of one solid plastic band around the eyes that you don't
wear unless you're insane. He locks the door behind him and shouts, "if you give me any
shit, I'm going to fucking kill you." That was his opening line, the next few lines were
derivatives of the same.

He was yelling in English, but at about three threats in he says, "I want a translator--" so he
opens the door and the secretary (hispanic) that had come to the door to see what the
yelling was about steps in, no, he pulls her in, locks the door again, and goes back to
yelling. "You're fucking dead, do you hear me? Fucking dead!"

One other thing: he has a gun.

Putting it together later, yes, there will be a later, the doctor had seen that man, Juan, once
before. He had demanded Xanax max dose three times a day, and in the subsequent
negotiations it was agreed that as long as the guy could provide clean urines he could get
one Xanax half dose a day, along with the other medications. Deal? Deal. So he got a
script for 14 days, "come back then and we'll see how things are."

Somehow Juan had taken the 14 tablets as a personal insult, he expected 90, even though
it was clear that it was only for two weeks, and however he figured it in his brain the doctor
was screwing him. So he came back-- three months later-- looking to show the doctor he
messed with the wrong guy. "You think you're going to play me?"

The room they were in was the size of a large closet, about 8x8 square. The door opened
inwards, then there's a desk, and then the doctor-- so the desk is in between the doctor and
the door. The waiting room is full and it's right outside that door, so everyone can hear the
yelling, but no one can see the gun. Not yet, anyway.

The problem, logistically, was that even if the doctor wanted to jump him, he couldn't-- Juan
is blocking the door, and the desk is between them. If he comes over to hit him, then
they're close, but with that desk in between, the doctor was completely at his mercy.

The other problem, the GIGANTIC problem, is now there's a woman in there with them, and
she can't get out because she would have to open the door into herself (she'd end up
behind the open door) and then move towards him to get out.

Patients yelling at the doctor to give them Xanax is nothing new-- they threaten, they yell,
they posture, and it's all part of the game. The doctor had always played the game
respectfully, cool, calm, no anger, and he let them, nonverbally, understand that he
respected the power that they had-- if they wanted to, they could kill him-- but that the job
is the job, nothing personal, you're not getting Xanax not because I hate you but simply
because I don't think it's right. And he let them know that he'd do whatever else he could
for them. Sure some people left angry, but they left.

And when they yelled he let them, let them go on for so that they felt like they had
delivered their message, and eventually cut them off; ultimately they just need to feel that
they chose to let him go, not that they were turned away or rejected but that it was their
choice to move on, and when they left that would be the end. It happened about once a
week to him and all the other doctors, it's just the nature of the business and there's no
billing code for "pissed off xanax seeking guy."

But this guy was different, this guy wasn't looking to get something. This guy came with
the specific intention of killing him, he wasn't looking for more xanax or anything else.

And he wasn't psychotic, he was logical, specific-- just very threatening. "You think I'm
playing?" "I'm going to tell you what's what." "You think you know me?" Every
gangbanger movie cliche, as if he was reading from a script, but if that guy stayed true to
his character then this was going to end very badly.

So Juan locks them all in, and she's scared, and the doctor is scared. Because now, with
her there, he was completely sure he meant to kill them. Before she came in, it was
between him and Juan only, and he might be able to talk him down, but when Juan brought
her in it was clear he wasn't worried about being caught or identified or collateral damage,
he just wanted to kill.

So he yells for about 30 seconds (it felt like an hour) and then the doctor tells him that
perhaps he can get him some Klonopin, which is a lot like Xanax. The Klonopin was
incidental to the argument, but he figured that if he could get this maniac to focus on
something concrete, turn it into a treatment or at the very least a transaction, in which he
could be "given" something, the guy might back down just enough to not kill everyone.

But the problem was the woman. She was scared but also... irrational. Would she try and
run? Would she try something stupid? Was he going to kill her, too? He had to get her out.

So the doctor turns to Juan and says, "but I need your insurance card to make sure I can
give you Klonopin." That was a lie, but it was a distraction, turn the focus to something
else. Juan gets his wallet out muttering, "he wants my card now, my card, this fucking
(something) wants my card." And he gives it to the doctor, and the doctor hands it right to
the woman and says, "I need a copy of this immediately. Immediately." She hesitates,
she's unsure, she moves towards the door slowly but Juan lets her pass. Thank God, he
thinks. It's going to be okay.

Wrong. As soon as Juan closes the door behind him, he goes ballistic. It was like he
remembered what he was there for. "You fucking [this], I'm going to fucking [that]!" and
etc. Whereas before he was waving the gun around, now he kept his arm locked, gun
pointing towards the floor. He's still yelling, cursing, threatening. The gun is there and it's
pointing down and it's simply waiting for him to decide to raise it.

Again, even if the doctor could disarm him, he can't because of the desk. He can't throw
anything, there's nothing else on the desk. He can't run. If he stands up, he'll get shot in
the chest. If he ducks down, it forces Juan to lean over the desk, which means he'll get
shot in the back of the head or the spine.

This was the plan: turn to the side and let him shoot him in the shoulder or arm.

What did he think about? He thought about his kids, how sad they'd be that their father
was dead. They would cry. He thought about how this nut would eventually get caught
and the kids would have to face the man who did it and listen to his words and the words of
everyone else. The kids would have to look around at an insane world that tried to explain
everything with lies. And then they'd have to go home and grow up. "That's life," someone
would tell them, because it's true and that helps.

He also thought about how stupid this guy was, how terrible he was at valuing things, he
had decided that his life was worth throwing away over... what? He wasn't stealing his car,
there wasn't anything of value at stake. Xanax? He could have gotten it anywhere else,
easily, anytime. Revenge? It wasn't like the doctor had raped his sister, he had just not
given him something. But somehow in his calculus this grudge was worth carrying for three
months, worth killing someone over, worth 25 years in jail. This wasn't psychosis, this was
a man who was bad at math.

The plan is to give him the shoulder, take it in the shoulder, and not turn, not go down.

Then the woman comes BACK. What caused this woman to come back is unknowable, but
she opens the door and it bumps him because he's in front of it. So he turns around to see
who's coming in and he grabs the paper out of her hand and he sort of flings it at the
doctor.

But everything is different now, because the door is wide open, and everyone in the waiting
room can see them.

So the doctor, as calmly and with as much authority as he can muster, looks at the paper
and says "ok, I can give you 30 tablets of Klonopin with this." He tried to make it sound like
that was what they had been talking about the whole time, a treatment, a transaction. It
wasn't about the doctor, it was about the pills.

Juan reflexively says, "no, Xanax," and the doctor responds, "no, all I can give you without
a urine (drug test) is Klonopin," and Jaun says, "I want 90 of them." And the doctor says,
"only after the urine."

Whatever calm exterior he displayed was not mirrored on the inside, and while he was
trying to show steady penmanship he made a mistake- and he wrote Xanax instead of
Klonopin. It just came out. So now Juan sees the doctor writing that, and the doctor has
to decide if he was going to give it to him that way or not. But if the reason he was still
alive was that he had turned it from something personal into a treatment, then handing him
the Xanax was an admission that it was, after all, not a treatment but a stick up. And
maybe that would remind Juan that the doctor had screwed him the first time. So the
doctor says, out loud, "dammit," tears up the script and rewrites it. Doing the job
correctly.

Juan took it, made a few more threats, and left. 20 minutes after that the police finally
came, and while they were there he called the clinic and said he was coming back to kill the
doctor because he only got 30 tablets. A man who is terrible at math.

When the doctor went back to see the patients who stuck around, all of them, men and
women, told him the same thing: "Yo, man, I had your back, if anything happened, I was
going to bust in here." Of course they would have.

What's unsettling, however, is that Juan had been in the waiting room for an hour before the
doctor even got there, muttering to other people that he was going to "fuck him up." But
no one said anything.

There's not much more to the story, except that the doctor went home, felt a little shaken,
had a drink or three, debriefed with some people and not with others, and eventually 3am
came and he went to bed. And when he woke up it was gone, merely a memory, it all felt
like it happened a decade ago. That's life.

MARCH 19, 2011

March 13 Week on Partial Objects
The Adjustment Bureau
All The News That's Fit To Compartmentalize
Physics Envy Can Be Hazardous To Your Health
Amy Bishop Didn't Snap
Simulating The Simulated Experience. With Gum

Looking for others to post their own deconstructions!

 MARCH 15, 2011
When Is It Okay To Rape A Woman?

no one's gonna hear nothing

I think I'm supposed to put up a *PTSD triggers* warning, so consider yourself warned.

I.

On the Ron and Fez show, an male intern asked: if you could rape a girl, but then give her
this magic drug that left her with no memory of the rape, would you do it?

Such hypotheticals are often argued over beers and best settled over rum, but the real
learning isn't in the answer but in the asking of the question.

His argument was that since there's no evidence that it happened and she can't remember
it, then she can't possibly suffer the consequences of it. So, no harm done. And the
response to this is that there's a reality outside of perception, and whether she suffers or
remembers doesn't much excuse the act. Rape is rape. End of story.

But it's right about there that the question gets more interesting.

II.

Without even answering the question, it's important to understand what the intern did: he
assumed that most of the (male) population would (want to) do the same. He didn't think
men would all rush out and do it-- and he was protected from finding out because such a
magic pill doesn't exist-- he believed that in men's hearts, when they consider the world of
fantasy and what they wish they could get away with, men would want to get away with
this. We all wish we could just bang that girl and then erase her memory.

A caller incorrectly identified this as the consensus fallacy. A consensus fallacy is the
assumption that since lots of people believe it, it must be true. But in our case the intern's
mistake was in assuming that lots of people agree, which is false. The actual fallacy is
called the false consensus bias, in which one assumes others share the same beliefs as you
do.

I make this distinction explicit because it should be evident that two different kinds of
people will be prone to either error. Some will hold, as their premise, what many already
believe; and others will PROJECT what they believe onto others.

Importantly, no amount of data or solid evidence will convince the latter-- the false
consensus bias guy-- that he is wrong. That's because it's not a belief, it is a maneuver, it is
an act to protect the self, an act that they will take as far as they need to. "No, they're
lying, they're just not willing to admit it." When you hear that-- "I speak for others who are
too frightened"-- run; because if they had a gun, they would speak for you.

III.

In physics, you typically solve an equation by getting it into the form of a different equation
that's already been solved. So the Rape question is of the form "if a tree falls in the forest,
and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" Solve for x: duh.

Not so fast, Sir Charles, technically, the answer is no. The question doesn't ask if the tree
fell or not, but if it made a sound. The felled tree generates (real) air pressure waves that
we call sound waves, and these pressure waves hit the ear machine and are interpreted as
sound. The tree doesn't make a sound, we interpret what it makes as sound. A creature
with no ears might experience these waves differently, Beethovening them as vibrations on
it's body.

So now our rape question is, if a penis goes inside a vagina, but no one's around to
remember it, is it still rape?

The intern says that as long as she never finds out, she can't judge it as rape. He's arguing
that moral questions ("this is rape/ this isn't rape") are different than technical questions ("I
penetrated her/ I didn't penetrate her.") There's no such thing as objective morality, society
merely agrees on some rules-- and since she can't remember, she can't judge it.

Fine; but he is a person, and he remembers it, and he was there. So it is still rape. He
might try and rationalize that he doesn't think it's rape, but then he'd be lying: the question
he asked used the word rape.

One of the biggest mistakes we make when arguing with dummies is that we don't take
their own words at face value-- we allow them pretend that their initial move was
meaningless in comparison to the revisions, like a bank robber who says to the police,
"yeah, but I'm giving it back right now." The initial volley is always the most relevant:
everything afterwards is defense.

IV.

But there are some of you who will agree with the intern. Some of you will wish you could--
not that you'd ever do it, but boy oh boy wouldn't it be great. It's to them I'm writing.

The intern, and you, don't even need to have performed this rape; simply by answering the
question in the affirmative, your lives have veered sharply to the left, you have made
connecting with another person substantially more difficult. By which I mean impossible.
V.

If you could rape a girl, and then give her a magic drug that would leave her with no
memory of the rape, would you do it?

In responding to the intern, Ron (the host) made an obvious point, and before I make it I
want you to clear your mind and imagine yourself acting out this scenario. You're a man, on
top of the woman, finishing, pulling out, and then giving her the drug. She blinks, looks at
you like she forgot what she was going to say, and goes back to ringing up your order.

Got that image? She doesn't remember anything. She's perfectly happy, no harm done at
all. The point Ron made was, "so if a couple of my boys from the west village rape you in
the ass, and inject you with the drug, that's ok?" He used the word "fucking" to modify
every noun in that sentence, but I'm paraphrasing.

Some of you are right now experiencing a weird disconnection. Like the intern, that obvious
thought simply hadn't occurred to you. And it wakes you up to the reality of the rape, of
course this rape is wrong. Forcing you to imagine yourself as the victim makes the scenario
more real, more vivid.

But why it didn't occur to you? Are you a bad person? Selfish? Homophobic? Why is
imaging yourself as the victim more real than imagining yourself as the raper, even though
that was the intended fantasy?

Because picturing yourself exerting power is fantasy; imagining yourself as victim is easy.
Which is why you brought this all up. You spend a lot of your waking life creating elaborate
fantasies of power that contain their own self-justifying logic, and those fantasies are so
numerous that added together they actually take up a real portion of your day. A portion
you're not spending on something else. If I saw a Tardis, then I would know how to pilot it.
If such a drug existed, then my sexual problems would all disappear.

What you don't see is that this logic isn't even self-justifying, it is self-destructing. Not
"since I have sexual problems, I wish I had the drug"; but, "since I wish I had the drug, I
have sexual problems." Since I wish I had the drug, two hours have already gone by. I'm
staying in tonight.

VI.

How could you live with yourself? Guilt without shame, that's how. Guilt without shame,
for you, is no guilt, because what you did isn't who you are. You're a good person. How do
I know? You told me yourself.

You can imagine yourself getting raped by the West Village guys, and that's really vividly
bad. Imagining what she must feel when you do it to her-- that's really vaguely good. How
easy is it to empathize? Easy. How easy is it to sympathize? Not so easy.

VII.

No one can hear us. So level with me: just because it's wrong, doesn't mean you wouldn't
still do it. Right?
The intern, in a pseudo-devotion to his premise, said that the west village ass raping
scenario is a go under his logic. Maybe, maybe not, but what he was really thinking was, "I
know it's wrong, I don't want it happening to me, but if I could do it to someone else, I
might still take the chance." Stealing is wrong but if the leprechaun is off dancing a jig
you're going to shimmy down indigo and make off with his Lucky Charms.

In your defense, violating a rule is much healthier than thinking the rules don't exist. So
you're not lost, you can still change your life. But it's lonely. There's no one else in it.

VIII.

"If a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound?"

The question itself is explicitly a question about sound, but we wield it to make a point
about objective reality. We want it to be about reality, fine, but that's because the
objective reality question seems open to debate while the scientific one is not, and so we
alter the question's intent to get to where we want to go.

So the way we choose to hear the question says a lot about what we believe to be true or
important, even without answering the question.

Let's re-run the scenario. On her, in her, out of her, drug her. She blinks her eyes, smiles,
and goes back to cheerleading practice none the wiser. End scene. That about right? Okay,
question: was she crying?

The scenario is about a magic drug that makes her forget. But how on earth do you plan on
getting your penis inside her before that? How are you going to get an erection strong
enough to penetrate a woman who is crying in terror, not to mention resisting? The reason
you're even imagining this is because you feel like you can't get her through seduction, so
you still have the mechanical problem to contend with.
I agree that a dangerous minority want this fantasy to be about violent rape, and I agree
that it's easy to spot those guys because they all have mustaches. BUT the majority are
imagining... come on, think hard, get into the scene, you are imagining that she likes it.
Maybe you imagine her partially drugged (though that wasn't part of the premise, was it?)
but by the end of it, she's into it.

That's what makes this premise so bizarre and so revealing. If she enjoyed it, you wouldn't
bother with the forgetting drug. What he is imagining is that she'll want to have sex with
him and then forget; but what he said-- what we've run through for several paragraphs-- is
that he wants a drug to make her forget.

Squirm, wildman, squirm. "No, what I meant was..." And it starts, the minor adjustments
to the original question, e.g. "well, the drug could be for the times when you know you
could totally bang your wife's sister but who needs all the drama later?" Fine, but admit you
just made that up now. That wasn't what you were imagining.

And so on, a million of these amendments and appendments and defendments to the
original question that you say are clarifications, but they're all defensive, they are post hoc
rationalizations, they are diversions. The true form of the question you are asking is, "does
the ability to give a girl a forgetting pill afterwards give you the courage to try and hook up
with her?" Which simplifies to: "can you live with rejection?" Solve for x: duh.

IX.

The argument here is that you would rape her as long as she wouldn't remember it or
suffer, but it reveals how little you are able to perceive the complete existence of others that
you would even consider using them as a prop. I can confidently predict a gargantuan
amount of rage in you, which you will assume is completely unrelated. You'd be wrong.
They are the same force.

The interesting thing about where you have found yourself is that it is easy to fix, but as
usual the focus has been backwards, on you and not on what you do. While the question
reveals a lot about you, it also causes you to think and behave a certain way. Though it's a
fantasy that a pill can solve your problems, your mind includes it in weighing your next real
moves. You are less likely to approach that girl at the DMV because your mind has found a
safer way (for you) to handle it. That "less likely" may only be a dyne of force, but it is not
nothing.

Now think about how many fantasies and scenarios you're actively running every day about
a million things, and think about how many of those things you're actually attempting in real
life. I know the popsicleogists will say you're running the scenarios to make yourself feel
better, but they are what's holding you back. Those thoughts, in the absence of any action,
have defined you. Just because no one else can see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

---

You might also like:

Did The NPR Chief Have A Liberal Bias?

Ready To Go, Even For Nonconsensual Sex?

 MARCH 11, 2011
Partial Objects
I've started a new site, Partial Objects, which is a short form, high post frequency version of
TLP, and I'm going to use TLP for longer posts.

I get so many links from readers that time and alcoholism prevent me from writing up with
a full post; and so I'm hoping this is a place where I can put down some basic ideas, offer a
perspective, and let people comment with their interpretation.

I'm aiming to do 3-4 posts a day on Partial Objects.

I'm also opening it up to anyone who wants to post, the main requirement is that you try to
tell the reader something. If you're linking an article, don't let that article speak for itself--
tell us something that perhaps we wouldn't have seen on our own. Questions are also
welcome-- I get a lot of "what should I do about X?" that are worth repeating for other
people. I will always try to respond to them.

I hope people find it worthwhile.

MARCH 7, 2011
3 Media Narratives About The Middle East You Should Defend Against

if you're watching it, it's for you

(that's why the signs are in English)
1. Youth In Revolt

Ha! That's hilarious. Wait-- you're serious? You know Jay-Z is 40, right?

According to Time, these are the guys who toppled Mubarak. That one guy in the back
punched him and the girl poked him in the eyes. The guy in the back right ate the body.
The New Revolutionaries: a liberal, pro-democracy group of consumerists concerned equally
with global warming and expressing themselves, discreetly lip-synching the words to Lose
Yourself as they march on Freedom Square.

You'll have to excuse my cynicism: I've seen this exact same movie a lot of times,
admittedly to a CCR soundtrack.

Of course the young(er) are looking for social changes and a better life. And I don't doubt
that they at least believe themselves to be earnest. But the media narrative that it is they
who are the force behind the acute changes is both wrong and manipulative.

It's manipulative because it is easy. We can understand that kids might not like the world
as it is, and the youth certainly appear to have enough energy drink to march for a week
straight or yell anti-Bush obscenities, so it is logical that they're the ones to focus on. It
gets Time, et al, out of the hard work of trying to figure out why the revolution happened,
happened now, and if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Even Obama's not sure how this plays
out, so the more we hear about youthful idealism on the march, the less we have to worry
that Israel doesn't first strike Iran, just in case.

Also, it's self-aggrandizing. This is the folks at Time saying, "hey, man, we get this hip
generation." It makes them think they're young and in touch, ("they even figured out how
to use the internet for something other than porn!") and I'd bet 10 piastres every guy
working at Time thinks the girl in the bottom right would find them interesting.

The narrative is wrong, or at least woefully inadequate, because-- in the simplest terms
possible-- the guys in the picture aren't the ones changing the world. I'm sure they'd have
thought voting for Obama was going to bring change, too, but they'd have been way wrong
about that as well.

Here are some sobering statistics for the Time readers. There are 80M people in Egypt, 10%
unemployment and 40% in poverty, as defined as less than $2/day. About a third don't
know how to read. None of those people are in the picture. None of those people want the
same things as those in the picture. None of them will ever listen to those in the picture.

There may have been 100k students in that Square, but if their 50 year olds are anything
like our 50 year olds, then their 50 year olds might actually find those students infuriatingly
arrogant regardless of what side they're on.

The sad truth is revolutions start with the disenfranchised, get attributed to the idealism of
"students" and "the youth," and are ultimately resolved by thugs or corporations. Sideways
Glasses Guy is in for a jarring quarter-life lesson in economic history, and I'm guessing he's
not going to pass.

1b. The Young Are Mad As Hell, And They're Not Going To Take It Anymore. Sorta.

In the next issue of Time after that one, I found this picture of the Wisconsin union protests
(click to enlarge):
Some observations:

1. Look at the crowd in the background. They're all older people. But Time has put the
young ones front and center.

2. They do not appear to be members of the teacher's union. Or particularly fond of

teachers.

3. They are smiling.

They're not angry, they're not outraged, they're... socially conscious? I'd bet a lot of money
those kids aren't there to support the unions, that's not exactly their fight, but that fight
happens to have a common enemy (feel free to speculate who that common enemy might
be.) This explains precisely what is wrong with so many fights and positions and ideals:
they are not for something, but against something else.

"What's wrong with coming out in support?" Well, go ahead and ask Time: "what's wrong
with putting them front and center?" Because if I was agnostic about unions, and interested
in really deciding who I supported in this fight, one look at that picture guarantees I side
with whoever they're yelling at. If you want to know exactly what is wrong with the
"political discourse in America today," it's that we are trained to pick a side against
something we hate.

So choose your "face of the revolution" carefully because if it's an emotional response you
are trying to evoke, there may be some unintended consequences. That's what happened
in the 60s, too-- Woodstock the revolution and you landslide in Richard Nixon with a victory
margin 3 times higher than Obama's. Guess music can't change the world after all.

2. The Mad Dictator That Has To Go

Oh, he may be a nutjob, but once he's out-- what, exactly? He's not a lone nutjob. There
was an entire government in place there and while they don't all have voluptuous nurses
you can be damn sure they want voluptuous nurses, and if they can't get that they'll settle
for all your money and your obedience.

It's a narrative that existed long before the nights of Saddam, get rid of the dictator and
things will get better. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and if your country has oil
in it it usually doesn't.

yes, Mr. President,

I'm going to get a haircut and try and ride this one out
Imagine you replaced George Bush with Obama, but kept Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Pearle, Rice... Imagine you get rid of all the Congressmen, but kept all the lobbyists, all
the civil service employees, intelligence services, all the guys previously on the take-- and
the media infrastructure. "The media supports the people!" Oh, yes, that has long been my
experience with media.

It's so easy to get distracted by the Evil Despot that we aren't horrified that Egypt's
chaperons of future democracy are the military. Really? "They didn't turn on their own
people!" Wow, that's your metric? Do you think they're just going to step aside when the
kids show up to sell off the tanks to pay for education?

I am certainly in no position to decide whether you Paul Bremer everybody in a uniform or

keep specific people on the payroll, but I can at least tell you this "new" government isn't
going to have any room for the likes of Sideways Glasses Guy.

The best thing that can happen to him, is a long, boring, bureaucratic shuffle towards
elections, because if you do them in anything less than a year the old entrenched powers
will win. Or the Muslim Brotherhood, who are going to win anyway (my prediction.)

If the kid in Time wants to participate in government, he needs at least a year to get his act
together, not to mention money from the U.S. (You didn't think we were going to stay out of
it, did you?)

The media likes the Mad Despot narrative because, again, it's easy, but, again, it's wrong
and manipulative. And it backfires. When George Bush pulled the Mad Despot card, the
media reacted against it-- but that was itself a manipulation, because they wanted the Mad
Despot to be Bush himself. Offered no other choices than "one of these guys is utterly,
completely, evil," America was forced to choose who they thought was actually the Mad
Despot; and-- tip for the media-- most Americans will think it's the foreign guy.

3. The Power Of Social Media

The intended subtext of this myth isn't that facebook and twitter aided people in their
revolution; but that those were somehow the cause of the revolution. That the technologies
themselves "need" freedom, they force freedom, they cause freedom, by their very
existence.

This is a letter to Time:

Re: Why It's Different This Time" What we have on our hands today is not only a revolution in Egypt
but also the beginning of an era when a new medium finally proves to the world its equal and
comparable importance to that of the printing press. Social media are no longer just how we stalk
ex-girlfriends or update the world about where we bought coffee. It fuels revolutions...

In my short time on earth, I've lived through: papyrus, morse code, radio, yelling, mobile
phones, and I have only just recovered from TV. All of these "disruptive technologies" share
two commonalities. First, they empowered the people to communicate, congregate, and
share ideas. Second, and more importantly, all of them were eventually co-opted by the
government and business to manipulate those people, who didn't mind one bit as long as
the ads were under 30 seconds.
It's fairly obvious why media companies would push the idea that the media itself is
responsible for puppies and Reese's Pieces cookies, but when the medium becomes the
message, there's no message.

II. So What Are The Lessons Of History?

From The Economist:

In Tunisia Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali met peaceful crowds with concessions. In Egypt Hosni Mubarak tried
to ride out the protests by mixing concessions with force. In Bahrain King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa
resorted to violence, but did not have the stomach for the fight. In Libya Mr Qaddafi seems to crave
blood. Screaming ghastly defiance in an hour-long tirade on February 22nd, he vowed to "cleanse Libya
house by house". If he prevails, dictators the world over will know which course to follow.

Or: every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

MARCH 3, 2011
The Trouble With Charlie Sheen

crazy like a fox

You want me to confirm he's bipolar? An addict? A narcissist? You don't need me for any
of those things.

You can judge a man by what he says or by what he done, and this is what he's done: taken
Scarface levels of drugs and slept with lots of pornstars, gotten rich, kept his hair, and not
gotten fat, skinny, or AIDS. Not bad for a Wikipedia page. Mine just says, "horny/scurvy."

And he's held down a job, well, up to now anyway, and produced products that reveal
absolutely no hint whatsoever of his personal behaviors. I'll give you a thousand bucks if
you can find the scene in Navy Seals that looks like he was doing 7 gram rocks. (Ok, ok,
the whole movie looks like...)

Of course, as fun as all that sounds-- and I admit it sounds wicked awesome-- he's also
having legal, employment, and diagnostic issues, and if you put your ear up to the TV you
can hear America breathing a collective sigh of relief, thank God he's falling apart, because
if he wasn't crazy and there's no God then what rationalization could you possibly have for
not following his lead? We want our celebrities sexy and wild but the narrative has to
include a built in reason why we can't imitate them, something like divorces and cops and
rehabs but definitely not genetics, lack of commitment and social retardation. Your life
sucks, but at least you have your health. Enjoy your five ounces of wine a day.

II.

"Why do you sleep with pornstars?" asks the marionette from 20/20 after weeks of texting
him and visiting his home. Seriously? What answer is she waiting for? I'm not saying it's
for everyone, but the question answers itself, right? It's a tautology.

The question her producers are getting her to ask in this po-mo way is, "what's it like to be
able to sleep with pornstars? Got any footage?" I wish they would simply have asked it
that way, but she doesn't want to appearsalacious, she wants to appear concerned,
indignant, superior.

In a particularly enlightening exchange, she recalls a radio interview he had done and
proclaims, "one message you put out there that didn't sit well with people was that using
crack socially was ok as long as you can manage it." Sheen's insanity suddenly disappears
and he laughs in her face. "Was that a joke?" she asks indignatiousnessly. "Come on,"
Sheen says shaking his head, "you're a smart [sic] lady [sic], what do you think? Of
course it was a joke, because it was so absurd..." Sheen may have a highly evolved brain
but there was a better answer: "I do crack, and you all think it's hilarious. I say I do crack,
and you all get self-righteous. I sleep with pornstars, you all want details. I say that I
sleep with pornstars, and you all judge me. I may be crazy, but you-- you, you
manipulative harpies, are just terrible, manipulative, harpies. Interview over. I'm going on
break."

III.

An observation: Sheen went publicly insane early last week. It wasn't until this Tuesday
night, after Extra and Today started showing the goddesses, that the court ordered an
extraction team to medivac his kids. He's had a week of full on insanity, 20/20 had an entire
crew in his house last Saturday, Radar was in there all day and no one felt obligated to
rescue the children, but go on TV and publicly say you like multiple vaginas and they put
your name on a database. No more interstate travel for you.

IV.

Is Charlie Sheen bipolar?

The only thing you're never supposed to do in psychiatry is offer an opinion without
conducting a full psychiatric examination, they're very emphatic about this, which is weird
because half your grade on the psychiatric board exam comes from diagnosing a guy in a 10
minute video clip from 1977. (Academic dishonesty spoiler alert: he has OCD.) Thus, I
will reveal here that I conducted a brief examination of Charlie Sheen, online, from my car.

I know mania when I see it, but I also know that there are a dozen reasons for mania that I
can't see from the outside. The pressured grandiosity is pretty characteristic, the cause of it
isn't.

But there's a much bigger story about Charlie Sheen's illness you won't see anywhere, way
more important than his actual diagnosis.

Lunatic or not, Sheen makes one very solid point: CBS is not doing right by him. I don't
care what he's done, Charlie Sheen is a big time actor from a Hollywood royalty pedigree,
CBS made a fortune and a half on him, and now when he needs somebody in his life with a
little power to step in and help him make some better decisions, they abandon him.

Forget CBS, I'll go further and say that all of Hollywood abandoned him, as they do all of
their "employees." Ok, so he fires his publicist and goes on several different interview
shows talking about his time as the Air Force. You know what each and every one of those
shows should have done? Refused to let him on. Not aired the segments. Whatever
happened to taking care of your own? SAG, and all that? Viacom should have declared a
media blackout immediately, so the public wouldn't even know he was going nuts, or at the
very least not display it on purpose. There's something very cannibalistic about Hollywood,
we're not surprised when they drool over an exposed breast or turn on a President, but am I
the only one who finds it weird that they eat each other after years of relationships and
profit? Is there any species other than soccer players that think it's ok to eat one of their
own when they get ill?

Sheen made money from, and for, Hollywood, and when they couldn't make any more
money off him that way they let him on Piers Morgan and made money off him that way. Is
his breakdown so important 20/20 devoted an hour to it? Is it news? Doesn't this distract
us from $100 oil and the fact that Egypt's Facebook Revolution is being run by the military,
or is that the whole point after all?

This is CBS, this isn't some half-assed intervention by the five other waiters at the
TGIFridays, CBS has limitless resources, they could spend a million dollars to hire a
battalion of psychiatrists or extraordinary rendition him to Paraguay and not only not miss
the money, but make a profit when he comes back fluent in Spanish. Dos y Media
Hombres! Even the Federal Government takes better care of its battle fatigued, and that's
saying a lot, because they suck at it.

Whether Sheen did this to himself is irrelevant, and didn't you tell us mental illness was "no
one's fault?" You don't abandon a guy when he needs you most even when he's fighting
you, especially when he's fighting you. He didn't hurt you, he didn't attack you, all he did
was go bananas. You don't drag him out into the open and tie a honey sandwich around
his neck and let bears eat him. "Well, we tried to help him before." You keep trying, that's
your job as his "friends" or his coworkers or whatever you said you were to him a month
ago, and for damn sure you don't videotape it to trade for Camel Cash or whatever currency
CBS uses nowadays.

zark off

It's the old psychiatric argument, genetics or environmental? I can't comment on Sheen's
genetics, but his environment blows. And yes, that's a professional opinion.

---

You might also enjoy:

Charlie Sheen Has An Awesome Experience

Why Do Politicians Cheat?

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

The Decline Effect Is Stupid
 we were surprised to find the data fit well within the two axes. Further research is needed

Is there something wrong with the scientific method? asks Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker.

The premise of the article is a well known phenomenon called the Decline Effect. As
described in the story, that's when exciting new results, initially robust, seem not to pan out
over time. Today a series of studies shows X, next year studies shows less than X, and in
ten years it's no better than nothing.

To be clear, this is what the Decline Effect is not: the finding of better data that shows your
initial findings were wrong. The initial findings are right-- they happened-- but they happen
less and less each time you repeat the experiments. The Decline Effect is a problem with
replication.

An example is ESP: the article describes a study in which a guy showed remarkable ability
to "guess which card I'm holding." He was right 50% of the time. That happened. But in
subsequent experiments, he could do it less. And less. And then, not at all.

Many critics of Lehrer's article read this and say, a ha! the real explanation is regression to
the mean. Flip a coin and get heads nine times in a row: it could happen, but if we flip that
coin enough times we will see that it is ultimately 50/50.

But that explanation is incorrect, the article explicitly states that the Decline Effect is not
regression to the mean.

The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment
is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets canceled out... And yet Schooler has noticed that many
of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid--that is, they contain enough data that any
regression to the mean shouldn't be dramatic. "These are the results that pass all the tests," he says. "The
odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline
effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!..."
And this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to
violate the laws of statistics.

Lehrer believes that the Decline Effect is an inexplicable byproduct of the scientific method
itself.

So? What gives?

By now, many scientists have weighed in on this article, offering the usual list of
explanations-- publication bias, selection bias, regression to the mean. But while these are
real problems in the pursuit of science, the real explanation of the Decline Effect goes
unmentioned.

A hint of "what gives" is contained in the rest of Schooler's quote, above:

...This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time! Hell, it's
happened to me multiple times."

The true explanation for the Decline Effect is one no one cites because the place you would
cite it is the cause itself. I am not exaggerating when I say that the cause of the Decline
Effect is The New Yorker.

II.

The Decline Effect is a phenomenon not of the scientific method but of statistics, so right
there you know we are out of the realm of logic and into the realm of "well, this sort of
looks like a plausible graph, what should we do with it?" Here's the article's money quote:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly
uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are
suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a
wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

A wide range of fields from the almost entirely made-up to the slightly less made-up are
losing their "truth?" This phenomenon isn't occurring in physics. You could (and people did)
build a Saturn V launch platform on the unscarred edifice of Maxwell's equations, and then
40 years later build an iPhone on top of that same edifice. It's amazing what you can do
with the black magic of electromagnetic theory.

Psychology, e.g., is different, because it attempts to model the particular minds of some
humans at this particular time in this particular culture, and those models may apply 3 or
3000 years from now, or they might not. Ecology attempts to form a static model of the
dynamic relationship of constantly evolving organisms to each other and their environment
which we are wrenching to and fro in real-time. But there is no static "reality" in these
fields to observe. In these soft sciences, the observation of reality doesn't just change the
results, sometimes the observation actually changes the reality almost completely.

In these regression sciences, we throw a ton of data into Visicalc and see what curves we
can fit to them. And then, with a wink and a nod, we issue extremely broad press releases
and don't correct the journalists or students when they confuse correlation with causation.
We save that piercing insight for the cushy expert witness gigs.
The problem isn't that the Decline Effect happens in science; the problem is that we think
psychology and ecology and economics are sciences. They can be approached scientifically,
but their conclusions can not be considered valid outside of their immediate context. The
truth, to the extent there is any, is that these fields of study are models, and every model
has its error value, it's epsilon that we arbitrarily set to be the difference between the model
and observed reality. Quantitative monetary theory predicts that given this money supply
and this interest rate, inflation should be 2%, but inflation is actually 0.4%. Then let's just
set epsilon to -1.6% and presto! Economics is a Science.

III.

To make its point about the Decline Effect-- and unintentionally making mine about
science-- the article predictably focuses on the psych drugs that we hate to love to take,
that keep the McMansions heated and the au pairs blondily Russian. "They were found,
scientifically, to be great, and now we know, scientifically, that they're not!" Medicine is not
a science, and despite the white coats and antisocial demeanor doctors are not scientists.
Docs and patients both need to get that into their heads and plan accordingly. That why
we say doctors practice medicine. If medicine was a hard science, doctors would not have
been surprised and puzzled by the effects of some of these drugs. You can show me
Powerpoint slides of depression rating scales for as long as the waitress keeps refilling my
drink, but none of that "science" explains why imipramine doubles the mania rate, Depakote
does nothing to it, and Zoloft lowers it, with apparent disregard for their scientific
classifications.

The problem isn't the Decline Effect, the problem is you believed the data had the force of
F=ma. No one should be surprised when medical "truths" turn out to be wrong-- they were
never true to begin with. And if you made sweeping policy proclamations based on them,
well, you got what you paid for.

IV.

But for all this imprecision, the criticism-- by folks like Jonah Lehrer-- directed at the
"social" sciences is even worse. Eggheads are collecting data in routine and predictable
ways. They are at least consistently using statistical analysis to analyze that data. It isn't
art history by postdocs with warez Photoshop.

So when I read this, I have to manually push in my temporal artery:

Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than
first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now
look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.
Shiver me timbers. Okay, Professor Davis, now that your conclusion about the inferiority of
the expensive drugs has been read by an audience twenty-five times larger than that of any
study you've ever read, let alone written, can you please show us that data that supports
your conclusion that atypicals are less efficacious? Oh, that's not what you meant. I'm
confused, what do you mean by "worse?" Wait, were you talking about depression or
schizophrenia? OCD? I'm lost, let's back up. And while you're at it, please define for
us/Jonah Lehrer the other technical terms: "sometimes," "they," "now," "look," and "even,"
because I have no idea what they hell they mean in this context, and, big money down, you
don't either.

This is where the "scientific method" is breaking down. Not in the lab or at the clinical trial.
It's breaking down in the sloppiness of the critics. If any researchers want to argue about
the efficacy of new drugs over the old ones, there are ways and places to do that. The New
Yorker is not among them, because it lets scienticians get away with sloppy soundbites, and
leaves anywhere from nine to 3M layman readers with the impression that scientists "know"
"the newer meds" are "worse."

And the moment you talk to The New Yorker, your misinterpreted statistical association
becomes truth. Certainly for the layman's mind, but also in the mind of the Professor. I'm
going to bring up Depakote again until I get a public apology-- do you know how many
times a day I have to correct psychiatrists that Depakote does not have "a lot of studies"
supporting its efficacy in maintenance bipolar-- let alone an actual indication?

Left alone in his office and a stack of contradictory papers, he probably wouldn't be so
flippant about it all. It's slow, excruciating, unexciting work that is the pursuit of science.

But that won't get you any grant money, let alone quoted in The New Yorker.

V.

An example:

What Møller discovered is that female barn swallows were far more likely to mate with male birds that
had long, symmetrical feathers. This suggested that the picky females were using symmetry as a proxy
for the quality of male genes. Møller's paper, which was published in Nature, set off a frenzy of research.
Here was an easily measured, widely applicable indicator of genetic quality, and females could be
shown to gravitate toward it. Aesthetics was really about genetics....In the three years following, there
were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them
found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn't matter if scientists
were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies--females seemed to prefer
males with mirrored halves.

That's what Lehrer wrote. I know you didn't read it all. Here's what you read:

"Females seem to prefer symmetric males."

The actual study suggested nothing about what the picky females were doing. Lehrer
inferred it. By the time we get to the end of the paragraph all the reader remembers is that
women prefer to have sex with symmetric guys, which is simply, undeniably, not true. But
none of the studies in that paragraph every concluded that. They each made specific
conclusions about the specific creature they were studying. And if you think I'm splitting
hairs, then you are the reason for the "Decline Effect."

Scientifically detected associations, in specific situations and contexts, are then generalized
by the popular press-- or at least by the profession's internal pop culture-- and those
generalizations are used as working knowledge. Those generalizations, which were never
true, are the starting point for the future decline in effect that Lehrer is worried about.

When the article then goes on to describe the breakdown of this sweeping generalization in
studies after 1994 (on other species), it attributes that to the Decline Effect. It's not. When
you look at the studies together, what you should have inferred is "symmetry is an
associated factor in mate selection by females in only some species and not others and
more research is need to explain why." Instead, the article attributes its inability to
summarize the variety and complexity of nature in a 140 character Twitter message to an
underlying failure in the 500-year-old guiding principle of science.
Worse, as the article points out, sometimes journals want to publish only confirmatory
findings, which set the stage for the discovery of a Decline Effect later on. But the article
doesn't go far enough: they're not looking for confirmation of a previous study, they are
looking for confirmation of a sweeping generalization. Not: "Zyprexa is more efficacious on
the PANSS than Haldol for schizophrenia," but "Don't we already know atypicals are better
than typicals?" And then those same journals, in the future, will only want negative data
because their new sweeping generalization will be popular at Harvard via a grant from
NIMH, all the Pharma guys moved on to Ohio. That's not the Decline Effect: it's a pendulum
swinging wildly from one extreme to the other, over a pit, in which is tied a guy. You're the
guy.

V.

Here's an example of how sloppy science becomes enshrined as "truth" by popular press
outlets like The New Yorker.

In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze
"temporal trends" across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at
hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and
discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.

Look at that sentence, inadvertently hitting on the truth: the decline effect happened as the
theories became irrelevant-- not the other way around. The question isn't what does
science say is true; the question is, what does the author want to be true?

But how can the author will a meta-analysis to show what he wants it to show? Maybe he
could manipulate an individual study, wouldn't a "study of studies" be immune to his dark
sorcery?

Imagine a study of Prozac vs. placebo in 10000 patients, and Prozac is awesome. Imagine
two more studies, each with 6 patients, and Prozac doesn't beat placebo in those. I now
have three studies. My meta-analysis concludes: "Prozac was found to be superior to
placebo in only a third of studies." Boom-- Associate Professor.

When meta-analyses look at only a few studies (e.g. N=4), if even one of them is a poorly
designed study you can overwhelm-- or purposely extinguish-- what might actually be a real
effect.

In theory, researchers are supposed to be vigilant about the kinds of studies they lump
together, making sure they are all similarly designed, etc. In practice, researchers are not,
on purpose. Researchers all know what they want to find, and maliciously or unconsciously
the studies to be included are selected, and, surprise, the researcher's hypothesis is
supported. I have a blog full of examples, but conduct your own experiment: take any
meta-analysis, look only at the author's name, find out where he works-- and guess
everything else.

While you're wasting your time with that, that author of that meta-analysis is talking to The
New Yorker and changing reality, "well, studies have shown that..."

V.

This is going to get worse as the internet allows for popular discussion but not for access to
the primary data. I am contacted all the time by the media, "hey, what do you think about
the new study that finds that women are hotter when they're ovulating?" I try to drop some
knowledge in a media friendly way, but at least a third of the time the reporter just wants
me to a agree with that atrocious study and speculate wildly. "Do you think it's because
their boobs get bigger?" Let's find out.

It's easy to go through Lehrer's examples and identify the culprits of the supposed Decline
Effect, but the best example of why "science" goes bad is, not surprisingly, offered by
Lehrer himself. In (brace yourself) Wired, Jonah Lehrer answers some questions about his
New Yorker article. Recap: his premise is that the Decline Effect is real, occurs in all
sciences, may be a function of the scientific method itself, and eats away at even the most
robust findings.

Question 1: Does this mean I don't have to believe in climate change?

Me: I'm afraid not. One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of
precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims.

Get that?

Instead of wasting public debate on creationism or the rhetoric of Senator Inhofe [critic of climate
change], I wish we'd spend more time considering the value of spinal fusion surgery, or second
generation antipsychotics, or the verity of the latest gene association study.

Jonah Lehrer is the Decline Effect. I think he is a good and earnest person, and I know he
was previously a scientist himself, but he ultimately grades the science he's not
knowledgeable about based on value judgments. Which is fine, it's his life, though I wonder
if deep down he believes it. If he goes psychotic, will he actually want me to give him
Haldol over Abilify?

The trouble for the Earth is... he writes for The New Yorker. And Wired. Which means that
his value judgments carry more weight than the science itself.

If they didn't, I, and those who are real scientists, wouldn't have to explain why the Decline
Effect doesn't exist, I wouldn't have to waste time rebutting his article.

But I do. That's the problem.

---
You might also like:

Do video games cause violence?

Is Science Just A Matter Of Faith?

FEBRUARY 18, 2011

Not A Good Month For Blonde Reporters
 and not a good generation for everyone else

Honest up, wildpeople, when you heard a TV reporter named Lara Logan got sexually
assaulted by a gang of hooligans, how much did you want to see what she looked like? Lara
sounds hot. And how certain were you that to find out, all you'd have to do was click the
link?

Is rape a crime of sex or a crime of violence? Better to ask: how good is your psychic filter
that you can find sexiness in pretty much anything? You didn't picture her bloodied and
crying, you imagined her reluctant. How easy was it for your mind to turn "gang rape" into
gang bang"? You don't have to answer; I live in the same country you do.

The story seems to be that she was raped by a bunch of hooligans, but that story is long
gone in favor of the louder one, the one that's everywhere: did her looks have anything to
do with it?

Years of cognitive retraining have finally taught us not to ask that question, though only
because we're now in general agreement that looks have everything to do with it. Oh, I
know, not all rapes-- just the ones you're going to hear about in the media.

Media producers, my pet name for the Chthulu, have pretended to be appalled by the
public's wonder if Logan's blonde hotness had anything to do with her rape, but it's hardly
the public's fault-- they made her hotness the story. I knew she'd be Victoria Secret hot
the moment I heard the story, partly because I assume they only hire hot reporters but also
because I know they wouldn't bother screaming the story at me if she wasn't. Do they
ordinarily reveal the faces of rape victims in other cases? Well, here's one so you don't have
to google it.

But they're not telling you she's blonde to suggest that's why she was raped, they're telling
it to you to read the story. And when they tell you that you are a misogynist jerk for
thinking that her swimsuit model body had anything to do with her attack, I hope you can
see that they are telling you that so that they have an excuse to mention that she had a
swimsuit model's body. Like Arthur challenges Saito, "don't think about elephants. What
are you thinking about?" Son of a gun, inception works.
Are there any among you who read the story but didn't wonder if she was good looking?
Ladies, no one's looking, you can be honest.

So don't let the media tell you her looks aren't an issue, I have no idea whether they
weren't an issue in the rape but they are most certainly an issue in the story, which is all
they care about, and which becomes your entire data set of the world.

II.

You know what I don't know about Lara Logan? Who raped her. Pro-Mubarak or anti-? Too
bad, that's what I want to know, so I know whether to write the country off for the next
decade or the next five decades.

Oh, refreshingly, the media has refrained from the reflex racial apologistics that follow
American crimes, "not all Egyptians are rapists" and "this isn't indicative of all Egyptians,"
but the media has to hold off because we don't know who did it, the media isn't sure which
way they want to go. Once we know for sure, you won't have to fire one synapse to figure
out if this is indicative of all Egyptians or not, they'll Matrix it out for you in news reports, TV
shows, and commercials. Stay tuned, the next generation of foreign policy axioms brought
to you by the producers at CBS.

III.

It isn't a good month for blonde reporters on location. Some other swimsuit model tried to
get the words out right, tripped over the first, and then like dominos all the words went
down, down, down, and there's only one valid interpretation: her brain misfired.

The story is that she maybe had a stroke; but the story of the story is that the media want
to get out from the shadows and become the story, and any chance they can get it-- and at
anyone's expense-- they will take it.​ No one wants their reporters to have strokes or
get gang raped, but no one should let a good crisis go to waste, either, it's an opportunity to
do important things that you would otherwise avoid, thank you very much Mayor Emanuel.
Maybe we had a good reason to avoid certain things? I will point out that the entire pubic
discourse on these reporters does not ever mention the content of the original story-- what
was Logan about to report? What words was Branson trying to get out? Oh, that's not
important. Then why did we have her out there in the first place?
 oh, now I
see

It's hard to summarize the extent of the damage that the news media inflict on each
individual's psyche because it all seems so appropriate: shouldn't we want more
information, not less? That way we can pick and choose what's important to us? It makes
some sense, yet it still takes me weeks to pick a computer that is identical to all my other
choices though none of which are really appropriate to my needs. Information bias is a
steel death trap, once you're in you do not want to come out. But there are only 24 hours
in a day, and with sleep and porn and driving and drinking, what you know about the world
comes in brief soundbites, and the minutes you spend knowing about Branson and Logan
are minutes you don't know something else, and worse, you think you can extrapolate from
these pop culture images to a sophisticated understanding of finance and politics. You
can't, there's no time left for thinking. I know you think you're above pop culture and stick
to news, but all of this is pop culture and you're eyeballs deep in it and there is no where
else to turn. I guess I'm guilty too, having just spent hours writing about this, but I justify
it by saying someone has to make this explicit, someone has to let you know that these
maneuvers and seductions aren't incidental but wholly the purpose, sure they know it's
dumbing and wrong but that's the game, everyone's gots to get paid, you may not be
interested in pop culture but pop culture is interested in you.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

The Effects Of Too Much Porn: "He's Just Not That Into Anyone"
 that would be a gross
misrepresentation of the facts

Imagine you are the editor of New York Magazine. You want a story that will generate buzz
but no one wants to hear how hard it is to be a parent in Manhattan-- so porn it is. How
about an article about how porn is making real sex less interesting to men? Conventional
wisdom at $3 an issue. Nice.

Gotta have pics. You can't show porn only because the advertisers don't like it. So how
about some "photographs of men watching online pornography, taken January 25"?

Sweet. Let's get five random guys and set them in front of the Pornotron:
An observation. The top guy looks like Dexter, which is good because they are all obviously
serial killers. What's the message here? That porn leads to meth?
II.

You've read the same thesis before: too much porn leads to too much masturbation and
there's no cum left for the ladies, resulting in sadness and gnashing of teeth.

The article is written by Davy Rothbart, and is a mixture of personal anecdotes, interviews,
and expert commentary from a key celebrity, in this case John Mayer.

It's not like there's anything in the article to dispute, it happened to him, he's spelling it all
out for you in graphic detail. Too much porn made it impossible for him to perform with
women. Here he is able to bone up but unable to hose down.

Had I just given up, things might have played out the way they often did, with shades of confused
disappointment and inadequacy on the part of the woman and mumbled apologies and awkward shame
from me. But that night, ingenuity struck--unable to actually get off, I found myself flying a fresh route:
I faked it.
That's right, he faked an orgasm during a one night stand because porn ruined it for him.

And here he quotes some guy named Perry:

"I used to race home to have sex with my wife," says Perry, a 41-year-old lawyer. "Now I leave work a
half-hour early so I can get home before she does and masturbate to porn." Throughout the course of
our conversation, Perry insists that he's still attracted to his wife of twelve years. Still, he says, she can't
quite measure up to the porn stars he views online. "Not to be mean, but they're younger, hotter, and
wilder in the sack than my wife," he says.

It is a narrative that is impossible to argue with: too much porn leads to trouble, as Perry
and Davy will tell you. And they did tell you, so you're on notice.

And so we are back to first principles: what does the author want to be true?

III.

I won't argue with the hypothesis that gently annoying your penis for two hours, boringly,
while you surf the tubes is going to lead to some desensitization. You have to approach
porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent
alarm. Leave nothing behind.

That's not this guy's problem.

I realize regular readers are anticipating my punch line, but that doesn't make it less true.
The reason he's semi-impotent has nothing to do with how he views porn, it has to do with
how he views himself, i.e. completely oblivious to reality. Observe that this guy wrote an
article, under his own name, about how he can't get an erection with women because he
watches too much pornography. Take a minute. He thinks this is such a universal problem
that far from feeling any shame, he should be applauded for exposing the dark secret of
American men.

Run through it: does he want it to be true that he's impotent? No. He wants to be true
that the reason he has sexual problems is the porn, in the same way that I have no doubt
he believes the reason he can't find a job is Sarah Palin.
It is for this reason that I can make the following prediction with 100% certainty: if he
never looks at porn again, if he never masturbates again, ever-- he will still have chronic
sexual dysfunction. Pornography is a scapegoat.

IV.

This isn't a judgment on Rothbart, it is an indictment of all of you who want it to be true
that something is destroying your lives but that something cannot possibly be yourself.

Here's the first paragraph of the article, in full:

I met the woman at a Broadway show, but the night's best piece of acting, I'd say, came from me, back
at her East Village apartment, after we'd been having sex for about 25 minutes, with Neil Young wailing
the song "Comes a Time" from the laptop on her bedside table. The dried-out condom had a full-bodied
choke hold on me, but I'd already stopped twice to put on a fresh one, and I knew, as I kept earnestly
pumping away, that one more condom wouldn't make the necessary difference. Had I just given up,
things might have played out the way they often did, with shades of confused disappointment and
inadequacy on the part of the woman and mumbled apologies and awkward shame from me. But that
night, ingenuity struck--unable to actually get off, I found myself flying a fresh route: I faked it.
I don't need anything other than that paragraph to tell me that his problem isn't porn. Do
you know anything, anything about the woman? Forget her life choices; what color hair
does she have? Hell, even characterize her as just a sex-object, a bimbo, tell me she's got
big boobs, degrade her, anything, but put her in the movie! How would you cast her?
"Well, it's not really important who plays her." Got it.

But I know too much about him, none of it important, all of it branding: Broadway show,
East Village, Neil Young, two condoms in 25 minutes. You could counter that perhaps the
story is just made up to illustrate his point, but that only reinforces my point: this is what
he imagines to be important to a story about sex.

The article proceeds to offer examples in support of the premise that too much porn leads to
an inability to connect with a real woman:

Then there's Stefan, a 43-year-old composer, who has no problem getting aroused when he has sex with
his wife. "In order to come, though, I've got to resort to playing scenes in my head that I've seen while
viewing porn. Something is lost there. I'm no longer with my wife; I'm inside my own head."
Just like with Perry, above, you're supposed to interpret that as he has to fantasize that he's
with a hot chick, but that's not what he's doing. He's masturbating, but instead of his hand
he just happens to be using a climaxing vagina attached to a woman some other guy would
be happy to penetrate, which is weird because that's what he's imagining anyway.

V.

Ron says that for the past couple of years, he's had weekly "dates" with his favorite porn stars, which he
looks forward to all day and even showers and shaves for, as though preparing for a live-action
rendezvous. "Mondays are for Gia Jordan," he says. "Tuesdays for Sasha Grey." Wednesdays he has a
reprieve--a Portuguese night class. "I always look forward to Thursdays the most--Kasey Kox," he says.
"Then, on the weekends, I hang out with my girlfriend."

So, Ron is insane. I don't think there's any point in debating that. Any women who finds
his obsessiveness charming and are interested in auditioning for the Wednesday slot should
check the casting notice:
Are you right for the part?

But the point it makes is clear: Ron has an ideal woman image in his head, and only porn
can give it to him. Real women don't measure up. We can debate the impact on
women, that it forces women into gender specific stereotypes and presents women with
impossible expectations of their sexuality and availability. Or something.

But feminists and Ron are reading this the wrong way. Porn is not causing him to be
disconnected from women, he is already disconnected from them, and the only person that
will have him is online. He's not retreating into porn because real women don't measure
up, he's retreating into it because he doesn't measure up. He's not porn material. He
doesn't expect or want that women will naturally act like porn stars in bed, he expects that
he will be able to turn them into porn stars in bed, with his massive dong packing her into a
creaming pliancy. It is his failure to be able to do this that drives him back to porn.

Narcissism is about the need to self-identify and to broadcast that identity to others. Online
porn doesn't help you do this because it robs you of your pants, but you can run it as
defense: online porn prevents other people from finding out you aren't as good as you think
you are. Everyone imagines they are good in bed, but when you hit 30, 40, 50, and you
slow down, now you're no longer as good as even you once were. And so you will give up
sex, actual sex, something you would have previously stabbed a harp seal to get, just so
you and she don't have to realize just how mediocre you are. "No, you're wrong, I simply
don't have the energy." But you can stay up till 2am spinning the Wheel of Anal?

Add to that his own self-image. When you masturbate to porn, as with all fetishes, you are
able to focus on a single piece of something as a proxy for all sexuality. It is super easy to
look down at, say, your own penis manipulated to its max and see it as gigantic, see it as a
proxy for the stud that you imagine you could be given the right script, lighting and
production. But the moment the director yells, "action!" the self-consciousness kicks in. You
see your flabby gut through her eyes and imagine she can't possibly be aroused by it. You
don't feel sexy, so you are not interested in sex. Do I need to point out that this is what
women used to say about themselves? Dude, you're acting like a girl.

You don't need to drive more than three paragraphs down to find evidence of this. Here's
what one tool said about being a tool:
"I've always thought it's really hot when women in porn movies say dirty stuff," he says. "Usually,
they're just literally narrating the shit that's happening, giving the play-by-play: 'You're fucking me!
Your dick's in my ass! I'm sucking your cock right now!' For whatever reason, that's what does it for me.
But recently a woman I was with started saying all that stuff, and it just kind of spooked me. She seemed
slightly nuts."

And

Women, noticing a decline in their partners' libidos, try to reenact the kinds of scenes that men watch on
their computer screens. Men, as a result, get really freaked out. They don't want their real women and
their fantasy women to inhabit the same body.

They're not freaked out, he has assessed them incorrectly. Remember Sartre's "look?" This
is an anti-look. This is where, as she's looking over her shoulder at you and screaming out
the expletives she's learned men like, you catch a glimpse of her eyes and see behind them,
into her soul, and you see that she's pretending, this is just an act, this is fake, this sex is
even less real than the stuff on the internet.

VI.

Let me be clear: it's not masturbation that we're talking about, neither is it a critique of
porn in general, but specifically online porn video clips-- the way Davy and Ron and pretty
much the rest of America views it. What makes it so bad, and how can we stop it?

This is the approach that fails us with social issues, "what can be done about it?" Nothing,
you can't do anything about the porn, the porn is a fact of reality. You may as well uselessly
ask what can be done about giraffes or misplaced modifiers. Porn is here, ubiquitous, and
until the government finds a way to kill you over the internet there's nothing stopping you
from blowing out your retinas. We can Thomas Aquinas this issue for another decade, and
maybe it is a moral issue I have no idea, but I do know that it won't change reality. You
can only change yourself, and if you can't change yourself you had no realistic possibility of
changing the world anyway. Stop rationalizing.

We're looking at the porn "problem" the wrong way. Because there are vaginas in it, we
think it has something to do with sex or libido or even power, but strip porn down to its
functionality and you'll see it's something else. Do a rundown: it's not illegal. For the most
part, it isn't even shameful, you say Brazzers and every guy in American will be happy to
tell you about it. "How did you know that?" "Wikileaks." It's easy to access. It's not
terribly damaging. It sucks up a lot of time that you always regretafterwards, Davy and Ron
may light candles and dim the lights in preparation for their "date" with but three seconds
into the ejaculation they're already planning how to kill themselves. That's right, mo, that's
two hours you could have spent learning to Ricky Jay a deck of cards or dictionary attack
your ex-GF's facebook account. "Hey, what'd you do last night?" "Hung out." "Me too. I'm
exhausted."

And: no one climaxes unexpectedly from watching online porn. You decideyou're done. The
first 10 minutes are thrilling but after that you're not holding back from orgasming; in fact,
you're trying to remind your penis to stay hard until you find whatever it is you think you're
looking for, because you think you're going to want to suddenly come when you find it,
whatever it is will be so awesome you won't be able to hold back-- but it's never so
spontaneous. You have to decide the time has run out. This is why online porn is so
problematic: there's no natural end in sight.
And for most, the biggest problem is the drive: you don't do it because you're horny, you do
it because you're bored. With porn that available, you never get to really horny anyway in
the same way Americans never get to really hungry.

You're training your penis to resist physical stimulation and key off your mind, which sounds
good in theory but you see the results with poor Davy-- you're training yourself to have sex
in your head. So it's not that real women aren't porn-like; even porn, after twenty minutes,
isn't porn-like anymore. What you need to finish is some time afterwards to create a
masturbation scenario, and with some real woman squirming underneath you playing her
own movie, "give it to me, Julian!" it's hard to concentrate.

In other words, online porn isn't a drug, it isn't an addiction, it isn't a sign of deviancy or a
trigger for disease: porn is junk food. It is a bag of potato chips you eat when you aren't
even hungry, and once you start and the initial "mmmm!" passes you're all in, may as well
finish the bag, you've ruined your diet/night already, start over clean tomorrow.

After a while potato chips just figure into your routine, there's a passing thought that
perhaps you shouldn't but since there aren't any obvious and immediate consequences...
And now it's part of who you are.

But no one would ever say that "other foods don't measure up", no one says that potato
chips taste better than steak not because they don't but because no sane person makes
those kinds of comparisons. If you did, if you played it all out in your head and now
deliberately avoid eating a steak in order to get to potato chips-- then you have a problem
that is deeper than steak or potato chips.

Junk food is stripped of the essentials of real food, leaving just the vulgar, the simple, the
obvious of taste: sugar, salt, fat, repeat. It is the pornographization of food. The mistake
people make is that they think it is delicious, but it's really just easy, comforting, reliable,
satisfying. And that's where we are now: online porn is the pornographization of porn.

VII.

When you characterize porn as an addiction it tells you that it is hard to break free, that it is
a struggle, that relapse is inevitable-- all things that have nothing to do with porn. But
when you characterize online porn as junk food, the solution is obvious: don't eat it.

Easier said than done, I know, but the thing I find helps most people is to understand that
you can't refrain from doing something you like. You can, however, change the person you
are into the kind of person who doesn't even like that stuff. Sugar Smacks still taste the
same as they did under Carter, but I don't know anybody who still eats them. Do the same
for soda.

In medical school a lot of the guys (who went into ortho) went to the gym and would
discuss with euphoria how much canned tuna they ate. "There's 15g of protein and zero
fat!" they'd whisper to each other, and they'd sooner eat salamander eyes than lick a Dorito.
That was the kind of guysthey were.

This may not be a reassuring solution to some, but I can promise you that it is the only
solution: you have to decide you're not the kind of person who wastes time on that.
Condemning it, banning it, hiding from it-- all will lead to failure. Lust isn't the trigger,
boredom is, idle hands are something or other, so the sooner you get a default activity, the
better. When your wife walks in on you in the midst of an overhand tug and she moans,
"you are pathetic!" she's really a vowel off, apathetic is more accurate and considerably
more amenable to improvement.

VIII.

Davy believes porn messed up his relationships with women. I don't expect him to
understand that he gravitates to porn because of who he is.

Like any through researcher, I decided to investigate a theory. I had heard about something called the
National Day of Unplugging, sponsored by the New York-based Jewish group Reboot, which
encourages people to take a one-day vacation from their tech. But I chose to unplug in my own way: by
refusing to visit the usual series of tawdry websites I frequent before bedtime.
If you can get past the branding, you can see that Copernicus's porn usage isn't an
addiction but a routine. Routines are part of your identity, like it or not, with the
unfortunate consequence that you'll reflexively defend it even if it is foolish. Here is the
very next sentence:

Now, I'm certainly not trying to indict porn, or to conclude that it has no place in men's lives, whether
they are alone or in company. And I'll concede that some couples still find it to be something of a
turn-on. But realigning one's relationship to it might just improve one's actual relationships--especially
if you're often finding yourself in the bedroom, staring into the eyes of a very confused partner.
"Just don't do it" is going to be hard for him, the porn is part of who he is, but-- and this is
the part you should focus on-- if he decides to be a different person he can stop that
routine, and if he stops that routine he will become a different person. But he doesn't want
to change, he just wants things to change.

I went without porn for a day. Then I tried it for two. Then three. On the fourth day, I had the fortune of
having sex with a woman. And nothing was faked, although I can only speak for myself.

The next 40 years of this guy's life are going to be drudgery, and for anyone else he drags
with him. So if that's you, for the sake of everyone around you, stop eating junk food.

---

---

You might also like:

The Near Death Of A Salesman

Don't Settle For The Man You Want

How To Lose Weight

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych
 FEBRUARY 7, 2011
Or, You Could Just Nuke The Bitch

no, i was just giving him a boost

This is how it happened.

She's zippering the coat of her 6 year old son after soccer practice. Two other mothers are
talking nearby, one of them animatedly, about how some bastard kid punched her son. "No
one hits my son. If I find that mother, I'm going to let her have it."

She finishes zippering, gets up, and they walk to the door, but she hears Angry Mom yell to
her. "Hey!" she says, coming towards them. "I want to talk to you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. Your son punched my son." She is very angry. And loud.
"He did?"

The background noise in the gym goes down as all the mothers stare openly at the
confrontation.

"Yes, "says Angry Mom, "he did. Scratched him right in the face."

She looks down at her own son. "Is this true?"

He looks up at her. "No, I didn't hit him."

She looks back at Angry Mom, tentatively. "I'm sorry, there must be some kind of mistake,
are you sure it was him? He doesn't hit people, he's not that kind of a person."

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"No! no, I'm just saying that--"

Angry Mom calls over her shoulder to her own son. "Did this boy punch you? Don't be
afraid, you tell me."

"Ummm, yes."

"I'm very sorry if he did," and then turns to her son, "are you telling me the truth? Are sure
you didn't hit him?"

"No, really, I didn't."

"I'm sorry, I don't know what else to do, he says he didn't do it and I know him, he's not
that kind of boy."

Angry Mom cuts her off. "The coaches are going to hear about this. I won't tolerate
violence."

"I'm sorry--"

END SCENE.

The mom walks away shaken, for two days she can't get past it. That kind of emotional
hysteresis happens to all of us, and if the reason for it isn't actual guilt then it's repeatedly
trying to force an incorrect interpretation onto a situation. For the right one, you have to
look at it from the outside.

Re-imagine this as a scene in a movie. What is the setting, why is it there and not, e.g.,
over the phone or in a private meeting with the coaches? Who is (singular, not plural) the
main character? Who are the supporting cast? Who are extras, and what are they for?

Dialogue like this is exposition. What does it tell us about the characters?

II.
It may seem that Angry Mom is angry because her kid got punched, but she was actually
Angry before that. Allow me to explain.

In this scene, she's yelling at the mom for two reasons, both of them bad.

First, because in America you NEVER yell at another person's kid-- or praise them, or hug
them, or ask them what their favorite Harry Potter movie is; every adult-child interaction is
immediately interpreted on a continuum of pedophilia or abuse. (Why are we so worried
about child abuse nowadays? Because the truth is deliberately obfuscated. CNN will tell
you how many pedophile priests there are, but not emphasize that they molested 20+ years
ago, and that the incidence of priest-abusers now is tiny. Nor do they let on that they know
that the person who molested you almost certainly has the same last name as you,
BORING, here's a modified narrative about a girl we'll call Elizabeth Smart. See? It was a
crazy person, and they're everywhere. The state encourages the media promotion of
boogeymen-- in the 1970s serial killers, today pedophiles and etc-- because it makes the
populace demand increased state control in their private lives, which is the precisely the
natural single goal of any state. The state and the media effect this encouragement by
pretending not to know of the boogeyman's nonexistence. Says a Congressman: "you
mean there's an epidemic of baby rapers out there? Wait-- did you say rapers or rappers?
The hell you say! Elect me, I'll make sure we buy thousands of cameras from my
supporters at Nikon to monitor our streets, we're going to need tech support so let's bring in
Google...." None of this is consciously planned in advance, it doesn't have to be, it is in the
nature of things: individual selfishness always finds a way, and that way leads to indoor
recess for all of us.)

But she really doesn't want to yell at the kid, the point is to yell at the mom, that's the
whole reason for this exchange. The kid isn't a person, he's an extension of the mom, in
the exact same way that Sarah Palin isn't a Republican but an extension of the Republican
Party, which is the only reason you're yelling at her.

Second, she's conveying to the audience that she's the kind of mom who defends her kid,
who is tough, who will stand up to anyone. That's the reason she was telling the other mom
about it and why the confrontation is so public. Does this exchange say, "don't mess with
her kid?" No. It says, "don't mess with her."

III.

What about the puncher's mom? Surely she is not at fault?

Well... her mistake, a crucial one, is she allowed herself to get blindsided by the Angry
Mom's Cognitive Kill Switch-- hijacking a discussion and making it a criticism of the person's
identity instead of the actual issue. Rather than repeated I'm sorrys and he's not that kind
of boy what she should have said is, "why are you yelling at me? I didn't punch your kid."

That changes the whole movie, now we have a different main character. Now Angry Mom is
put on notice: back off and let's talk rationally, or confirm to me you are a nut and face the
consequences.

But her reflex-- a product of the generational forces to which she was exposed-- was to
square off and get defensive: my kid wouldn't do that, my kid wouldn't lie. She accepted
Angry Mom's premise-- the premise of Gen N-- that the kid is only her, and so she took the
Angry Mom's attack as an attack on her directly, which it was, because that's the premise.
If the kid is truly an individual, he has to answer for his own behaviors; and not just
explicitly, but implicitly: if the mom's reflex is defensiveness then the reflex isn't towards
individuality.

This is a kid who has a brain and does stuff, yes, a lot of it involving boogers and punching
but still he is the one doing it. But the two moms are treating it like a fender bender: you
lost control of your kid and drove him into my kid because you were too busy texting, and
that makes you a bad person.

IV.

But why isn't this just a case of a mom reacting angrily to her son getting hurt? Why can't
it just be that she wants to protect her son? Because the prepositional phrase is absent:
protecting him from what?

I said this was a scene manufactured by Angry Mom to display her identity, and as incorrect
as that analysis might initially feel you should consider it very seriously. If the purpose of
the confrontation is to prevent her kid from getting punched, it failed. Will it prevent
another kid from punching him? Will it prevent even that boy from punching him some
other day?

It is completely impossible to expect that boys are never going to come into violent contact
with each other. It is simply unnatural. I'm not talking about bullying, but any two kids
who are otherwise friendly are eventually going to punch each other in the nuts. And then
go right back to playing Madden. God made them that way. Sure, break it up, sure,
reprimand them, but if kid A hits kid B, then the situation is kid A hit kid B, not "I don't
allow violence in my home." Zero tolerance is impossible and counter to the education of
children: it teaches that violence is the sole privilege of the state and the people who run it.

V.

Does it seem like we are hypersensitive to kid on kid crime?

Call it PTSD By Proxy: a bully of your kid is a flashback to being bullied yourself, and what
you wish you could have done had you been bigger and more powerful and, hey, wait a
second, you are bigger and more powerful. But as much as you'd like to travel back in time
30 years and be an adult kid again so you could punch your son's bully in the face, you can't
because he wasn't alive then and he didn't bully you, he bullied your son, and he's a kid and
you're not. So all you can do with that rage in a Tardis is yell at the other parent, or bully
the bullies using the weapons you have, like laws and rules and social norms, and if you
cross the line I am going to make you regret it. And if that logic seems highly convoluted,
well, Seroquel isn't a blockbuster for nothing.

VI.

So if a crazy parent rolls up on you, what can you do without resorting to a tire jack or 20oz
Dunkin Donuts stun grenade?

You don't let it be about you.

The first step is to make the other person feel important, that she has been heard. She's
upset, so you assure her that you're going to take on her levelof intensity to handle the
situation, you will make it as much of a priority for you as it obviously is for her: "Listen:
I'm going to get to the bottom of this. If my kid actually did this, then don't worry, I will go
old school on him, and he'll come in tomorrow with an apology and an offering of Junior
Mints." You don't have to accept any blame, but you can't just deny it and trivialize the
other person's complaint. No parent wants to feel stonewalled. Even crazy people want
justice.

Simultaneously, you have to declare the limits of your deference, that the only reason you
are not going Defcon 2 on her is that you are reasonable. "...but, if it turns out that he
didn't do anything, well, we're just going to have to let that be the end of it. Right?"

Finally, in every conflict, the ones you can win and the ones you can't, unless you really
want to fight you must always give the other person a saving-face way to back down. No
one, especially nowadays, wants to walk away in shame, they'd rather die, or kill you.
Angry Mom stupidly made this public, and so she has no way to back down unless you, as
the more powerful person, the one with understanding, give her one.

You take the conflict out of the interpersonal and move it to the realm of fairness and justice
promising to abide by whatever comes about.

And yes, I am talking about Iran. Bet you didn't see that coming.

---

You might also enjoy:

Why Parents Hate Parenting

When Was The Last Time You Got Your Ass Kicked?

FEBRUARY 4, 2011
Are All Drug Reps Hot?
 brought to you by Reaganomics

(This is only peripherally about drug reps.)

Someone was arguing with me about why all drug reps are hot. I told him they weren't,
and I would know. I've seen a lot of reps, I even used to train them, fly out to their HQs
and give them a two hour lecture on the pharmacology of their and the other drugs.

"Then why does everyone say they are?" He told me that a friend of his in the medical field
also noticed they were all hot. And didn't CNN or some blog say they hire college
cheerleaders and sorority girls?

Of course, he isn't asking me because he wants a date. The point he is making, the point
everyone always makes when they bring this up, is that this is a strategic plan of Big
Pharma's: hiring eye candy to influence prescribing.

How would that work, exactly? Pfizer tells HR to screen applicants by cup size? You know
HR is run by women, right?

I shouldn't have to explain that a company can't have an employment strategy that
discriminates against a protected class. Saying that your hiring practices are a necessary
part of a marketing strategy does not get you out of this.

There are some jobs where appearance is a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ--
see, there's even an acronym for it) and if you have to ask if your job is one of those, it
isn't. Elite Modeling can hire based on looks, but Abercrombie & Fitch can't. I leaave you to
tease out the details.

Surprisingly, ugly people are not a protected class, and phew. But while Pfizer can hire
attractive women, it cannot be a hiring strategy. Could a manager choose the prettiest out
of all the candidates and get away with it? Sure. But he couldn't hold out for only attractive
ones. So if they did want their salesforce to be all attractive females, it would have to be, in
effect, a conspiracy: everyone knowing the deal, and everyone playing along. Do you know
how hard it is to get a conspiracy going in this country? It's impossible.

But most people have never met a drug rep. And people who have seen one in a doctor's
office are sure they're hot-- "I saw her!" But the assumption is wrong, and your eyes are
lying to you. You are all making the same mistake.

II.

When you hear that all drug reps are hot, you can be confident that the person speaking is
a middle aged man and/or someone with... limited sexual power. These people are prone to
two errors. A psychological one: fetishization; and a biological one: mistaking for beauty
what is merely youth.

This is supported by the reverse complaint among young male residents, young male reps,
and guys who've been around the block: where are all the hot reps? This company blows.

These women aren't hot, they are polished, hair and nails, new shoes, clothes, time at the
gym and plenty of sleep. (Sigh, that was me-- never.) What would you expect of a single
woman with a lot of disposable income magnified 10x by credit? If you saw them in a bar
you might not even notice them, but in a doctor's office their appearance is jarring, out of
place, no one else has such attention to their appearance. No one else is as young. No one
else walks with such confidence.

III.

I'm not saying reps aren't trying to influence doctors; I am only saying that the looks aren't
part of corporate strategy, and it asinine to the point of insanity to believe that the 25 year
old female rep put on an Ann Taylor suit and Nine West pumps to look good for you, so
you'll prescribe Zyprexa.

If you found an actual hot rep, and asked her if she thought she looked hot in that suit, she
would say, "oh God, in work clothes?"

But it's those clothes, that job, that make her sexy. Take a 25 year old and put her in a bar,
she's a girl. Put her in the clothes and she's a woman-- so for a 40 year old, there's much
less guilt about seeing her as a sex object, because she isn't a sex object, she's a
professional.

"Sex for scripts" is not a derivative of prostitution. It is sexy because it is not prostitution.
If it were strictly transactional, it would lose its sex appeal-- no one fantasizes about having
sex with prostitutes, they have fantasies of paying for sex, and the fantasy isn't that she
does it even though she doesn't want to, the fantasy is that she wants it so much she'll do it
for so little. What makes it sexy is the fantasy that the woman doesn't mind it at all; for
her, sex is easy, comfortable, immediate. She'll have sex with a man simply out of
curiosity: "I just wanted to see if he was any good."

They don't have to have sex with you, of course, but their threshold for doing it is much
lower. The image of a woman offering her sexuality to obtain a non-sexual reward-- in this
case scripts, but it's no different from the idea of the woman who blows the bouncer to get
into a club, or sleeps with the band's frontman even though she thinks he's kind of weird
looking, just for the story-- is comforting. It offers an explanation for why her sex seems so
easy with other men and so out of reach for you: she's doing it for some reason that is not
sex. So you make it porn-- she has the ability to enjoy sex even with people she doesn't
actually like-- and now you ladies know why your boyfriend doesn't care a lick about the
three years you spent with your ex, but goes all quiet when you bring up a drunken one
night stand. Say this: "he was cute, I guess, but I don't actually remember his name," and
strap in for the best sex he can deliver (or a beating.)

If I say "drug rep," you think she's hot. If I say, "she blew the bouncer to get into the club,"
again, you think hot. If I say she's a "nurse" then she's hot. But if I say she's a surgical
nurse, or a nurse practitioner, then she's not hot. The more specific you get, the older you
imagine her to be, and the specifics crowd out the fantasy.

That makes being a drug rep a fetish, in which the job-- not the woman-- is attributed with
sexual power that it does not have, but we all act as if it does. That same girl in a
supermarket might be ordinary; but call her a drug rep and give her the uniform, and it's
boner time. That uniform is just as important as her actual appearance. Uniforms
de-humanize (that's the point of them.) The uniform tells you to think of this person not as
an individual but as whatever that uniform represents. But if that uniform represents sex
(as do nursing uniforms, etc) then the woman can't help but being thought of as sex. So
you have to abandon the uniform.

IV.

Instead of wondering why Pfizer hires only young women to be reps, you should ask why
young people are lured into Pharma.

And why not? Money is great out of college; it's a purely white collar job, not much
experience is necessary. While it's not a physically taxing job, who else wants to enter a
career where they have to work three nights a week until 10p? I know it's at a restaurant,
but these young women you expect to be hot have enough money to go on their own, with
people they like, not a 50 something "I was an obstetrician in my country" or a table of
know-nothing residents who all think they're going to Vasco da Gama the buried data of the
presentation.

But the hidden danger is that for most of these reps, there is no future in Pharma. Pharma
cut more jobs than any other private sector industry, about 100k since 2009.

Whatever else you might think about reps, they represent the goal of the nation: young,
motivated, college educated workers who want to 401k their future, have families, watch
the Super Bowls and not get involved with nonsense. The problem with the nation is that it
didn't have any jobs to offer them except Pharma (and similar) jobs. Those jobs don't exist
now, and there aren't any other jobs for them. It's one thing to say the poor/uneducated
can't find work, it's another thing to say the explicitly desired outcome of this country's
social and educational system can't find work. The supply is there; but there's no demand.
And there's no demand because there's not enough people who create stuff creating stuff
which would justify the other jobs.

When this occurs, a country has two options. It can support those young people through
social services, healthcare, housing and food subsidies, etc-- with steady GDP growth of
about 5%; or it can create jobs. The first one is called Egypt.

Let's stick with the Pharma example, though it applies everywhere. If Pharma was creating
new drugs, it could justify all these jobs. Now they aren't, so jobs are cut. Create new
drugs and everyone's back in business. Ok-- but wrong.
They never were creating new drugs, they were only creating new markets. I realize Zoloft
and Lexapro are nominally different drugs, but they are really the same drug, packaged
differently: markets were created to sustain both Lexapro and Zoloft; not one market with
two products, but a doubling of the market. In a perfect world, Lexapro wouldn't have
been invented, they would have worked on something else. But since they knew they could
create a market for "another Zoloft," they took the easy route. And they hired a salesforce,
accordingly.

While that was good for Lexapro, it's terrible for the country. Temporarily-- and ten years is
temporary-- hiring all these people to essentially duplicate efforts cannibalizes resources
from other industries. All of those reps might have done something else, back when they
were young enough to do something else. You might say it's not for me to judge whether
being a rep is more valuable to society than being, say, an engineer. I agree, that is not my
place to judge, the market can do that; but it is the responsibility of the nation's
administrators to decide that what they want for their 18 year investment. And if they
want more engineers, entrepreneurs, creators, they have to incentivize that, and
de-incentivize other choices. And if Pharma is offering $60k + benefits, the country's got to
come up with something better.

Here's an example: Pharma offers 401k with matching benefits. The government, if it
wants to use stimulus money the right way, could offer college grads who go into jobs the
country wants (e.g. engineering) a matching pension. In 2009, $50B worth of school loans
were in default. If you spent only $10B a year on grants to pay for e.g., engineering, you
could get 200k engineers through college. Etc. And many people who are already
employed would love a way to fund side projects, in essence doubling the output of a single
person.

The chief predictor (actually, the only predictor) of suicide is hopelessness. A person can
withstand all manner of attacks and traumas, but if you take away hope all bets are off.
When the hopelessness becomes endemic, it looks like this:

----
You might also like:

Diana Chiafair Is Hot, But Is She Illegal?

JANUARY 30, 2011

Tech Sunday: Will.I.Am Gets A Job At Intel

taking it to a whole new level

From the press release:

Intel Teams with will.i.am, Black Eyed Peas Front Man

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

* will.i.am joins Intel as "director of creative innovation."

* Unique collaboration entails the development of new technologies, music and tech advocacy.
* Intel and will.i.am "share a strong interest in innovation around music, art and lifestyle."

For those of you who don't know, Intel is a company that manufactures atomic-scale
thinking machines that are the pinnacle of human civilization. I can't hate on a guy who
writes songs that make people happy, but his only substantial contribution outside of the
world of pop music is punching Perez Hilton in the face. Is that enough on the resume to
get a job at Intel?
So why is Intel hiring an idiot to be Creative Director? Because outside of its engineering
departments, Intel is staffed and run by idiots. Same goes for nearly every tech company.

The closer you look at the strategic plans of companies like Intel, Microsoft, HP and others,
you come to the conclusion that the CEOs of these companies must all be heavy investors in
Apple, because none of them do anything that is remotely threatening to Apple. I would
like to know how much Apple stock is owned by the guys who run Apple's competitors. It
wouldn't be hard to extinguish Apple from the marketplace, Apple's products aren't really
that good. Yes, a lot of people buy Apple products. But a lot of people also read The Secret
and watch Glee. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in what the masses think.

Apple is successful not because their products are "insanely great." No matter how good
they are, their products are obnoxious and way overpriced. $499 for an device with a
1024x768 screen, no ports, no accessible filesystem, graphics from the first Bush
Administration, and a 1GHz CPU? That's not overpriced? Yes, yes, we all enjoy the pinching
and zooming on the iPad, that multi-touch return-of-the repressed masturbatory ritual that
only crudely and temporarily substitutes for real satisfaction. But the thing is so crippled by
design you can do nothing with it but consume. Oh, look streaming episodes of Glee.
Wicked.

I'm using an iPad last night, and it comes to pass that I need SSH in order to--and I
apologize for being technical here--transfer and organize "terabytes" of "warez" and
"illegally downloaded Hollywood movies in high definition" among the horrific array of
computers on my MPAA-disapproved home network.

SSH is one of maybe a thousand free command line tools that are part of the entirely free
Linux operating system. The source code is freely available. All it does is let you log into
another machine and get the command line on that machine. So naturally I assume
someone has put up SSH for free on the app store, because duh.

I look at the offerings on the App Store. SSH costs $10. Or $1. Or $5. There are about ten
different SSHs for sale on the App Store. None of them are free. Most of them have a
three-star rating. How the hell does the command line get a three star rating? What is the
criticism? "Pfft. This sucks because I can't use Helvetica." Hit the bricks, Hipster, and take
your overused homogenized Velveetica with you. It's remote access, you either logged in to
the other system or you didn't. It's a binary proposition.

At best, I still have to pay $1. Actually, $1.09 because of sales tax. That's right. Listen up
all you 1337 hax0r5 and script kiddies, if you want SSH on the iPad you're going to pay the
State for the privilege. How does that sit with your "information wants to be free" ethos?

I think it's unacceptable. It is 2011. I was promised tricorders, Skynet, and flying cars, not
sales tax on the bastard child of telnet so that Pixar could crank out movie after movie
about baby toys doing baby crap in a way that oddly follows the plot of The Magnificent
Seven.

You would think that a competitor would step into this breach to offer a tablet or phone
computing device that was, well, a computer. Nope. Oh, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, "But Android has all the unix tools blah blah blah." You're thinking that
because you are a stupid Android consumer who is stupid. Android devices aren't
computers either. The flagship Android phone, the Droid X, has about thirty-seven cores
running at 1.21 jiggawatts. (Jay-Z is Android's Creative Director). With all that hardware,
have you ever tried to run one of those real-time audio apps like they have on the iPhone?
You can't. Do you know why? Because Android has exactly the same round-trip audio
latency as DOS 2.1. Yes. I looked it up. To do real-time audio, you need under 10ms.
Meanwhile, the Droid-What is 350ms in version 2.2 and 45ms in an "optional" package in
2.3. (According to the Davos Summit, "Optional" is an industry term for "Unavailable".)​
So, despite the fact that it runs on military-spec hardware, Android can't do the fun
multimedia stuff that the iPhone can do (provided that you pay and pay and pay for it (plus
sales tax.))

And now Blackberry wants to sell a tablet too. Oh joy. The Blackberry is basically a
corporate house-arrest ankle bracelet that prevents you from thinking about anything other
than your job no matter where you are in the world. I can't wait for that soul-sucking
experience in 9-inch high-definition. With multitouch.

This is not competition. This is copying. Charging users a premium for a locked down OS
which in turn nickel-and-dimes the user for single function apps that are freely (and legally)
available in much more advanced configurations on normal PCs is not innovation. It's
asinine. Which brings me back to the beginning: I'm convinced the CEOs of these other
companies secretly hoard Apple stock. How else can you explain this total unwillingness to
do the obvious: to bring to the tablet space the computing platform that relegated Apple to
a niche player in PCs?

You know what costs $499 and can do real-time audio, SSH, PDFs, Flash, 1080p and
everything else you'd ever what to do for no additional cost? A crappy laptop
from Tiger Direct.

So why don't any of these companies just sell you that laptop, minus the keyboard, with a
touchscreen? I would buy that. Today. But no one sells it. Why? Because corporations are
amalgamations of people operating in lowest-common-denominator cover-your-ass
protected mode. Some corporate sperm donor at Intel or Microsoft or HP wearing khaki
pants and a blue dress shirt sees Apple's success with the App Store and decides to copy it
in his company. Khaki Blueshirt, VP of Entrenched Thinking, then gets labeled internally as
an innovative guy, because in corporate America, innovation means copying Apple without
also copying all the artsy designy stuff that is "gay."

Attention corporate America: you don't want to copy Apple. Apple sucks. Yes, they make
money. Two-and-a-Half-Men also makes money. Apple makes money for the same reason
Moleskine makes money selling $0.99 cent notebooks for $7.00--because they don't teach
checkbook balancing in high school.

I don't need Intel to sell me a quad-core CPU designed by Will.i.Am with two dedicated
"urban" cores providing hardware-accelerated Photoshop graffiti tags. I don't need a
"krunk" instruction set that invites me to "get retarded."

I need Windows (or Linux, real Linux) in a tablet form so I can download Firefox, Flash 10.1,
Greasemonkey, VLC, utorrent, SSH, and a life-goals management app called "Inception
2010 BRRip 1080p x264 AAC - honchorella (Kingdom Release)". That's what I need.

Listen up, Khaki Blueshirt. Just because you upgraded the star wipe in Powerpoint doesn't
make you a creative guy. You're a drone. You sell commodity hardware and a lots of it. You
want to beat Apple, stick to what you know. Sell tablets that allow users to do more than
fingerpaint and view advertising at the same time (yes, there's an App for that.) The
hundreds of millions of us that have not bought iPads want tablets that let us do on them
what we do on our regular computers--spreadsheets, Powerpoint, movie piracy, and porn.
Don't get fancy.
-- pastabagel

---

You might also like:

Upgrading Movable Type

JANUARY 28, 2011

Ohio Mom In Jail For Sending Kids To The Wrong School

collateral damage

A (black) woman pretends to live in another school district to be able to send her kids to
that better school. She gets caught, and is sentenced to jail.

The question on everyone's mind is if/how this is unfair, but the real money is in another
question: why now?

We can all agree: if they wanted to handle this quietly, they could have. Prosecutors could
have easily turned this into a misdemeanor, let her plea bargain.

Instead:
The district hired a private investigator, who shot video showing Williams-Bolar driving her children
into the district. The school officials asked her to pay $30,000 in back tuition. Williams-Bolar refused
and was indicted and convicted of falsifying her residency records.

Re-read those three sentences, but put the word "Then" in front of the second and third.
Oh, so that's how it is.

The wrong way to understand this story is to think it is racial (which it probably is), or that
she deliberately manipulated two systems-- public housing in Akron and schooling in
Copley-Fairlawn (she did.)

The important points not in the news: she had been pursued by the school district for years
about this, as had other parents gaming the system. So the question is why they indicted
her in November 2009. Not why her; why then.

II.

Here's the first hint that this "news story" has nothing to do with conveying information to
you. Look who gets a quote: prosecutors, superintendents, judges. Look whose name is
completely absent: her lawyer's. In fact, that she even had a lawyer is not mentioned once.
I'm sure she had one, but what he had to say isn't important to the story... is it?

The missing part of the story is that in November 2009, the district was about to lose
$467087 due to Ohio's inability to balance their budget. On August 3, 2010, the
Copley-Fairlawn district was the only one of 7 districts that managed to pass a school tax
hike of 23%.

The board chose to pursue this woman-- apparently, the first one so prosecuted in the
state's history-- for the specific reason that it can. It is a display of power, a show of force:
we will protect your interests. If you're asking why her, you're missing the point, it could
have been her for a million tiny reasons: race, she had been antagonistic with the board in
the past, she was left handed, who knows? This wasn't an assassination, it was a bomb
blast. She just happened to be in the building.

Why are you hearing about this story, in this way: "oh my god, those bastards won't even
cut a break to a poor black woman?" Because that story simultaneously delivers the
government's message: "we don't squander taxpayer resources; we'll fight to protect every
dime we can get." The symbiosis between media and politics: the media gets their readers,
and the government gets their message relayed to the public. There's no news here, this is
propaganda.

"But why would the school district want to portray themselves as racist meanies?" Do you
think they care what you think of them? Dolla dolla bill, y'all. They owe their allegiance to
the voters of Copley-Fairlawn.

"But what's wrong with the Board protecting taxpayer money?" That's just the point,
they're not protecting it, they are pretending to protect it. $30k for two years and two
kids? If you think the cost of public education in Akron is $7500 a year, you are completely
and utterly insane and need to be disintegrated with acid. The University of Akron, which is
only slightly worse than any high school in Akron, charges $8k. Granted, their teachers
have PhDs but,... wait a second...

$30 million budget? For what? As long as you assume they're racists, as long as you think
they are way too strict in their pursuit of fraudsters, then never will it occur to you to ask
what exactly you're getting for your money. That's what the media is for. Oh, look, Idol is
on tonight.

Anyone on the outside should be able to see this for what it is: a mafia style protection
racket. Pay us. If you pay us, we will protect you from those who... don't pay us.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

JANUARY 25, 2011

Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?

Fordham's post-graduate employment data

Almost at the same time no one was asking why the WSJ was publishing excerpts from Amy
Chua's, How To Make A College Student, no one was also asking why the NYT was
interested in whether law schools weren't a scam. I respect that this is an unwieldy first
sentence, but it's late and I'm drunk. That's how I start my essays.

I.

The New York Times asks, Is Law School A Losing Game?

The piece has two main points. The second one is that students incur a huge amount of
debt with little ability to pay it back, and, if the law jobs don't materialize, won't ever pay it
back. This second point is presented first, indeed, in the first sentence:

If there is ever a class in how to remain calm while trapped beneath $250,000 in loans, Michael
Wallerstein ought to teach it....

Mr. Wallerstein, who can't afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance
grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford
during the real estate boom. But creditors can't foreclose on him because he didn't spend the money on a
house.
He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.
Which brings us to the first point, the main point: law schools are lying. Despite the fact
that "JDs face the grimmest job market in decades" the schools are somehow reporting to
prosepctive applicants that, e.g., "93% of grads are working" and "the median starting
salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000."

How do they do this? "Enron-type accounting standards..."says a law professor. "Every

time I look at this data, I feel dirty."

A law grad, for instance, counts as "employed after nine months" even if he or she has a job that doesn't
require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee's? You're employed.

The schools do this because the schools are extremely profitable businesses: high cost, low
margin.
"If you're a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that's a million dollars, and you don't even
have to hire another teacher," [said an ABA commissioner.]

II.

Why do law schools bother to fake this data? If it was "80% employed" vs. "90%
employed," who would notice?

They fake it because that pointless data gets handed over to the illusionists at US News
along with other pointless data (expenditure per student, library facilities, max bench press)
to generate a single overall ranking, which is just the kind of simplistic, pseudoscience
objectivity that students, parents, and schools demand.

A quick word on the US News rankings. 25% of the ranking comes from a "peer quality
assessment" in which schools rate each other. So, say you are Clemson Law School. What
should you do? "Rate all other programs below average." And, of course, do what
University of Wisconsin did: give the highest score only to itself and one other school that
you're not really competing against. You can also bring up that "alumni donations" factor by
calling alumni and asking them to donate $5, and whoever doesn't donate label as
deceased.

A ranking, like the "percent employed", is an example of information bias. You think you
know something, but you don't. If Fordham is #21, is that different than saying it is #29?
Or saying it is in the second decile? It's a deliberately obfuscated precision that you can't
act on. That level of "certainty" does not inform your decisions.

By the way, the ranking doesn't have to be inaccurate for it to be information bias. A
ranking can be deadly accurate and still be ridiculous. Back in college and yesterday, me
and my boys used to rate women to the tenth decimal place, "yo, yo, yo, check this out, I
just got maced by this 8.9!" and while our scale had confirmed 100% inter-rater reliability,
what were we going to do with this information? Was our audition going to be any different
with a 8.4 vs. a 9.7? "Hi, I'm here for the part of sketchy boyfriend, here's my headshot,
references... Light my head on fire? No problem."

this is a billion

See? Grade inflation. We already know about the problem of grade inflation in colleges; the
LSAT was supposed to help offset this by offering a standardization. Now the ABA wants to
do away with the LSAT requirement. Fine. But the result of all this is you can't really be
sure how you compare to other applicants, so instead you demand objectivity in the schools'
rankings as a proxy to guess where you might belong. "I think I belong in a top tier
school..." How do you know? The analogy is you have no idea what kind of a man you are
and thus what kind of a woman would be right for you, so you just harass the girls that
other people think are the best. Then if you don't get her you're angry at the girl ("these
bitches just want jocks and legacy applicants"); and if you get her you're surprised to find
that three years with her has left you unfulfilled.

And once they're in law school, there is more grade inflation and even retroactive adding of
.333 to everybody's GPA.​ And now law school graduates are surprised to find they're
unemployed. Law students had no real measure of their status as an applicant; no reliable
descriptor of what kind of a school they went to (short of branding); and no reliable
measure of their performance there. "What do you mean I can't get hired?" They think to
themselves, "amn't I bright? Hard working? Fluent in legal theory?" And the employers
respond, "how the hell would we know that?"

III.
That's Mr. Wallerstein, I assume clutching a yellow legal pad.

The structure of the NYT article is to offer a profile of an unemployed graduate and use it to
explore the law school system. In the vein of itsanalysis of the unemployed college grad, it
exposes him as intelligent but entitled douchebag.

Here's an example. Though his massive debt is in the first sentence, it isn't until page 4
that you learn why he's in debt:

WHEN Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson, he was in no mood for austerity. He borrowed so
much that before the start of his first semester he nearly put a down payment on a $350,000
two-bedroom, two-bath condo, figuring that the investment would earn a profit by the time he
graduated. ...Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South
of France and a month in Prague -- all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition
of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.

He lives with his fiancee who is "unperturbed by his dizzying collection of i.o.u.'s." She
doesn't want him to get a corporate law job because (take a sip first): "we like hanging out
together." Carly, another unemployed law graduate explains, "I guess I kind of assumed
that someone would hook me up with something." I'm sure she felt she deserved it.

Do you hate law grads yet? Hold on, here's how the article ends:
MR. WALLERSTEIN, for his part, is not complaining. Once you throw in the intangibles of having a
J.D., he says, he is one of law schools' satisfied customers.
"It's a prestige thing," he says. "I'm an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to.
They understand I'm in a lot of debt, but I've done something they feel they could never do and the
respect and admiration is important." [my edit: he isn't actually practicing law.]
...And he's a quarter-million dollars in the hole.
Unless, somehow, the debt just goes away. Another of Mr. Wallerstein's techniques for remaining cool in
a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear.
"Bank bailouts, company bailouts -- I don't know, we're the generation of bailouts," he says in a hallway
during a break from his Peak Discovery job. "And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it's a little illusory.
I feel like at some point, I'll negotiate it away, or they won't collect it."
He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. "It could be worse," he says. "It's not like
they can put me jail."

Haters: this guy is asking for it.

IV.

Let's take all this at face value. Is he entitled? Delusional?

I don't doubt for a moment he sincerely believes he is a lawyer, because lawyer for him isn't
a profession or even a job, it's a label, a code word for a kind of intellectualism he wants for
himself. As long as "all of my friends see me as..." it was well worth the cost. He didn't
study to become an attorney, he bought a back-up identity.

It's worth asking why Wallerstein chose a JD as a back-up identity, and not an MD or a PhD.
Can we agree it was easier? Why not an MBA? Because an MBA is for something else; a
law degree is a brand in itself. You can get an MBA and still be nothing unless you find a
job. Get a law degree, you're always a lawyer.

It's probably the same reason he didn't try some other hail mary like, say, borrow $200k
and just open up a coffeeshop or become a daytrader. You could fail at those. Graduate
from law school-- and everybody does-- and you can't possibly fail. (Surprise.)

I go through this to show you that law school, while it attracts people wanting to practice
law, also attracts college kids who are bright but emotionally adrift. They don't know what
they want-- besides a mental image of a lifestyle-- and they don't know who they are--
besides a mental image of an identity. A three year law program is a great way to postpone
reality and still have something to show for yourself.

This is as good a place as any to point out that a huge portion of this failure to mature is the
fault of the undergraduate college that gave him up for adoption. If four years of
mandatory intellectual exploration not to mention electives in acid and penetration can't
guide you to self-awareness then you probably paid too much for the experience. Smart
students will always tell you that most of what they learned in college they learned on their
own, which is true but opposite to the purpose of college. Demand a refund.

Law schools are magnet for those kinds of people, because to people not in law school it
sounds like it's three years of elevated debate, philosophy, history, thought, with a feudal
ka-ching at the end for joining the club; in other words, it sounds like what college should
have been.

In actuality, law school is utterly useless. The only thing that was useful was the writing
class, which basically taught you how to argue thoroughly but efficiently on paper. Law
school is also the first place that many people are confronted with someone who tells them
their conclusions are stupid, so I suppose there's benefit in that.

IV.

Please remember that as I quote the Times' description of Mr. Wallerstein, I have no idea if
it's true, I only know that the NYT wants me to believe it's true, which makes me more
suspicious than 6 clear vesicles on both labia. The one thing I know for sure is that the New
York Times-- throw in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, too-- hates its readers. It wants
them, of course, but see them only as organ donors. The Times is accused of being a
leftist/socialist paper, but that's not true, their collectivist perspective comes from assuming
all of you people are free range cattle. It thus feels it has an ethical obligation to construct
stories that will get you to believe their message, even if the facts of those stories have
nothing to do with the message they're interested in. If you follow this, you then discover
that Mr Wallerstein is an unemployed law grad--let alone an entitled douchebag-- but a
straw man.

While it looks like this is a story about law schools, it is in fact a story about debt-- and
who's to blame. By debt I'm talking American style debt, the kind that Greece and Iceland
scooped up like a Komatsu front loader only to discover they couldn't print money like we
can.

So now we have a rewrite: You're promised the American dream. You borrowed against
that dream, but now the dream is gone and the debt remains. Someone's to blame. That's
the story of housing in Florida.

Put that way, of course it's the law schools'/mortgage brokers' fault. How could a kid-- or a
hispanic-- be smart enough to ever consider that they were too much in debt when the
people in charge were saying it was okay to leverage because it would all work out?
Predatory lending.

Now, no one would dare propose taking that money away-- we want everyone in big
homes-- but something has to be done, right? What would be an effective solution to the
high cost of law school?

Steven Greenberger of DePaul recommends a mandatory warning -- a bit like the labels on cigarette
packs -- that every student taking the LSAT, the prelaw standardized test, must read. "Something like
'Law school tuition is expensive and here is what the actual cost will be, the job market is uncertain and
you should carefully consider whether you want to pursue this degree,' " he says. "And it should be made
absolutely clear to students, that if they sign up for X amount of debt, their monthly nut will be X in
three years."

That is exactly the kind of solution I'd expect from a lawyer: completely ineffectual and CYA.

Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one
very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close. But nobody inside of the legal
establishment, he predicts, has the stomach for that. "Ultimately," he says, "some public authority will
have to step in because law schools and lawyers are incapable of policing themselves."

And again, the lawyer answer: we need more regulation.

If you want one single sentence that summarizes precisely what is wrong with the
interpretation of what is wrong with law schools, it's this one:

Today, American law schools are like factories that no force has the power to slow down -- not even the
timeless dictates of supply and demand.

If something is immune to the laws of supply and demand, it's usually because someone
deliberately set it up to circumvent those rules.

Supply and demand should have caused these lower tier schools to lower their costs to
entice students away from the better but more expensive schools. But they don't need to,
because all law schools are free. Read it again. All law schools are free.

Not after you graduate, of course, but right now. Law schools can charge anything they
want because everyone has enough money to pay for it- today. As long as there are
guaranteed government loans available for this, there is no economic incentive to lower the
costs. And as long as the price is zero, demand will always be infinity.

If it was true supply and demand, #1 ranked Harvard and #100 ranked Hofstra wouldn't
have the same tuition. But they do, the same as stupid Washington University, which is so
stupid it's in Missouri. "It's underrated." Bite me. Are we saying that Hofstra's worth the
same money as Harvard? That people would pay anything to go to Hofstra? No, they don't
have to pay anything to go to Hofstra. That's the point.

You cannot, on the one hand, say you want to lower the number of students while on the
other hand incentivizing them to go. But you're not incentivizing the students, are you? It's
a wealth transfer to universities. That's why you want to directly limit the number of
schools while keeping the payments to the rest of them intact. More for you. And if you
have to throw Mr. Wallerstein under the bus to hide this truth, well, sacrifices have to be
made.

---

You might also like:

The Dumbest Economic Collapse In History

The Worst Thing That Can Happen Is You Succeed

The Conspiracy Theorist's Guide To The Financial Crisis

Vanderbilt University: The Goal Is To Keep Them In Puberty

JANUARY 17, 2011

This Time It's ESP
 I knew this was going to happen

Let me clarify one point about the MMR/Wakefield controversy. The fact that Wakefield
faked his data does not prove there's no link. Right? I don't think there's a link, of course,
but what do I know? I'm a pirate.

There's a controversy about a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, a highly reputable academic journal. The paper is about ESP, which is the
controversy.

Either (NYT):

Journal's Paper On ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage

One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author
describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception... The decision may delight believers in
so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists.

Or (NPR):

Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That See The Future

One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell,
has just published an article that suggests that people -- ordinary people -- can be altered by experiences
they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the
Present. And he thinks he can prove it.

All depends on whether you think "scientists don't know everything, man!" or "scientists are
fraudsters, man!"

II.
The experiments are of the type: two groups take a test; one group is then shown the
answers, the other group isn't. The ones who see the answers after the test did better on
the test. Weird, right?

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments... testing the ability of college students to accurately
sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side
of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects. Some scientists say the report deserves to be
published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental
flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

"It's craziness, pure craziness. I can't believe a major journal is allowing this work in," Ray Hyman, an
emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. "I
think it's just an embarrassment for the entire field."
Hyman is right but for the wrong reasons, for self-serving reasons, which makes him wrong.
And the NYT assertion that this "accentuates fundamental flaws in the peer review of
research in the social sciences" is also wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

There's a subtlety to the experiments that is indeed explicit in the articles but is easily
overlooked, so I'll quote from the study:

From the participants' point of view, this procedure appears to test for clairvoyance. That is, they were
told that a picture was hidden behind one of the curtains and their challenge was to guess correctly
which curtain concealed the picture. In fact, however, neither the picture itself nor its left/right position
was determined until after the participant recorded his or her guess, making the procedure a test of
detecting a future event, that is, a test of precognition.
This is the part that's important. If it was a study of clairvoyance, well, could there be a
possible physical explanation? Perhaps. But time travel?

Which is why anyone who says this study "doesn't belong in a scientific journal" is wrong.
It doesn't belong in a psychology journal: this is an experiment about the laws of physics,
not the laws of psychology.

And so to say that it is a failure of peer review-- like they did with Wakefield-- also misses
the point. Bem's peers are in absolutely no position to review this. This study is better
reviewed by physicists. Bem himself makes an explicit case for quantum entanglement! So
notwithstanding my own rants about peer review,

"Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript," [said the journal's editor] "and these are very
trusted people."

Trusted though they may be, they are not experts in the field being studied.

All four decided that the paper met the journal's editorial standards, [the editor] added, even though
"there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results."

Exactly. So you should have sent it to the physicists. You know, the ones who work a
building over in the same university that you do. That was the whole reason for
universities, right?

No, I'm a dummy. The purpose of universities is to suck up Stafford loan money. And the
purpose of journals is to mark territory, more money in that, like a corporation that spins off
a subsidiary. NO CROSS SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION ALLOWED IN SCIENCE, EVER, EXCEPT
IN SCIENCE, NATURE, AND THE POPULAR PRESS.
II.

So I'll be explicit: peer review may have problems, but the entire way we evaluate science is
territorial and stuck in the 19th century, which, ironically, was a time when scientists were
much less territorial and practiced multiple disciplines.

With a data feed to select articles on "psychiatry," what do I need a psychiatry journal for?
If you wanted to be brain scientists, why do you have separate journals form other brain
scientists?

How awesome would it be to have an astrophysics grad student or a PhD economist or a

dancer or anyone of the mofos from metafilter to come look at a psychiatric clinical trial and
discuss it? You wouldn't have to pay them, they would think it was fun-- what, you think
I'm blogging because of the millions of dollars in donations I get from Denmark and now the
pacific northwest (6x in a month-- did you guys find a work around for Cybernanny?)

And no, not just the paper data; why not video the whole process and upload it? I have a
phone that shoots HD 720p; good enough for the optical demands of amateur porn, why not
good enough for science?

If researchers published their paper along with all of the primary source data on a web
page, and let the public wikipedia it up, we might discover that a study was crap but we
might also learn something about how studies become crap, the biases or hidden pitfalls,
etc. (No, "available upon request" does not cut it.)

Instead, we have a near idiotic controversy occurring in self-imposed darkness. "It's a big
butt!" "No, it's a big leg!" "No, it's a weird snaky-thing!" "Well whatever it is, don't turn
on the light, let's just keep guessing-- this way we can all get publications out of it."

JANUARY 13, 2011

Are Chinese Mothers Superior To American Mothers?
 oops... a simple oversight, I'm sure

"A lot of people," writes Professor Amy Chua of Yale, in the Wall Street Journal,

wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. Well, I can tell them, because
I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.

It's hard to argue with success-- one of her daughters is pictured playing piano at Carnegie
Hall-- and the kids seem at least ISO 400 happy. So is making them practice 3 hours a day,
etc, so terrible?

If you're trying to figure out if her method works or if it is harmful some other way, you're
missing the real disease in her thinking. She's not unique. the disease is powerful and
prevalent, it is American, but a disease nonetheless. (No, this time it's not narcissism.)

I'll explain what's wrong with her thinking by asking you one simple question, and when I
ask it you will know the answer immediately. Then, if you are a parent, in the very next
instant your mind will rebel against this answer, it will defend itself against it-- "well, no, it's
not so simple--" but I want to you to ignore this counterattack and focus on how readily,
reflexively, instinctively you knew the answer to my question. Are you ready to test your
soul? Here's the question: what is the point of all this? Making the kids play violin, of being
an A student, all the discipline, all of this? Why is she working her kids so hard? You know
the answer: college.

She is raising future college students.

Oh, I know that these things will make them better people in the long run, but silently agree
that her singular purpose is to get the kids into college. Afterwards she'll want other things
for them, sure, but for 18 years she has exactly one goal for them: early decision.

Before you argue the merits of that goal, let's ask ourselves why that is the pivot point in
America? I don't know any parents who are desperate to raise better parents or better
spouses or even better software engineers, we don't think like that. The few times someone
thinks out of the box-- "I want my kid to be a basketball star" "I want my kid to be a
Senator" the parent is identified as an unrealistic nut. And while a stated goal might be to
raise a future doctor, in truth that's really only an abstract promise-- the 18 year goal is
explicitly college. You don't teach your 6 year old to assess acute abdominal pain, do you?
Nowhere to put that on an application. No, you teach him piano.
I certainly am not saying forcing them to learn piano is bad, or bad for the kid, or that
despite the disease that has infected you it won't benefit the child-- I'm not saying Chua
isn't right in her techniques. I am saying that what Chua is advocating is ultimately
pointless because it is for a meaningless endeavor. The piano isn't for itself, it's for the
"right" college, and for 99% of America the precise college you went to is as irrelevant as
the beer you used to lose your virginity. Was it Bud Light or Stella Artois? Same bank
account.

I feel you resisting my thesis, but no moment in time, at that moment, seems as important
as getting into college, both to the parents and the kids. No one anymore celebrates
getting a job even though that really represents your future lifestyle, limitations,
experiences, everything.

You want your kid to go to a good college, of course I get it. But that monomania for
college has to occur at the expense of something else. How much better/worse off are you
that you went to your college and not your friend's college? In this hypothetical you don't
play football.

And is that average class at an Ivy really better than the average class at a state school?
I've taught at both: no. NB that in my example both the state students and the Ivy
students had the same teacher-- me. I know there are differences between schools, I'm not
naive, but most of those are social/political/sexual and not educational. An Ivy is "better"
because its brand is better, like a car. No I don't mean "hey, they all get you there" I mean
that the engine of a Toyota and a Lexus is the same, the difference is the leather seats. You
want to pay for brand, go ahead; but the people in the know aren't fooled by your fancy car
and windshield sticker and the people who aren't in the know can only praise or envy you,
but they're in no position to help you attain your goals.

Don't think I've forgotten how important college is to a high school kid. I remember that
despite terrible grades I was, inexplicably, put on the wait list to the University of Chicago.
And all I could think was, "I'm going to be Phaedrus!" I didn't give a damn about the
education, I was hoping/believing that that college was going to define me, make me into
someone I was not. I should have been drafted into an infantry battalion just for that.

II.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."
Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score
and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could
never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the
Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have [the piece] perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I
thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch,
no dinner... no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told
her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I
told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Take a step outside the article. This is a woman explaining why Chinese mothers are
superior. The thing is, I don't know any Chinese mothers who would ever talk about their
families this way, publicly, describe their parenting, brag about it. Never. And then you see
it: Amy Chua isn't a Chinese mother, she's an American mother. She had a Chinese
mother, but now she's a first generation American, which means she has more in common
with Natalie Portman than she does with any recent Chinese immigrant. As an American,
she was raised by the same forces: MTV, Reagan, Clinton, John Hughes movies. She may
have reacted differently to those, but they were her experiences.

And what do Americans do? They brand themselves. I have no idea if Amy Chua cares
about Viking stoves or Lexus automobiles but clearly her brand is SuperSinoMom and her
bling are her kids. When Jay-Z wants to front he makes a video, and when Amy Chua
represents she writes a WSJ article. Because that's her demo, you feel me?

Which means this self-serving piece has nothing to do with "how Chinese mothers are
superior" but is really a summary of her episode of MTV Cribs. "Welcome to my home, yo,
let me show you my gold toilet. It's for peeing and flushing the coke down when the heat
comes in the back way."

III.

She meant this next passage to be self-congratulatory, let me know if she succeeded:

"You just don't believe in her [the daughter]," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked
sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a
finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the
one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

Who talks like this? This isn't a 3rd person account, it's her autobiography, these are her
words, she chose these words, these are how she saw it all go down: "accused,"
"scornfully", "rolling my eyes," "sarcastically." That's her impression of the world. She's
writing this about her husband.

She can't resist getting in a few jabs at her husband. I cringe when I hear a spouse
criticising another spouse in public. Lesson 1: you should never, ever, ever, demean your
spouse in front of a commoner, and that's a much more powerful lesson to teach your kids
than a decade and a half of Minuet in G.

(sotto voce): my husband is a piece of crap my husband needs his face bitch slapped
And while we're on the subject of her husband, when I Google Earth this guy "Jed" what
Chinese province is he going to be from? Oh, Jed isn't Chinese, he's a Jewish American
Yale law professor. Now I can't tell if this woman is a racist or insane. Its ommission can
only be deliberate, right? It's almost as if she is trying too hard to convince us not that
she's a good mother or a successful woman but Chinese, that's the focus for her, so
important is this that she needed to make it public-- which makes me want to bet ten
million dollars that her children are being raised Jewish. Is she publicly broadcasting that
she's the Chinese mother stereotype to make up for the SinoSems she's created?

You/she'll say that the Chinese discipline is what makes the kids successful, but that's silly.
Given that her husband is a Jewish American equivalent to her Chinese Americanness, why
isn't their daughters' successes the result of Jewish fathering? Chua would say that she's
the one who made her practice, but she's at work all day just like he is, right? I get that
she yells more, ok, mission accomplished, but as a technical matter she's not there all the
time, the kids have to be self-motivated, and that self-motivation came not just from the
mother, but from growing up in with those parents. Unless she's arguing that the father is
pretty much irrelevant? Oh, that is what she's arguing. Sigh.

What Chua believes has made her kids succeed isn't just that she makes them work hard,
but that she is allowed to yell at them.

As an adult, I once did the same to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely
disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately
ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My
friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

Look, I totally get how sometimes a parent will threaten their kid with piranhas or downed
electrical wires, but why on earth would you brag about it? Seriously, think about this
woman's mind. Either she is totally oblivious to what people would find appalling, or else
she actually thinks that she is going to convince an entire room of what I assume are also
baby making professionals that what she is doing isn't crazy, but awesome.

IV.

Amy Chua wants us to believe she is a "Chinese mother," and my contention is she's not.
I'm not saying she's a bad mother at all, only that what she thinks is and what she actually
is aren't the same.

What defines a "Chinese mother"-- and any steretoypical immigrant parent situation-- is the
sacrifice. "We sacrifice everything to give you better opportunity!!" they shriek at dinner.​
Look up at her opening list: those are the sacrifices her kids make, but what sacrifices does
she make? Again, I don't mean she's a bad mother, but where is the sacrifice of her own
personal happiness, clothing, hopes and dreams? Note carefully that she may in fact be
sacrificing, but in her essay she does not describe those as important (or at all) to the
success. What's important to her is the yelling and the discipline, which she believes is a
Chinese technique.

The curse of the second generation, in which they do worse then their parents, isn't about
lazy kids but self-absorbed parents. When you immigrate to America to open a dry
cleaning business you don't make it your identity-- it's all for the kids (and boy of boy do
the parents never let you forget it.) Then your kids grow up to become, oh, lawyers, and
that does become their identity-- so when these lawyers have kids of their own the
lawyering isn't all for their kids, a lot of it is still for the lawyers. It's not a criticism, it's a
comment on the 24 hour day: two lawyer parents aren't home as much as their wife of a
dry cleaner mom was, so there's less time for the kids. There's nothing you can do about
that.

Except there is, and what Amy Chua isn't telling you, the real secret of her brand of
"Chinese" (read: affluent American) mothering, is that there's likely a brigade of tutors
running through the house. Now it appears on screen that Chua can be both successful and
devote all this time to calling her kids fatties, but behind the scenes she has help. Hey, God
bless anyone who can get it/afford it/convince your spouse it isn't because you want college
girls around, but if you want to prove that something is associated with success, you have
to control for the external variables.

V.

You will observe that she is writing this nonsense not in a peer reviewed journal that could
take her to task, e.g. McCall's, but in the WSJ. Why would the WSJ want to support "the
Chinese mother?" Because if you're reading it, it's for you.

The WSJ doesn't care a lick about her, as evidenced by the fact that they actually published
this embarrassment. What the WSJ does care about is defining "good kids" in the same
(but opposite) way The New Yorker wants to be the one to define it. For the WSJ, good =
will generate a positive ROI.

Let's go back to her crazy list of why her parenting is better. #9: violin or piano, no other
instruments. If Chua is so Chinese, and has full executive control over her kids, why does
she-- and the real Chinese parents out there-- make their kids play violin, play Bach and not
Chinese music? They'd be happy to educate you on the beauty of Chinese music, I'm sure,
but they don't make their kids learn that. Why not?

She wants them learning this because the Western culture deems classical music as high
culture, and therefore anyone who can play it is cultured. Someone said Beethoven is great
music so they learn that. There is no sense of understanding, it is purely a technical
accomplishment. Why Beethoven and not Beethoven's contemporaries? The parents have
no idea. Can her kids write new music? Do they want to write music? It's all mechanics.
This isn't a slander on Asian musicianship, it is an observation that the parents who push
their kids into these instruments are doing it for its significance to other people (e.g.
colleges) and not for itself. Why not guitar? Why not painting? Because it doesn't impress
admissions counselors. What if the kid shows some interest in drama? Well, then the kid
can go live with his white friends and see how far he gets in life.

That's why it's in the WSJ. The Journal has no place for, "How a Fender Strat Changed My
Life." It wants piano and violin, it wants Chua's college-resume worldview. Sometimes it
has no choice but to confront a Mark Zuckerberg but they quickly reframe the story into the
corporate narrative. "The Google boys were on to something, but to make it profitable they
had to bring in Eric Schmidt..." The WSJ is operating well within the establishment, right
wing, artists-are-gay and corporations-are-not context. It wants kids who will conform, who
will plug into the machine (albeit at the higher levels), it wants the kind of kids who want
the approval of the kinds of people who read the WSJ.

Amy Chua thinks she wrote an essay and published it. Wrong. The WSJ wanted this kind of
an article and they chose one from the thousands available. They chose hers-- a woman's--
because if this same article had been written by a man it would have been immediately
revealed as an angry, abusive, patriarchal example of capitalism.

Which is where this comes full circle. Amy Chua thinks she's raising her kids the Chinese
way, but she is really raising them to be what the WSJ considers China to be: a pool of
highly skilled labor that someone else will profit from. On second thought, that is the
Chinese way.

----

You might also like:

This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

The Dumbest Economic Collapse In History

The Dumbest Generation Is Only The Second Dumbest

----

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

JANUARY 11, 2011

The Suicide Of Bill Zeller

with respect: he was wrong

I.

I'm writing this for the other Bill Zellers.

II.

Bill Zeller, Princeton grad student and Metafilter regular, committed suicide last week,
leaving behind a long suicide note that explained: "My first memories as a child are of being
raped, repeatedly." The note describes growing up in a cold fundamentalist Christian
household; being repeatedly molested by someone; and the parents, or at least the father,
either not caring or not stopping or the molester. It's possible that the father did not
condemn the molester because he had already been identified as "saved." I don't know how
any mortal would know that about another mortal but I'll admit I don't fully understand
"saved." I guess it means the rape charge doesn't stick.

I'll also admit that my first, reflexive, thought was that he hadn't been raped. That he
made it up. The story seemed too vague, especially for a note that whose supposed
purpose was to make things clearer. The language reminded me of other similar
fabrications, e.g. "my first memories as a child are of being raped." First? There were no
specifics mentioned; and while there was plenty of rage, there was no trace of the guilt that
accompanies so many admissions of childhood abuse.

In traditional therapy these suspicions are initially irrelevant because the point is present
feelings, and whether their origins are real or invented doesn't change the veracity of those
feelings. But ultimately it does matter; a fabrication of molestation may signify that this is
the only way they know how to verbal language storyboard the kind of pain they are
feeling-- "unless I invent a trauma backstory, no one would appreciate how desperately sad
I am." Or, the fabrication could signal not a pain but an undeservingness of love; the only
way they think they can merit love is to be pitied, damaged. "The only time they held me
lovingly is when I fell down and hurt myself." Different people will connect with either of
those; you know who you are, and so I may as well say: this process is not unusual, and
you are not Alone.

But looking at the comments on Metafilter, Gizmodo and other places, I was stunned at how
many people I "knew"-- regulars on those sites-- admitted to being molested themselves.
That guy?? That girl???? Him, too? All these people?? I began to wonder if true binary of
the world wasn't men/women or rich/poor but people who had been molested and no one
cared or stopped it/ people who had never been molested or someone cared and had
stopped it. Even Freud's idea of the oedipal fantasy was a backpedaling: it couldn't be that
all these people were actually molested, right?

But it's hard to argue with the numbers, and the numbers were overwhelming. Then came
my inbox, and it was the same. I had, as a personal prejudice, not appreciated its
prevalence. Ok. But when even the news reports blindly accepted the abuse story, I had
to ask: how come no one wondered if Bill hadn't made the whole thing up?

III.

If rape was the clear motivation for his suicide, Christian Fundamentalism was the clear
motivation for the rape. George Zeller, his father, is about as hard core fundamentalist as
you can get, dissecting the atomic structure of something called Christian Sonship in
droning recordings and labyrinthine essays, and if this man is only the assistant to the
Pastor then there exists a man on this planet that I am frightened of. I don't know
anything about fundamentalism, but if you pause and look at George's writings not as a
religion but as an activity, what you see is George reworking and reworking the ideas over
and over and repeating and repeating, nuance after nuance after microscopic nuance, until
he gets them "right." But there is no right; there is only the identification of wrong. It is an
obsessiveness with sterility and removing dirt that doesn't have room for outsiders-- hence
his minuscule disagreements with other thinkers blown into theological catastrophes. He
must always be in conflict with another's thoughts not because they're wrong but because
their very presence contaminates the lattice he uses to lock down the Anxiety, yes, in the
same way watching someone disturb one piece of your hoard means you have to redo the
whole pile. He's hoarding religious minutiae.

George was an easy target, and if the fact of Bill's growing up in a fundamentalist home was
brought up by a commenter, it was always brought up as evidence that Bill was raised by an
insane man, maybe even evil.

But again, almost no one doubted he was raped. More than that: many people
automatically assumed he was truthful because his parents were Christian fundamentalists,
i.e. "I'm not saying all fundamentalists are child molesters but it's damn sure pretty near all
of them."

And then I could see that my doubt of the rape was actually a reaction to their assumption
it was true. I was reacting to their reaction. They had their prejudices, I had mine, and Bill
Zeller was the excuse for an ideological battle we had already chosen sides about long
before he killed himself. Ugh.

IV.

Suicide notes are unreliable; they don't convey information, they convey mood. And if you
have ever been on the other wrong end of a suicide note you've probably lost part of your
soul trying to decide if they were right, so let me help you: as a rule, they weren't. What
they said isn't the point, it's how they said it. "I am so angry at _____." The direct object
is a red herring, the subject-verb is the whole truth.

You might say it doesn't matter, ultimately, if the causes of his pain were true, only that he
was in pain, and I agree; but the counter is that Bill is dead and his parents are not and
now they have to live not only with the death of their son but the popular belief that they
caused it. My son is dead, and he thinks I hated him.

I don't know what being molested is like; but the empty, wretched, backwardsness of your
child's death, and the subsequent relentless reminder of the wrongness of reality and the
impossibility of ever fixing it; the incessant scrutiny of memories, was I nice enough to him?
Did I tell him I loved him? When he wanted that balloon and we were in a hurry, shouldn't I
just have--

-- all that is not something anyone should have to experience. And yet that unique, infinite,
unfathomable limbo is being experienced by thousands of parents a year, forever. George
Zeller didn't believe in purgatory, and now he's in it, waiting for the end to come. There
isn't anything else to wait for.

And I'll say something I almost dread saying: what if it is true? What if George himself
raped his son repeatedly, when he was 6? Does that mean that George has lost the right to
be devastated by this loss?
 now what

It doesn't much matter whether he has the right or not, whether he should or not. If he did
rape his son, there's a Calvinist hell awaiting him no matter how saved he thinks he is. But
if he didn't, and we blame him anyway because it matches our prejudices, then that hell is
waiting for us.

V.

I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I
truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will
be a better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.

Maybe that's the key to the whole note, maybe he made up the rape to bring shame to his
parents for abandoning him. To punish them.

Maybe. It's obvious he was sad in an unfixable way, not unfixable because there's no fix but
because his depression had fiendishly protected itself from fixing, like a bacteria developing
antibiotic resistance. He says he stopped drinking to make this decision with a clear head;
but that drinking was a kind of solace, and stopping it was a punishment, you can't even
enjoy that. It was the Depression tricking Bill into thinking that since he wasn't drinking
therefore he had a clear mind.

And though he had gone to several doctors, he told no one of his pain-- I don't even mean
the molestation, but the emptiness. And he had devised a workable rationalization: if you
tell the doctor, then they will betray your secrets. But that, as a Metafilter poster named
pastabagel observed, is the secret protecting itself; it prefers pain to the unknown. But
what are you afraid of? That they'll learn your secret, or learn you don't have any secrets
that would explain so much misery?

It's different for everyone.

He could have been helped; I don't know how, I just know yes. Maybe he needed to be told
that nothing in the past defines you. "Ever since, I haven't been able to ___." The horrible
truth is that you probably still can. You won't-- this isn't a criticism and I don't blame you--
but you can.
Or maybe you are helped to figure out the concrete steps that would lessen the rage, from
punishing the molester to punishing the ones who turned a blind eye to not punishing
yourself. Or maybe you take it all in and make it part of you, reaction formation that pain
into something better. There are a million possibilities, but he didn't try them. The
Depression doesn't want them to work; it doesn't even want you to think you and it are
separable. It convinced Bill.

VI.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable
lives, just so you possibly won't feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a
temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more
intense and overwhelming every day.

He's wrong, it's a mind trick, but I can see the seductiveness of this thinking. Only heroes
and suicides get to choose the time, and the manner, of their death, a power none of the
rest of us will ever possess, of and for that reason they deserve a silent respect. Rest in
peace.

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

JANUARY 7, 2011
Wakefield And The Autism Fraud-- The Other Part Of The Story
 get it?

Does the MMR vaccine cause autism? Merely writing those words guarantees the google
crawler is going to summon the trolls. But it's a legitimate question, not legitimate in that it
is true but legitimate in that since someone says it does, we should all be interested in
finding out one way or another.

Short version: a paper in 1998 with more authors than test subjects observes that
previously normal kids developed autism after the MMR vaccine. Back and forth, the
science is questioned, 10 of the authors renounce the study and Lancet ultimately retracts
the study.

However, a new analysis finds that Wakefield wasn't just wrong, but he probably faked the
study.

From AP:

The analysis [by Deer] found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied
were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems.
Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical
records and the children's parents.
The obvious outrage is how this guy frauded all of us, and may have inadvertently/on
purpose caused thousands of kids to not get the MMR vaccine.

But there are two other problems that should also generate outrage, or at least bafflement.

First, it's 2011. The paper was written in 1998. How long does it take to look over the
primary source data?

Which brings us to the next, larger problem: the people who finally reviewed Wakefield's
paper, scrutinized the primary sources, and went and talked to the parents was not a team
of neurologists or 3 new peer reviewers, but a journalist.

That's who we have fact checking our science.

This journalist did what all of medicine did not do for a decade: email 12 people.
II.

Hold on: as we now already knew for years, Wakefield wrote this paper in order to support a
lawsuit against the vaccine manufacturers. In 1998. There were several other Illness v.
Vaccine civil cases as well.

No?

Let me spell it out for you: in these gigantic cases with millions of dollars at stake and every
possible resource imaginable-- Wakefield himself got $500k-- no one in the legal community
thought to verify the science either. They just trusted the expert witnesses, who, of course,
never read a primary source on anything-- always review articles and books. All that
money hinging on, essentially, the word of Wakefield, and no one bothered to check his
work.

Think about this when you meet with your public defender.

III.

I get it: Wakefield's evil. A Big Legal shill who faked the data to enhance his testimony and
own profits. He probably thought-- and this is in fact what happened-- that it would be a
small enough study that no doctor would care about it, but he could use it in court to say
"there is evidence to support the notion that..." And, indeed, no one read that paper until 2
years later, when Wakefield pressed his luck by writing more articles citing that study.

We should "extradite him to Britain to face fraud charges," said some article somewhere.

Whatever. If you want to be cattle and moo with the herd, fine: blame Wakefield. But
Wakefield didn't do this, Wakefield is a product of this. It's like blaming Bernie Madoff for
the banking crisis. He's guilty, but he isn't the cause of the problem, he's the result of the
problem.

You scientists have created a system that trusts, implicitly, the word of every scientist--
except if he is getting paid by Pharma, of course (as everyone knows, NIH and university
funds do not influence results.) If he says the patient had a -7 on a scale, then it was -7,
end of story. "Well, we have to trust the researcher a little bit, otherwise the whole
architecture falls apart." Exactly. Why then do you not trust bankers that way? If a
banker lies he goes to jail. Are there any penalties for making up a study? Do you seriously
believe that scientists have less reason to nudge the numbers than bankers do?

Then, you'll engage in serious academic disputes about whether MMRM is better than LOCF
for analyzing a double blind study-- you'll assert that double blind trials are the gold
standard!- when you all know that 75% of the time we can tell if it's placebo or drug.
When you title the paper, "A Double Blind, Placebo Controlled Trial of---" you are lying.

And why wouldn't you? The system is set up for you to lie.

Why, in the internet age, is the primary data not part of the paper?

Peer Review is a joke-- why do you call it that? They're not my peers, they're my close
friends or my mortal enemies depending on my/my department's relationship with the
editor; and they're not reviewing it, they're writing asinine, self-important comments that
will never be noted after publication.

Why doesn't it change? The answer is precisely in what Wakefield did: he wrote a tiny
paper that he hoped would not be scrutinized (or even read.) He just wanted to be able to
say he wrote it, he wrote it not for science but for himself. Now pick up any journal. How
many articles within are not for clinicians to act on, they're to put on a CV, get a promotion,
get a grant, establish a name. That's why we have ten million journals, none of which
anyone reads, ever.

Fortunately enough good science gets done, loudly, powerfully, that medicine moves
forward. But the amazement shouldn't be that Wakefield's study was a fraud, the
amazement should be why we haven't discovered hundreds of studies that are frauds.

I'll save you the meta-analysis: it's because we don't have enough journalists.

----

From 2009:

MMR Vaccine Finally Cleared Of Assault

Autism And The MMR Vaccine: Bait And Switch, For Profit

JANUARY 5, 2011
The Black Swan Movie Review Criminal Attorneys And Hollywood Don't Want You To
Read
 already seen it

I was once involved with a woman and we decided to stay in and watch a movie, she was a
professional cheerleader who was interested in dancing, travel and working out, and the
movie I chose was Pi.

45 minutes into one of the best movies I had ever seen she says, "I have absolutely no idea
what's going on in this movie. All I see is a paranoid fucker living in a world of madness."

II.

As I was leaving the White Trash Monday (matinee) showing of Black Swan, exactly what I
predicted to myself would happen happened: a woman turns to her boyfriend and mentions
how beautiful the Swan Lake ballet's music was, and how she'd like to get it from itunes.

Is it beautiful? I'm no expert on beauty, pornography is more my thing, but I'll go with yes.
But I do know that that woman is in for a surprise, what she heard in the movie wasn't the
music of Swan Lake but the same 4 measures of Swan Lake Act 2 looped over and over and
over and over again, like it's being played by a wind up music box, which half of the time it
was.
Those of you musically inclined will observe that I erased the F clef and edited out the first
measure (four beat rest) to generate the above graphic, which is analogous to what the
movie does: exerts considerable effort to spoon/force feed you the necessary elements,
when letting them happen naturally, which would have been easier and more rewarding.

That's just the music. Now imagine what it does with the psychosis.

III.

Are there any new stories in the world? A high school girlfriend told me the universe was
made of them. I'm ok with remakes, but you have to take the story somewhere different,
right?

Here's the story: Nina is a dancer and wants, then gets, the top spot in Swan Lake. The
previous prima ballerina got old. Nina is an innocent, childlike waif. The director knows
she'll be great as the white swan, but can she tap into the dark side to play the black swan?
In so doing, she goes crazy, has anorexia, eats a cake, has bulimia, skin picks, kills herself,
maybe kills someone else, has sex with Mila Kunis, punches her mom, takes ecstasy, never
once mentions the existence of a father, and turns into a bird. I'll leave you to sort out the
order.

In parallel: Natalie Portman (the actress) loses a ton of weight, many times thought she
would die, thinks what will get men to want to see an Aranofsky film is a lesbian scene, and
marries her costar. No, the other guy.

Sort of parallel: Mila Kunis (the actress) denies getting drunk before the sex scene, and
ends a 9 year relationship with the kid from Home Alone. (So that's what happened to
him.)

We get to see her crazy ex-ballerina mom infantilize and control her, and her French director
try to seduce and mature her. There's the psychological tug-of-war: the mother wants to
keep her as a child, the director wants her to become a woman, Nina can't choose so she
District 9s into a bird.

The problem with this interplay is twofold.

First, the porn-- doing the most obvious to generate the desired emotion. The mom isn't
just Carrie crazy, she is exactly Carrie crazy. The French director isn't just smarmy, he is
exactly "French director" smarmy. Example: he grabs her crotch and whispers, "respond to
my touch. Respond to it."

As advertised, there's a lesbian scene in the movie, it's supposed to depict the psychosexual
component to Natalie's obsessiveness. Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman get naked, and Mila
lustily gives Natalie
oral, and I'm thinking to myself, what's the matter with me that this terribly unsexy? Am I
too old? Too much porn?
The literary answer, the subtext answer, the one that is never touched, is that perhaps
Nina's relationship with her mother is not just controlling but incestuous, a ha!, which
explains why Nina would dare to have her first lesbian experience at home, in her princess
bed, with her Carrie mom banging outside the door; Mila Kunis becomes a projection of
mother who brings a guilt ridden Nina to orgasm. The only way she can orgasm is with
mom; and the only way she can orgasm is to pretend it's not mom. And when Nina is
masturbating on her princess bed, at the moment she should have an orgasm she (thinks
she) sees her mom asleep in the chair. Sex without mom is impossible; sex with mom has
made all other sex impossible.

That's one answer. The other answer is that I've already seen this scene, this exact scene,
a dozen times. No attempt is made to make it different, unique to this story, important to
this story. Hence, it is gratuitous; and I certainly have no problem with girl on girl gratuity
but when it's done boringly even I will be bored.

Secondly, it's wrong. When those two forces pull, they pull at angles with a resultant
vector, they are not exact opposites-- you don't get torn apart. If you go with the
psychoanalysts, the schizophrenogenic mother causes psychosis through certain
interactions, but explicitly NOT because there's another force in your life opposing the
mother's. The alternate force, however bad it was, since it opposed mom would be reality
grounding, and while you can still get every kind of personality disorder and a lifetime of
messed up relationships, having that opposing force prevents psychosis, not enhances it.

Natalie Portman adeptly plays lots of different pathologies: anorexia, psychosis, OCPD, etc--
but these things don't all manifest in the same person and certainly not because of events in
your life-- this thing made me OCD and this thing made me hallucinate and this thing...

It is also the kind of crazy defendants fake when they want to pretend they're crazy. Not
understanding real psychosis, nor the specifics of the legal term "insanity" often means
defendants endorse or exhibit every symptom I throw at them. They pull a Nina, thinking
I'll be impressed. (A very common one: cross modal hallucinations, e.g. seeing and hearing
a demon talk to you, are rare in schizophrenia and if they actually happen are usually the
result of drugs or other organic illness.)

Of course, anything is possible and blah blah, but since this depiction is not novel and not
accurate, what is it, and why is it at least partially effective? The answer is that it's a genre
piece. The genre isn't ballet, the genre is paranoid fucker living in a world of madness.
Nina's craziness is the (male) audience's fantasy of crazy, it is a template for the kind of
crazy a 20something wants to pretend he has to impress girls. The crazy part is a signal to
girls: I'm passionate, creative, driven. (FYI: It almost always signals a lack of commitment.)

The movie is very much what an outsider assumes happens in a world he doesn't inhabit.
Crazy overbearing ballet mom? Seems plausible. But doesn't exist-- not at the professional
level. That's grade and high school stuff. A person who needs to work hard at a profession
would have abandoned such a mother (fathers are different) long ago because it interfered
with her own progress. Crazy soccer mom? Check. Crazy Olympic soccer moms? No.
Where you would see such an enmeshed mother-adult daughter relationship, with the mom
living through the daughter, is when there is no technical skill necessary, e.g. living through
their daughter's beauty, youth, relationships. I don't expect pathological enmeshment
between Natalie Portman and her mom; it wouldn't surprise me in Kim Kardashian.

IV.
None of this is to detract from Natalie Portman's Christian Baling the role or Aranofsky's
tremendous directing and emotional impact (Ron Bennington: "Aranofsky's movies make
you hate the human body.") But the story doesn't do anything but repeat scenes from other
movies which were better in their originals. This is why Natalie Portman could probably get
an Oscar for Best Actress, but the movie isn't a contender for Best Picture. Nine years
married to Rachel Weisz, he's going to be predisposed to melodrama.

Unfortunately, where I see Hollywood headed isn't more sequels or more remakes, but more
copying, more cheating. When a movie copies a scene from another movie, that used to
represent an allusion; it now represents a cheat sheet to the audience: remember how you
felt about the dance scene in Jacob's Ladder, the fear, sexuality, confusion? Just apply all
that here, it saves me the work of exposition.

Here's an example: the preview before Black Swan was for a super cool movie that I really
want to see right up to the part that it turns out to be a Transformer.

But listen to the music. At the big reveal, the music they play is the Lostcrescendo; and at
1:45, the way they signal we're not in Kansas and things are not what they seem is to play
the Inception theme.

And on and on. The Adjustment Bureau is a Matt Damon movie about fate. So when you
want to quickly create a backstory, just put the Fringeguys in anachronistic 1940s clothing
and Dark City yourself a spiral staircase

and we'll take it from there. It is in all ways identical to the shortcuts and cheat sheets we
employ for ourselves-- branding-- to generate a backstory without having to put in the
work. "See this hat? It means I like to think about the things I heard on NPR."

I'll still go see these movies, of course, but I find myself wishing someone would do
something original or at least in an original way. By all means, make it 3D.
---

You might also enjoy:

Surveillance Movie Review

Wanted Movie Review

DECEMBER 31, 2010

Happy New Year 2011 From Your Friendly Neighborhood Pirate

uncovering reality a little bit at a time

 DECEMBER 31, 2010
What Does The Woman Who Feels No Fear Feel?

I'm going to need another drink

An article in Current Biology.

A 44 year old woman named SM has a rare, autosomal recessive disorder that resulted in
bilateral amygdalar damage and...

On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear...
SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations and an overall impoverished
experience of fear. Despite her lack of fear, SM is able to exhibit other basic emotions and experience the
respective feelings. The findings support the conclusion that the human amygdala plays a
pivotal role in triggering a state of fear and that the absence of such a state precludes the
experience of fear itself.

If you know anything about science, you know it loves to yell at people. It also loves rules,
some of which are arbitrary at best but good luck telling anyone, ordinary folk just say,
"well, science said so" and the ones who should know better don't have time for your
nonsense, they have to submit 50 page grant applications to a review committee comprised
of a cabal of cronies or they won't make full professor. /rant.

The rule for today is amygdala= fear. So no amygdala means no fear.

SM, who lacks amygdalas, was Fear Factored with snakes and spiders; they took her to a
haunted house (though not a Japanese haunted house which doesn't so much scare you as
destroy your soul forever); they made her watch clips from horror movies.

But she wasn't scared. She exhibited, and said she felt, no fear.

II.

Don't hit up a brain surgeon quite yet.

SM not only can't feel fear, but is impaired "in recognizing fear in facial expressions, and in
aspects of social behavior thought to be mediated by emotions related to fear." Which
seems consistent with the expected result of amygdalar damage.

But others noticed something interesting about patients with bilateral amygdalar damage,
and by "patients" I mean the exact same patient as the one tested in the above article,
"SM." They found that she was indeed terrible at detecting fear in faces-- but it was
because she didn't look at the eyes. When she was told to look at the eyes, she had no
trouble detecting fear.

("SM eyes" means SM was told to look at the eyes)

This is borne out by other studies which find that the amygdala is primarily involved in fear
detection when you are looking at the person's eyes. Body positioning and gestures, fear
displayed by the mouth-- the amygdala doesn't seem involved in processing fear from those
cues.

So the incorrect interpretation is to say the amygdala is needed to perceive fear. A more
correct interpretation is that the amygdala is involved in fixating and processing information
about emotions coming from cues from specific contexts such as the faces' eyes. You can
see why this interpretation doesn't make it to the internet.

II.

What's going wrong is that one way associations are made into two way relationships. It is
true that the amygdala is routinely observed to be activated during conditioned fear
responses, but that's not the same as saying that it is the amygdala that is necessary for
experiencing fear.

On top of which the terms are ambiguous. What's fear? Another patientwith the same
disorder as SM had normal mood and affect, and I'll quickly point out that this man had no
problem experiencing fear. But guess what happened at age 38: he developed panic
attacks. Missing two amygdalas did not help him, but 75mg of Effexor did. Take that,
anti-Pharma backlash.

Wired Magazine interviewed the Current Biology study's author:

"What that suggests to us is that perhaps the amygdala is acting at a very instinctual, unconscious
level," says Feinstein.
Well, not exactly. Another group had got hold of SM and this time flashed images of faces
too fast to be detectable by the conscious mind. Normal people are able to detect fearful
faces more easily than, say, happy faces. SM, lacking amygdalas, shouldn't show any
difference-- but, in fact, fearful faces broke into her consciousness much more quickly than
happy faces, and just as quickly as for normals. So unconscious perception is intact despite
the absence of amygdalas.

III.

Though I've pointed out some inconsistencies in the studies of the amygdala-- not to
mention the studies of SM-- the real "discovery" of these papers is this: all three of the
"groups" I cited share at least one author.

Unless we are positing these authors themselves suffer from some kind of brain lesion, we
need a better explanation for the discrepancies.

It isn't that they are not aware of their own findings, but that we are not aware of them.
Unless you're motivated to look up everything any time you read anything, then each paper
comes to you in a bubble. If you take it and read it and learn it, you will almost always get
it completely wrong. It's worse if you're getting your science from the popular press, which
is basically like reading only the 97th word in The Waste Land and then writing a synopsis.
"It's about canasta, I think."

Most real neuroscientists-- not psychiatrists or even neurologists- understand that the
common paradigm of structure-phenotype is overly simplistic.
More generally, the brain doesn't so much process information as apply a set of built in
solutions to every single piece of information. It constantly learns and reorganizes,
recognizes patterns and rebuilds.

In the case of the amygdala, it is involved in fear (conditioning), but it is more generally
involved in making decisions based on incomplete information. It helps reduce ambiguity
through learning. How the impairment of that facility manifests in an individual may be
very different: SM feels no fear, the other guy gets panic attacks. Some people gamble
more; or take more risks; or don't learn from experience. Etc. It's not just what's
damaged; it's what each individual compensates with.

In other words, cutting out people's amygdalas is a terrible idea.

Feinstein says the new findings suggest that methods designed to safely and non-invasively turn off the
amygdala might hold promise for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Which PTSD sufferers? The ones who already have smaller amygdalas? Don't hold your
breath, and anyway, we already have something that does this: Valium.

This isn't to say that a specific structure isn't important, but it is to say that the other
structures are just as important.

IV.

Here's the kind of question that should be primary, not secondary, to the investigation of
SM: what would you expect her to feel instead of fear? Think about this. If the amygdala
does fear and she doesn't have amygdalas, what do you expect to happen when there's a
spider on her face?

Probably, you'd answer nothing. You'd expect her just to sit there and stoic it as if it is all
meaningless. "Spider. Hmm. Tickles."

But what she actually felt was wonder. And curiosity. And excitement.

I could find no one else with amygdalar damage who had this compensatory (?) response.
She had the right amount of emotional energy, but she experienced it as excitement. The
spider didn't turn into a duck, it turned into a parachute jump. Why?

---

You might also like:

Man In Coma For 23 Years Not In Coma

The Problem With Science Is Scientists

DECEMBER 29, 2010

Taboos Are The Ways Christians Try To Control Us

if I told you the A stood for adulteress, would that turn you off? My husband said the same
thing

Of the many emails I received about the taboos post, only a handful were not of the form,
"you are a right wing Rush Limbaugh douchebag." Wrong at least two times. You fail.

Here was one of the nicer ones:

So, you're saying to not publicize all your wrong-doings, because there are small pockets of people to
support you, no matter what you've done. But, you seem to love Tucker Max (or at least his jokes?) who
has basically done that for his ENTIRE life. What gives?

The person who wrote that is a woman in the sciences whom I've emailed a few times, i.e. if
she misunderstood the post, it was my fault. So:

So, anywhere you can get support, including the NYT, by all means go. This isn't about
getting support, and these individuals aren't getting support. They don't care what you
think. That's not what they're doing.

You don't need me to tell you what's right and wrong and anyway I'm hardly an expert on
morality. But what I am an expert in is the psychological tricks we play, and their
consequences to you. You may be able to live with the consequences, but they exist
nonetheless.

Guilt, unlike shame, was always about You vs. Yourself. But what's changed is that You--
the guilty party-- has found a loophole in the system. That loophole hurts everyone.

I.

What did Epstein do wrong? Incest and infidelity. He did both, right? What's happened in
the press? The incest's severity has completely erased the infidelity. At no time does
Epstein have to confront the internal guilt of infidelity, because he's battling an incest
charge. I don't mean publicly-- I mean privately, he never faces himself about infidelity,
only incest.
Now incest-- terrible, we all agree, but should the law really be monitoring the sex lives of
consenting adults? Of course not. "Incest is wrong," I might say, "but we have no business
policing it." What just happened there is that "Epstein" has managed to get me to partially
support him. I may hate him, but irrelevant- "he" interprets my partial support as part of a
global judgment of him, and thus has mitigated his guilt by converting it to shame, and the
shame is lessened because some people are partially supportive.

I realize that HE didn't do this on purpose or consciously (though his lawyer is), and HE
does not care about my support. But it happened nonetheless. That's the whole point of
the media's involvement, our generational solution to the problem of guilt. This is what we
will all be doing, the internet as confessional and for the remission of sins. Whether we do
it on purpose or not, once a private guilt that (should) gnaw at you gets exposed as a public
shame, and the public/whatever newspaper you have at your disposal/your facebook
friends/etc start taking sides, that internal guilt is obliterated. Epstein still has to deal with
the shame and social and legal repercussions, but not guilt.

What's the result? The result for Epstein isn't my interest, it's his life and it's not my right to
keep his guilt alive for him. But now, FOR SURE, incest is no longer a taboo, it is no longer
a matter of guilt, but of shame. Everyone is free to decide whether they can take the
shame; everyone has become a Nietzschean superman, deciding for themselves if there are
any taboos. Which, of course they were always free to do-- but they had the good sense not
to try. Now it is possible to ask "am I free to have consensual sex with my adult daughter?"
-- which, of course, you are free to do, and which, of course, you are never free to do. It's
that simple.

Do you think it's a coincidence that 2010 had three big adult incest stories, but 2009 had
none? They were occurring in 2009, but the gates of that taboo have lost their sentry: guilt.
So now incest is a matter of shame, not guilt. If you can take the shame and your
daughter's hot, enjoy.

Many in the comments accused me of being an old codger, a "these kids today are immoral"
uptight Rush Limbaughlite. If you think that, you're missing something truly important:
these aren't kids. These are middle aged professionals who have kids. I expect-- want-- a
little Nietzsche in the 20 somethings of the world, to fuel them to do something with their
lives. But these are people who should know better. Instead, they've convinced
themselves, after 4 decades of life, that they deserve to be happy, that their happiness is
more important than anything.

I'm not free of guilt. But the difference is that whatever guilt I have I don't let infect other
people. If I am incesting or cheating on my spouse, I would still have the human decency
NOT to try and publicly mitigate that guilt by conversion to shame because I know that if I
succeed then it becomes okay for someone else. I may have the "right" to do whatever I
want, but do I have the right to make it okay for others? How I deal with guilt has an
effect on how someone else will. What could I ever say to console my daughter if her
husband cheats on her, when I'm in the NYT saying cheating is a matter of "finding a soul
mate?"

Every one of our actions has a blast radius, and there are other people in it. KABOOM.
Count the bodies.

II.
Would you trust Epstein or Tucker Max to babysit your five year old daughter? It's not an
idle question, there will come a day where you will be asked to choose between X or Y and
without any kind of architecture to guide you you will choose what my idiot generation has
chosen, which is to choose nothing-- "I'm not letting my child out of my sight" and you'll
end up like those parents at the park who use their kids as human shields to avoid
connecting with any other parent. Result? Your kid doesn't get kidnapped by the
Unabomber but he has learned you think all people are evil. Enjoy their adolescence.

"Not a fair comparison, Blackbeard, we're talking about consenting adults. Who would you
trust to chaperone your 24 year old wife, Epstein or Tucker Max?" That question is a lie.
That question really worries about who would be more successful with your 24 year old wife,
and of course that's not a comment on their trustworthiness but on your wife's. If she can't
keep some alternative penis out of her vagina then the problem isn't the penises.

But to answer the question, of course I would trust Tucker Max more because I have a
sense Max's limits are at X point-- has he slept with all his friends' wives? has he cheated
on his wife? (1) -- and David Epstein's limits are only his own physical limitations. Nothing
but the law contains Epstein, which is not any kind of containment. If I'm right he does not
feel guilt-- that means anything, including eating a baby, is possible. "Are you saying he'd
eat a baby?" No. But what's stopping him?

III.

There are a few people commenting who doubt the relevance of guilt, or the need for it;
who openly decry it as a tool of the Christians or the establishment as a means of social
control. I haven't tracked the IP addresses, but I'd wager big money that those are the
same people who want to think Goldman Sachs is evil.

I'd also wager gigantic money that none of these people are carrying around any terrible
secrets. None of you supporting Epstein are in the market for adult incest.

What infuriates you is the idea that anyone or anything has control over us. You don't like
to be told they aren't allowed to do something. "As long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I
should be allowed..." You want complete freedom-- which you will use to conform to very
ordinary standards of living that you impose on yourself.

But this isn't a moral issue that I am describing, it is an architectural problem: the very
thing that allows you to exist in a world of complete freedom is those internal controls and
not the social controls-- laws and shames-- that you think bind you.

Shame will never be enough-- when your identity is "strong" enough nothing shames you,
not a sex tape or a prison term, you'll take that scarlet letter and put it on a tight tank top
and wear it ironically, not to mention hotly.

The laws will never be stronger than you. Wall Street may need more regulation but it
won't reduce the corruption at all. If they want to find a way around the law, they will.
Always. The more laws you have, the less relevant guilt becomes. The laws are exactly
the same mechanism as Epstein's shaming: externalizing the rule affords you the
opportunity to explore the grey areas. The only thing that will stop corruption is people not
wanting to be corrupt.

The new factor is our access to the media, our connectivity. No matter how hard you try, it
is impossible to completely block out the judgment of others-- and you won't want to if that
judgment is to your benefit.
I am not trying to stop progress or technology, I'm telling you to be careful with your lives.
Riddell and Epstein may have dodged huge psychological bullets, but those bullets hit the
rest of us right in the face.

---

1. Maybe this isn't the place for a textual analysis of I Hope The Serve Beer In Hell, but
he's not so much disrespectful to women as a master of a kind of dialogue with them, one
that both of them are completely aware of.

"You're a slut."
"No I'm not! and I'll prove it by sleeping with you."
"Whatever. Let me get my coat."

At least within these kinds of interactions, labeling him "disrespectful" or "sexist" misses the
woman's active participation in this kind of dialogue. It's a game, she knows it's a game,
she's seen this game before, and she wants to play that game. Interestingly, it's probably
correct to say that your missing the woman's active role in the game reveals an implicit
assumption of male dominance in social interactions, i.e. you're kind of a sexist.

DECEMBER 22, 2010

Infidelity And Other Taboos, Media Style

Freud was a punk

The story that is making the internet and morning TV rounds:

Two people, a man who looks suspiciously like Julian Assange, and a TV reporter who looks
exactly like every MILF porn actress working today, divorce their spouses and get married.

The original couples were friends, and the two met at their kids' elementary school. There
are five kids between them, and, you know, whatever.

The twist is that they announced their marriage in the Style section of the New York Times,
because, of course, they hooked up in style. The further twist is that they semi-shamelessly
recount in the Times how they fell in love while they were still married to other people.

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had
children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses. ... The connection was
immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners,
Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

Hardly uncommon; hardly newsworthy, but a little-- brazen?-- to reveal you were basically
cheating. Why even mention all that about the school and the spouses? Why not simply
say "we met and fell in love?" Or better yet, why not just say nothing? And why would the
NYT report this?

The story inspired the predictable controversy with the obvious positions:

"The NYT's responsibility is to report, not be the judge."

"There's no infidelity-- they didn't have an affair, they split with their spouses before getting together."

"Cheat if you must, but don't try to parade it in public as a love affair..."

Whether what they did is wrong or modern is easy to answer (yes x 2) and not the point
here. Nor is the point-- a good one nonetheless-- that by the running of the story, the New
York Times reinforces its position as the one who decides things, in this case ethical things.
You may be invited to offer comment, of course, but the best you can do is agree or
disagree with the NYT-- they become the authority. The burden of proof falls to you to
explain why they're wrong.
Nor is the point that these two dummies didn't anticipate that they'd be criticized. Were
they really so brazen, so shameless, to think we'd all be "wow, that's so Lifetime Original
Special!" Not exactly.

The mistake is in thinking they shouldn't have publicized their story. They didn't have any
other choice.

It's a mantra: narcissists don't feel guilt, only shame. Well, it's not completely true,
sometimes they do feel guilt, but you have to be hitting on a taboo to feel it.

Even the most hardened narcissist feels some passing guilt when their spouse is sobbing on
the kitchen floor. How do you get over that? (Pills won't help, but psychiatry is happy to
tell you they might.)

This is how narcissism eradicates guilt: it rewrites the story, or as the po-mo mofos say,
"offer a competing narrative."

[Offers Ms. Riddell] We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for
our sakes and for our kids' sakes.

One honest account? Which were the accounts that were not honest? Were there any other
accounts at all? Oh, yeah, reality. Well that account doesn't count. This one's better:

it all changed two years later when Partilla invited her out for a drink at a local watering hole, the first
time they had gotten together away from their spouses. "I've fallen in love with you," Riddell recalled
Partilla as saying. She said she beat a path out of the bar, only to return five minutes later to tell him, "I
feel the exact same way."

Dress it up in the language of a story, of overcoming, of finding a soul mate, of mid-life

romance, of self-actualization. These two were fortunate enough to be able to make it an
actual story-- in which they are the main characters and everyone else is supporting cast
and the readers-- you-- will focus on the main characters. You may hate them, but that
doesn't matter. What matters is that they are the main characters. That turns guilt into
shame, and if there's no shame

We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we handled the situation. There was nothing in
the story to be ashamed of.

They win. That's how narcissism discharges guilt.

You'll notice that the exes are not mentioned by name or interviewed in the story; that's not
to protect their identity, it's because the author of the article didn't care/need to interview
them, because the author, and the new couple, are focused on the STORY. Win.

In other words, putting their otherwise quite shameful story in the NYT wasn't dumb, poor
judgment, or even damaging to their reputations no matter how many people end up hating
them. It was necessary to their own emotional survival. As long as you hate them for it,
they don't have to hate themselves.

II.
I do not like the hypocrisy game, where you try to detect hypocrisy in someone as a proxy
for dismissing their ideas; it is lazy and unhelpful, and usually done by those who
themselves overvalue projected identity. But sometimes you can't help but play. Which
brings me to this nut:

First, let's get the preliminaries cleared out of the way. A week ago, Sarah Palin was never going to be
president of the United States. Today, Sarah Palin is never going to be president of the United States.
Once you've accepted that fact (although it's not clear that Palin herself has), the political impact of this
decision is minimal -- the Republicans as a party look even a little flakier than before (bad for the GOP,
but what else is new?)

I don't expect journalists or anyone else to be free of moral ambiguity, but it should be a
postulate that if you choose to write those words you should not also be having sex with
your daughter. Allegedly.

David Epstein, HuffPo-Mo blogger and Columbia professor of Applied Po-Mo allegedly had a
sexual relationship with his 24 year old daughter. I'll save you the google search: he
doesn't have a mustache. I was surprised as well.

Many think his behavior is shameful. Harsh. Some think it is illegal, though clever people
found Lawrence v. Texas on wikipedia and discovered "an emerging awareness that liberty
gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in
matters pertaining to sex." After a nap they figured that might apply to incest as well. And
why not? Consenting adults? It's a privacy issue, right?

Oh, it's a privacy issue, but not in the way Scalia meant. The goal isn't privacy, the goal is
the reverse.

Dummy and his daughter allegedly sent text messages to each other, which anyone with a
Nike shirt knows is what you want to do to get caught as quickly as possible. I'm not saying
Epstein wanted to get caught (though I am thinking it), but when you break a taboo you
either face the guilt Dostoyevsky style with a lonely nervous breakdown and a trip to
redemptive Siberia or you get out a pen and rewrite the story. In Epstein's case, we're
rewriting it for him: the mere discussion of this nonsense, the simple fact that any of us
hate our fathers enough to write, "yes, but it's a legal issue..." means that Id and Ego
fought Superego and Id and Ego won. He's taken private guilt and core dumped it to the
internet for public judgment and the internet will always be more forgiving than he could
ever be. As cocaine magnate Sigmund Freud wrote, "when the story goes live the guilt
goes dead."

III.

The stats on second marriages and the psychology of vampires and vagina predict that
Riddell and Partilla will stay married. When you hook up in the presence of adversity it
tends to reinforce the relationship as they steel themselves against Those Who Just Don't
Understand (though watch out, sometimes you find that that adversity was the only thing
keeping you together). And it's not how I'd run my life, but they did it and there's no use
yelling at them, they have to make it work for themselves and for the kids, so best of luck:
bad start, hope you make it worth it.

But what you need to get out of these stories is how this generation and forwards will deal
with guilt: externalizing it, converting it to shame, and then taking solace in the pockets of
support that inevitably arise. Everyone is famous to 15 people, and that's just enough
people to help you sleep at night.

It is, in effect, crowdsourcing the superego, and when that expression catches on remember
where you first heard it. Then remember why you heard it. And then don't do it.

---

You might also enjoy:

How to get away with rape

Charlie Sheen Has An Awesome Experience

The Atlantic Recommends Abandoning Marriage

Don't Settle For The Man You Want

---

http://twitter.com/thelastpsych

DECEMBER 21, 2010

Test of Psychopathy 2
 no one picks the purple

(Part 1 here)

Each card has a color on one side and an alphanumeric symbol on the other.

Rule: If it is blue on one side, it is a 5 on the other.

Which card(s) do you need to flip over to test the rule?

I had said that most people don't get this question right-- the correct answer is p (blue) and
"not q" (G).

However, most people do get the question half right. They mess up the "not q." Almost
everyone picks p. And rarely does anyone pick "not p" (purple.)

Enter matching bias: people pick the choices that are actually written in the question, i.e.
"blue" and "5." This can be exemplified by rewriting the question:

If it is blue on one side, it is NOT a 5 on the other.

Written this way, people still choose the blue and the 5, because those appear in the
question.

Another example:

If it is blue...

is logically the same as

If it is not purple...

But the second way increases the rates of choosing purple, because "purple" is a match.

II.

Does it overwhelm logic? No.

 TA= true
antecedent (p)
FA= false antecedent (not p)
TC=true consequent (q)
FC= false consequent (not q)

In all of the above examples, the purple card (FA) is wrong. Though it is chosen more often
when it matches the question ("if the card is not purple...") it still is the least chosen card
by far, because humans are generally good enough at logic to understand that to test the
rule, the antecedent has to be true.

III.

So the situation is that people are typically bad at logic, but they are good enough to know
that in order for the rule to be tested, p (the antecedent) has to be true.

Matching bias can affect choices, but even that isn't enough to extinguish p as the most
commonly chosen answer. They may, or may not, also pick other choices (not p, q, not q,
or a combination) but everyone picks p-- especially if it matches the question.

Everyone, that is, except psychopaths.

Review: psychopaths are worse at social contract and precautionary logic than are normals.
But what mistake did they make? Did they all choose q? Not choose "not q?"

For that, we'd need access to the raw data. Fortunately, my writing partner, Elisa, is a
female, and she was able to email the authors of the study to get the raw data.

And this is what she found:

●​ Descriptives (did not choose p): psychopaths 42% normals: 34%

●​ Precautions (did not choose p): psychopaths 38% normals:13%
●​ Social Contract (did not choose p): psychopaths 42% normals: 21%

Psychopaths are remarkably terrible at choosing what should be both the logical choice and
the one the matching bias should have nudged them to choose anyway.

You might want to give psychopaths the benefit of the doubt-- maybe they just got
overwhelmed by all of the choices?

No; in fact, their version of the test was easier than my version, above. They were shown
each card independently, with a leading question:
It seems, well, obvious that if "Helen borrowed the car" there's a chance she could violate
the rule by not returning it. The back of that card could say "returned it" or "didn't return
it." By contrast, Screen 5 "Dave did not borrow the car" is pointless to choose.

But psychopaths don't see t like that. It seems that they read the question as "SINCE Helen
borrowed the car, she is at least halfway honoring the rule"-- so she didn't violate it.

What we are coming to is not a fault in logic, per se, but a different understanding of what a
rule is.

Part 3 soon
 DECEMBER 17, 2010
Test Of Psychopathy?

you failed

Are you good at logic? Of course not; you're American. No, that's not an insult, it is a
description of a process. Follow me.

I.

Each of the cards has a color on one side, and an alphanumeric symbol on the other.

Rule: If it is blue on one side, then it is a 5 on the other side.

Which cards-- the fewest necessary-- do you need to flip to check the rule?

The answer is the blue card and the G card. We'll come back to this.

II.

Each of the colored sides describes whether or not a sweater is borrowed; the other side
describes whether it was returned.

Here's the deal: If you borrow my sweater, you must return it.
Which cards-- the fewest necessary-- do you need to flip to check to see if someone broke
the deal and has to face the wheel?

III.

In formal logic, this is expressed:

(p then q) implies (not q then not p)

Go through it:

1.

if p then q.
p
therefore q.

2.

if p then q.
not q.
therefore not p.

Many people find formal logic difficult to understand because they read left to right and
apply future to the right, past to the left. If/then statements, in language, become about
what will happen:

If you shoot him, then he will have a bullet hole in his body (If p then q).
More generally, however, logic is operating in the other direction: what if there is not q?

He does NOT have a bullet hole in his body; therefore, you did NOT shoot him.

P then q also implies: without q existing first, p can never exist.

In any argument if p then q, the only two things you know for sure are: p, therefore q; and
not q, therefore not p.

In the cards above, those are the only two cards you need to flip: p (the blue card); and not
q (the G or the did not return my sweater). Flipping the 5, for example, is a waste of a flip,
it tells you nothing: if it's blue on the other side, then it worked; if it is orange, did that
really tell you anything?

IV.

"p then q" represents the form of a proposition, but it can be Englished any way you want:

Descriptions:

If he plays baseball professionally, then he takes steroids.

Precautions:

If you work with HIV patients, then you must wear gloves.

Contracts:

If you borrow my sweater, you must return it.

Don't get tripped up by the words: "hey, it isn't true that baseball players take steroids." "I
could borrow the sweater and not return it." This is about the form. If the premise is
accepted that "if you are a baseball players you take steroids," can it be true that someone
who doesn't take steroids is still a baseball player? No.

IV.

Which brings us to human beings: we suck at formal logic, but, we are excellent at logic as
applied to human interactions. Did you do better with the sweater than the numbers?

We instinctively feel the rules of borrowing and returning; and the logic of what happens if
"you DON'T return my sweater" (therefore you won't be allowed to borrow more sweaters.)
This doesn't mean we don't violate those rules, or cheat; but we understand the rules.

But impersonal descriptions, abstractions (cards, ps and qs) are naturallyvery difficult for
us. Unless you have committed to memory modus ponens and modus tollens and force
yourself to rewrite the question in that form, you won't score better than 20% (which is why
it is a good idea to do so.)
So if you take a bunch of people who are psychopaths, and compare them to those who are
not psychopaths but of equal intelligence:

You see that they do equally well/poorly on the descriptive questions but are comparatively
terrible at precautions and social contracts.

From The Economist's summarization of this study:

[The] test suggests that analysing social contracts and analysing risk are what evolutionary
psychologists call cognitive modules--bundles of mental adaptations that act like bodily organs in that
they are specialised to a particular job. This new result suggests that in psychopaths these modules have
been switched off.

That would be one explanation; and if it was the only one, this would hardly be worth
reporting in the first place. But there's another explanation.

Part 2 soon.