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Monday, November 28, 2011

Criminal Minds



Criminal Minds

Will testing the brain, even before birth, separate the good seeds from the bad?

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The American Paternalistic Culture of Rape

AlterNet.org


Why is the Times running an op-ed from professional antifeminist Katie Roiphe declaring that sexual harassment isn't serious?

Photo Credit: CSPAN

Herman Cain's campaign has raked in donations from loyal GOP supporters even after a handful of damning sexual harassment (and worse) allegations have surfaced.

Penn State students rallied and rioted on behalf of their coach even after it was revealed that he failed to report a witnessed child rape to the police.

Our rape culture, our misunderstanding of the way assault and harassment demean and hurt victims, is worse than ever. Denial is running rampant.

You'd think our national op-ed pages would rush to publish some feminist-minded pieces by professional victim's advocates pushing back against this pervasive culture, arguing that we take sexual assault and harassment more seriously, that we update our attitudes to reflect our laws and update those laws, too, if needed.

What we got instead, in the New York Times, was a column by professional antifeminist Katie Roiphe, sounding a lot like Don Draper, with the essential message that sexual harassment is just ladies who can't take a joke.

The headline is, "In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks" and the URL spells out "Sexual Harassment? What on Earth is That?"

There's nothing as fresh, cutting-edge and original as calling harassment victims humorless! I knew that '90s nostalgia was in style again, but I didn't expect this type of Anita Hill-era retread.

Now, as much as it would be lovely for all of the world's many humor-loving feminists to ignore this high-placed concern trolling and go back to making jokes in environments where it's actually appropriate and simultaneously maintaining the fight for respectful and safe public and workplaces (a distinction most normal, socially well-attuned people can make) we do have to stop and address her charges.

Because unfortunately, these kinds of contrarian arguments--so popular at the New York Times and like publications--are dangerous. They get swallowed up and absorbed by the mainstream culture and become used as weapons, allowing people who should know better to dismiss those who raise legitimate concerns about rape and harassment and abuse of power as "no fun," "man-hating" and "anti-sex." This stereotype as anyone who has seen or heard about a SlutWalk (or talked to most self-identified feminists in the last 50 years) can tell you, is simply not true.

Before we deconstruct the argument, let's take note of its arguer's history. Katie Roiphe has been described by Rebecca Traister as the "enfant terrible" of the feminist movement, dogging women's advocates ever since 1991 when she published The Morning After, a book that tried to discredit the notion of acquaintance rape on campus. (Parodying the content of that book, the Awl's Choire Sicha once memorably introduced her thus: "Katie Roiphe—whose first book, You're Actually Just a Whore: Raping Doesn't Happen at College, was so ridiculous that she should never have been published again.")

The monikers go on, but you get the idea. Insert feminist idea, expect a knee-jerk Roiphe retort, one filled with allusions to her own delightful rapport with the male gender, unlike those other feminists who are always killing the buzz with complaints like "rape is bad."

Anyway, on to her argument this weekend in the classic Roiphe vein, denouncing the fuss over the Herman Cain harassment allegations. She writes, essentially, that sexual harassment laws mean that dirty jokes have been criminalized, no one can have any fun at work, and the long arm of the law now prohibits flirty, bold women (presumably like herself!) from parrying innuendo for innuendo. Instead, in a world as bleak as 1984's dystopia, all would-be wits must become silent desk-drones lest they and their repartee-partners be hauled off in chains and booked at their local precinct.

Except that's not what sexual harassment is, and most people know that. It's not about conversation, but about abuse of authority or privilege.

Ask nearly any woman who worked in an office environment before those laws Roiphe decries came into effect and they will tell you that it wasn't very much fun, and it wasn't mutual--each day was a gauntlet, in fact.

At the Daily Beast, Leslie Bennetts explains why what Herman Cain is accused of doing was wrong, and why it should be taken seriously:

"Sexual harassment is about the lust for sexual gratification, obviously, but it’s also about power. When a man in a position of authority pressures a woman to service him sexually even if she doesn’t want to, and her ability to refuse is compromised by ...her dependent status, the man is committing an egregious abuse of power. For him, that’s a large part of the point: he’s demonstrating his dominance and demanding that the woman acknowledge her subservience."

Beyond the sort of quid pro quo (or implied quid pro quo) behavior Bennetts describes, there's the notion of a hostile environment. Roiphe makes the ignorant assumption that all ribald or sexual chatter in the office is an actionable offense (it also assumes that most people are dying to talk dirty at work, but that is another story) and that office environments are dominated by prudes who yell "see you in court!" when they hear any reference they deem impure.

In reality, though, a hostile environment is described as a repeated and protracted problem that is ignored or not addressed: "a pattern of exposure to unwanted sexual behavior from persons other than an employee's direct supervisor where supervisors or managers take no steps to discourage or discontinue such behavior."

Amanda Marcotte wrote a rebuttal of Roiphe noting her utter misunderstanding of this basic legal and workplace concept:

Roiphe is, without a shred of evidence, claiming that sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits are generally about a single comment or quickly dispatched advance. In reality, for something to rise to the level of sexual harassment, it has to be a "hostile work environment", aka persistent abuse. No one is getting it for one day saying something a little off-color, and it's intellectually dishonest for her to suggest otherwise.

Marcotte also notes that the vagueness of words like "hostile" and "uncomfortable" are there not to be able to qualify everything off-color as sexual harassment, but to allow people to discern the difference:

As the Clarence Thomas situation showed, sexual harassers are endlessly inventive with their euphemisms or gestures. If anything, they deliberately act as weird as possible in an act that is so common that psychologists have a name for it: gaslighting, i.e. acting strange to disorient the victim so that she doubts herself ... Thus, the language of 'uncomfortable' and 'hostlie' is good language, since a reasonable person can see that putting a pubic hair on a Coke can is a hostile gesture designed to make the victim uncomfortable.

At Slate, Roiphe's colleague KJ Dell'Antonia also has a response, taking on Roiphe's assertion that no smart and competent woman would be "derailed" by an unwanted advance. This is true, she writes, noting that harassment laws and protocols have helped those smart and competent women:

Real sexual harassment happens. That it happens less than it once did is because as a society, we've legislated against it, actively discussed it, and attempted, however ambiguously, to define it. That gives smart, competent young women the ability to whack their colleagues upside the head (harassment!) and say, as I once did to a friend: Dude, you just cannot forward that joke to everyone on your team.

Indeed, the existence of those laws and discussions has empowered women to be able to speak up when they feel a colleague is nudging a line--and often in a friendly way, without resorting to suing.

One advantage of this column is that it's brought out Roiphe's opponents' wit. A column this absurd needs an absurdist rejoinder. Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan mocks Roiphe by taking her rhetoric to the extreme, "If we simply laughed and acted charmed when men did stuff like speculate on our cup sizes in front of each other, there would be so many more female CEOs right now," she writes. "It is truly an outrage that so many men have been put to death for telling women in the elevator that they're pretty." Exactly. The idea that there's some sort of office-to-courtroom pipeline for everyday encounters is risible.

Again: most women who were in the workplace before sexual harassment laws have some stories to tell, and they aren't about occasional ribald remarks or being asked out once by a colleague.

Sexual harassment is a genuine bar to equality, and the onslaught of denial in both the Herman Cain situation and even worse, the Penn State rape coverup scandal, shows that we need to talk about these dynamics in the places we work and play seriously.

In the Nation, Dave Zirin has a chilling series of anecdotes about the denial of rape culture that took place under Penn State's Joe Paterno.

"In 2003, less than one year after Paterno was told that Sandusky was raping children, he allowed a player accused of rape to suit up and play in a bowl game. Widespread criticism of this move was ignored. In 2006, Penn State’s Orange Bowl opponent Florida State, sent home linebacker A.J. Nicholson, after accusations of sexual assault. Paterno’s response, in light of recent events, is jaw-dropping. He said, “There’s so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door; somebody may knock on the door; a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do? Geez. I hope—thank God they don’t knock on my door because I’d refer them to a couple of other rooms.” [The local branch of NOW] called for Paterno’s resignation and short of that, asked to dialogue with Paterno and the team. Neither Paterno nor anyone in the power at Penn State accepted the invitation."

Paterno's comments are the kind of flip, obnoxious victim-blaming that oils the wheels of a much more insidious rape culture--as the trajectory of the Penn State story shows.

And so while it's necessary to make fun of Roiphe's reactionary writing, it's also important to remember that the culture she aids and abets with her prominent hair-tossing is neither witty, ribald nor clever. It's tragic.

Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet, a staff writer at RH Reality Check and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published in Jezebel.com and on the websites of the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. Find her at sarahmseltzer.com.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Social Psychosis and Collective Insanity

CommonDreams.org

Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

We know from the sad experience of Nazi Germany or Khmer Rouge Cambodia that it is possible for whole nations to become mentally ill, with horrendous consequences. At the time, however, the Nazis or the Khmers had no idea that they were deeply out of touch with the reality that all people are equally worthy of respect and care.

The population of the earth recently surpassed 7 billion. As we move further into the condition of global villagehood, it becomes more important than ever to assess our shared mental health. Collectively we can less and less afford the distortions that afflict the psyches of individual persons, such as denial, regression into infantile rage, fantasy ideation, or blind projection outward onto “enemies” of our unresolved inner tensions. Everyone is aware of the potential horror, for example, of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of someone not in the clearest of minds.

The social psychosis of denial is one of the greatest of our temptations. As I write I’m sitting outdoors on my back porch in Boston. It is November 8. The “expected” temperature for an average day at this time of year might be around 40. Today it is 70. News stories in the last week have once again sounded the alarm of the amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere being much greater than previously estimated. The displacement of millions of people by climate instability has the potential to be the primary cause of future conflict.

No upstanding citizen from whatever country will find it congenial to be lumped together with the coldly murderous Nazis or the ruthless Khmer Rouge—or even with the notion of the “good German” who professed not to know what was happening to the Jews around him. It is painful enough merely to think of ourselves as people who, because we did not do enough, accelerated untenable conditions with which our children and grandchildren will have to cope down the time-stream. No previous generation has had to make prospective judgments about what they needed to change or sacrifice to ensure the distant future for the entire human species.

Few of our national figures are leading on such issues. Instead, the value-ideal of consumerist economic prosperity built upon models of endless growth continues to dominate the marketplace of ideas and determine the criteria for political success.

This growth model has a momentum of its own, not necessarily connected to our best interests. Take nuclear weapons. Almost 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States is still planning to spend 700 billion dollars on new and upgraded nuclear arms, including building 12 new ballistic missile submarines. But the U.S. is not alone. Russia, China, India, Israel, France and Pakistan are all setting aside vast sums for nuclear missile delivery systems of various sizes. Each nation rationalizes its actions on the basis of what its supposed rivals are doing. The net result will not be the intended increase in security, but a gross diminishment of collective security potentially ending in disaster.

If this is not a form of social madness, of collective insanity, what is? If the weapons are ever used there will be no victory, and the money spent on these useless weapons becomes unavailable for meeting challenges like global climate change and basic budget balancing. Perhaps most importantly of all, there are new models and processes that humans can use to diminish the original tensions that motivate the proliferation of such weapons. We know more than ever about how to overcome the fear within our own psyches that drives the engine of international hostility. At the same time there are enormous new opportunities for people to meet either virtually or face-to-face and learn how much they have in common—in short, to change from imaging others as enemies to interacting as friends, because survival and the greater good demands it.

The hope of reconciliation has its roots deep in a past that we tend to forget. Few among us recall the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war. Written by the great diplomat and poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960, St. John Perse, enthusiastically endorsed by hundreds of thousands of citizen-activists around the world, the pact was signed in 1928 by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, Weimar Germany, and many other nations. It is still the law of the land in the U.S. today—clearly honored more in the breach than the observance. It may be as Keats asserted, that poets really are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Carol Daniel KasbariCarol Daniel KasbariThe fate of peace lies more now with ordinary people than with the Gandhis and Nobel Prize winners. Carol Daniel Kasbari is an activist-citizen in the Middle East—a Palestinian scholar, writer, wife, and mother. This accomplished facilitator of change suggests a number of actions to help end potential or actual war:

  • Cross borders to successfully engage perceived adversaries in authentic, face-to-face, ongoing dialogue; tell your story to the world.
  • Invite news professionals to document what you experience and what progress you create with others; expand the circle to include vastly more interested citizens and, yes, also the skeptics and the unconvinced—all the voices.
  • Strengthen your own support system at home by involving people who matter most to you, so they also experience how easily the ice of alienation can be broken.

Here is the URL of a 20 minute talk by Ms. Kasbari: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxJaffa-Carol-Daniel-Kasbari

Both the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement are at least potentially geared in the direction of this understanding of interdependence and relationship. There are thousands of non-governmental organizations that are working to build friendships and break down barriers of alienation and misunderstanding. These too could benefit from an infusion of funds presently delegated to the insanely wasteful upgrading of nuclear weapons systems. If we are going to have a growth model, let it be growth in breaking down artificial barriers of tribe, race and religion, growth in the deep realization that all seven billion of us are in this together. That way lies collective sanity.

Winslow Myers

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Board of Beyond War, a non-profit educational foundation whose mission is to explore, model and promote the means for humanity to live without war.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

PSU has no way out of this mess






Penn State, by most indications, is hunkered down in damage control and, presumably, mapping some sort of strategy out of what is a catastrophic situation.

This proud school, which has forged ahead by leaps and bounds academically over the past few decades, is buckling at the knees.

The man who has been the public face of the university for some 40 years is likely to be forced out of his job within days or weeks. The athletic director has taken a leave of absence to prepare for criminal charges and it is highly unlikely he‘ll ever return. The president could -- and should -- be gone before the football coach.

Faced with covering up multiple sexual abuse charges against a former assistant football coach, Penn State is the focus of the nation’s ire and contempt. And the first shoe had barely drooped.

Up next, will be the ugly firings and dismissals to be followed by an epidemic of lawsuits that will have near-universal public support and which will likely cost the university or its insurance carrier hundreds of millions of dollars.

A giant of a university is staggering beneath an avalanche of horrific publicity.

And here’s what is amazing. Penn State knew this was coming. It had six months to prepare and it was totally unprepared. It was a known and published fact that Jerry Sandusky was under investigation and it was pretty well known that the news would not be good -- although no one expected the depth of the charges against Sandusky.

Penn State was so unprepared for what it should have been prepared that president Graham Spanier continues to call the situation ``troubling.’’

Troubling is a tooth ache or losing a football game. The situation Penn State is in is about 500 times greater than ``troubling.’’

As for the Paterno angle to this story, it makes no difference what he heard or did not hear from Mike McQueary. If McQueary said nothing more than he saw Sandusky in the shower with a 10-year-old boy -- and I doubt he said that little -- Paterno had to be aggressive in finding out exactly what happened and taking action against it.

But the New York Times is now reporting Paterno’s public stance that McQueary did not make him fully aware of the nature of Sandusky’s 2002 assault on the boy might not hold up.

The paper said, ``A person with knowledge of Mr. McQueary’s version of events called Mr. Paterno’s claim into question. The person said Mr. McQueary had told those in authority the explicit details of what he saw, including in his face-to-face meeting with Mr. Paterno the day after the incident.’’

There's no happy ending to this story. It should not be drawn out. Spanier needs to go the way of Curley and as a soon as possible.

Paterno needs to step down no later than the last game of the season.

Finding a successor will not be easy. Does anyone think Urban Meyer wants any part of this mess? He can have his pick of jobs. Why would he want one so tainted by a horrific scandal.

There is no PR solution to this. It cannot be finessed.

Penn State has made a gigantic blunder at the highest levels of the school. It has no choice but to take it’s medicine and hope to rebuild from the rubble.

The Forced Right to the Right Life: Beating Babies in the Name of Jesus


AlterNet.org


BELIEF
There is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God.


There is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God. Two stories recently converged to make us pay attention. Last week, a video went viral of a Texas judge brutally whipping his disabled daughter. And on Monday, the New York Times published a story about child deaths in homes that have embraced the teachings of To Train Up a Child, a book by Christian preacher Michael Pearl that advocates using a switch on children as young as six months old.

What many people may not realize is that in the evangelical alternative universe of the home school movement, tightly knit church communities and the following of a number of big-time leaders and authors, physical punishment of children has been glorified for years.

As the Times illustrates -- "Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate" -- the books of Michael Pearl and his wife Debi have been found in the homes where several children were killed.

They're not the only right-wing Christians who advocate these methods. Some of the most respected evangelical discipline gurus have made beating children not just "respectable" in conservative religious circles, but even turned it into a godly activity.

In 1977 James Dobson founder of the "Focus on the Family" religious empire and radio program, wrote a book called Dare To Discipline, whose purpose was, essentially, to get parents to beat their children.

In his book Dobson glorified a sadomasochistic/spiritual ritual of "discipline." He said he wanted to stop a "liberal" trend in America that was moving away from the godly thrashing of infants. He wanted to help "restore" America to God and the good old days of child hitting. This fit in well with the notion of God as retribution-in-chief that evangelicals endorse.

Dobson isn't alone. There's also the work of evangelical "family values" guru Bill Gothard, with a following of millions. As reported by the Cincinnati Beacon, Matthew Murray, the young shooter who killed a bunch of churchgoers in 2007, had been raised according to the teachings of evangelist Bill Gothard.

"I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard rules and then trancing out," he wrote Dec. 1 under the monicker "nghtmrchld26" on a Web forum for former Pentecostal Christians.

Bill Gothard is the founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles in Illinois, which promotes a Christian home "education" program. As quoted in the Beacon article Murray said "I remember how it was, like every day was Mission Impossible trying to keep the rules or not get caught and just ...survive every single (expletive) day,"

In The Strong Willed Child (Living Books 1992), Dobson makes a parallel between beating children and beating dogs:

"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud.

"What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!

"But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO." [Emphasis Dobson's]

"[I]t is possible to create a fussy, demanding baby by rushing to pick him up every time he utters a whimper or sigh. Infants are fully capable of learning to manipulate their parents through a process called reinforcement, whereby any behavior that produces a pleasant result will tend to recur. Thus, a healthy baby can keep his mother hopping around his nursery twelve hours a day (or night) by simply forcing air past his sandpaper larynx.

"Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of 'original sin' which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster."

Dobson is mild compared to the popular evangelical authors Michael and Debi Pearl. In their book To Train Up a Child (1994) they advocate beating babies.

In the book they recommend "switching" a 7-month-old on the bare bottom or leg seven to eight times as a punishment for getting angry. If the baby is still angry, the urge parents to repeat the punishment until the child gives in to the pain. The "switch" they recommend for an under 1-year-old is from a willow tree and/or a 12-inch ruler.

The leadership of the evangelical world, from Billy Graham to the editors of Christianity Today magazine or the megachurch pastors like Rick Warren, have not called for the banishment of abusers like the Pearls, Dobson or Gothard. These people remain in good standing.

In the Pearls' case, actual criminal complaints have been brought against some parents who have killed their children and who have been following the "methods" in To Train Up a Child. This book can be nevertheless be found in thousands of "respectable" evangelical bookstores. Here's what the evangelicals approve by their silence and complicity, as noted in the Examiner and many other media sources:

A California couple has been charged with murder and torture after their discipline methods caused the death of one of their children and critical injuries for another.

Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of Paradise, California, are accused of murdering their 7-year-old adopted daughter during a "discipline session." The couple is also charged with the torture of their 11-year-old adopted daughter and cruelty to a child for signs of bruising discovered on their 10-year-old biological son.

The parents allegedly used a 15-inch length of plastic tubing used for plumbing to beat the children, a practice recommended in the book "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl of "No Greater Joy Ministries."

The same plumbing supply tools were linked to a North Carolina child's death in 2006, when a devotee of the Pearls accidentally killed her 4-year-old son by suffocating him in tightly wrapped blankets.

Police later found out about the Pearls' recommendations to beat children with this type of plumbing supply tubing from a Salon Magazine article, "Spare the quarter-inch plumbing supply line, spoil the child."

Mr. Pearl, who has no degree or training in child development, writes in his book that he and his wife used "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules" -- namely, "switches."

On their web site, the Pearls write that "switching" or giving "licks" with a plumbing supply line is a "real attention getter."

And it is not just individuals who are abused. Whole "Christian" organizations are involved. According to a report by Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis (and many other media sources over the years),

"At first glance, the Bill Gothard-founded and run Indianapolis Training Center looks like an ordinary conference hotel. But some say there are dark secrets inside. "They're not here to play," Mark Cavanaugh, an ITC staffer tells a mother on hidden-camera video. 'They're here because they've been disobedient, they've been disrespectful.'"

He's talking about young offenders who are sent to the center by the Marion County Juvenile Court. Critics of the program here, however, have another view. "This is sort of a shadow world where these kids almost disappear," said John Krull, executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. The pitch for the centers says that they were founded by Gothard because: "At the age of 15, Bill Gothard noticed some of his high school classmates making unwise decisions. Realizing that they would have to live with the consequences of these decisions, he was motivated to dedicate his life to helping young people make wise choices."

The WTHR report goes on to detail how they help these young people make "wise choices":

"But Eyewitness News has learned of disturbing allegations about the center, including routine corporal punishment -- sometimes without parental consent -- and solitary confinement that can last for months.

And just last week, Child Protective Services began investigating the center. That investigation involves Teresa Landis, whose 10-year-old daughter spent nearly a year at the center -- sent there, according to Judge Payne, after she attacked a teacher and a school bus driver. What happened next outrages her family and critics of the ITC. The girl allegedly was confined in a so-called "quiet room" for five days at a time; restrained by teenage "leaders" who would sit on her; and hit her with a wooden paddle 14 times. At least once, the family contends, she was prevented from going to the bathroom and then forced to sit in her own urine."

Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard both have a big followings in Rick Perry's hang-em'-high "Christian" Texas. And Texas is where evangelical leader Gary North is based as he writes and preaches his Reconstructionist/Dominionist theology about applying literal Old Testament law -- including the execution of "incorrigible youths" -- as mandated by the Bible. So even Dobson is "mild" by comparison to the Reconstructionists who did so much to influence the far-right "Christian" politics -- the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

Here is how evangelical "man of God" Dobson describes how to beat a child using his own life as a guide. He writes in The New Dare To Discipline:

"The day I learned the importance of staying out of reach shines like a neon light in my mind. I made the costly mistake of sassing her when I was about four feet away. I knew I had crossed the line and wondered what she would do about it. It didn't take long to find out. Mom wheeled around to grab something with which to express her displeasure, and her hand landed on a girdle.

"Those were the days when a girdle was lined with rivets and mysterious panels. She drew back and swung the abominable garment in my direction, and I can still hear it whistling through the air. The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles, wrapping themselves around my midsection. She gave me an entire thrashing with one blow! But from that day forward, I measured my words carefully when addressing my mother. I never spoke disrespectfully to her again, even when she was seventy-five years old."

Meanwhile the evangelical leaders who embrace Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard will continue to tell the rest of us how to live "moral" lives while children are beaten in the name of Jesus.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

The evolution of deceit

iA

Farnam Street posts the best articles from around the internet on psychology, behavioral economics, human misjudgment, persuasion, and other subjects of intellectual interest.

The evolution of deceit


Fibs and self-deception are central to our evolutionary strategy.

The following excerpt is from an interview with Robert Trivers, author of The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life:

You do have some really fascinating information about the power of the placebo effect in medicine. What does the placebo effect tell us about the power of self-deception?

Like hypnosis, there needs to be a third party involved. It’s very hard to talk yourself into a placebo effect. You’ve got to have someone with a stethoscope and a white coat and acting like a doctor to get the placebo effect going. There’s something very important that’s not emphasized in the literature on placebo effect — there’s a lot of variability. About a third of us don’t show placebo effect, a third of us show a really strong one, and a third of us are kind of intermediate. The same thing is true of hypnosis.

I recently saw a guy in Jamaica to whom I gave some pills to calm him down because he’d just gone through a minor breakdown. I gave him a particular pill by the recommendation of a psychiatrist. They were pink pills — and they had a positive effect. When I came back to give him his refill, I had my own version of the pill that was identical, but was a white pill. I called him two days later and he openly sounded depressed. He says, “The other pill works better.” He was so happy when I showed up with a bunch of pink pills and took back the five remaining white ones.

Read the entire interview

The The Folly of Fools covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the mechanics and meaning of deception. This book will utterly change the way you think about lying. Commenting on the book, Richard Dawkins said “This is a remarkable book, by a uniquely brilliant scientist.”



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Neuroscience

Saturday, Nov 5, 2011 5:00 PM EST

The evolution of deceit

New discoveries show that fibs and self-deception are central to our evolutionary strategy. An expert explains

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Not long ago, a young man drove onto Robert Trivers’ Jamaica property. Suspicious of the man’s sudden appearance, and convinced he was intent on either extorting money from him or robbing him, Trivers, a Rutgers professor, confronted him about his identity. His first name, the man said, was Steve. “What’s your last name?” Trivers asked. Trivers, one of the world’s leading evolutionary theorists and an expert on deceit, was checking for a behavioral sign that the man was lying, like an absence of hand gestures or longer pauses between words, which indicate “higher cognitive load.” The man paused. And Trivers knew immediately he was right: As it turns out, the man’s real name was Omar.

Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about the mechanics and meaning of deception than almost anybody else in the world, and his new book, “The Folly of Fools,” covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the topic. The book is an attempt to connect the mechanics of deceit to evolutionary science, and takes a broad survey of the areas in which the two overlap, including animal predation, parenting and people’s sex lives. High parasite load, he discovers, for example, is correlated with heightened levels of self-deception, and high levels of deceit, he finds, are closely tied to bad health. Expansive, smart and deep, the book — a relentlessly fascinating and entertaining read — will utterly change the way you think about lying.

Salon spoke to Trivers over the phone about Arnold Schwarzenegger, “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the connection between staying in the closet and HIV.

When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?

Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.

So what does that have to do with evolution?

If you take a relationship between a man and a woman, the man can be carrying on an affair on the side and it can produce a child. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not tell his wife that that cute little boy that he loved so much was actually his own, by the maid. Maria discovered it when the child was 12 years old. So you can get a reproductive benefit by deception as long as you’re not detected.

Self-deception, by contrast, has been a long problem in human thought. You find it in religion. Minds like Marx and Freud have each claimed to have a theory of self-deception, none of which have stood up. Adam Smith, the economist, wrote a whole book called “Self Deception.” George Orwell obviously had deep insight into certain kinds of self-deception, but nobody has had anything approaching a coherent scientific theory as to why on earth we would lie to ourselves. Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”

So we are evolutionarily predisposed to lie to others and ourselves. How does deception play itself out in the animal kingdom?

Let me give you an example. If you’re trying to pick out a moth against the bark of a tree and it has evolved to resemble the bark of the tree more and more precisely, then it becomes a more and more difficult cognitive problem for you to solve. So your cognitive powers of detection, of seeing things, of being able to discriminate very minor differences, those are all being improved. I deliberately use that example because the deceiver is using morphology, not behavior.

Right, so by developing a more deceptive body, the moth is creating an incentive for you to become smarter — and therefore you’re more likely to evolve a more sophisticated brain.

Nobody has worked out a general principle of deception in creatures. Deception, however, seems to be a file against which mental intellectual powers have been sharpened. When it comes to behavior, there is a strong correlation in primates — monkeys and apes — between the relative size of their neocortex and how often they are seen to deceive in nature. The brighter you are, the more complex and devious your deceptions can be.

In children, for example, there’s a strong positive correlation between having higher intelligence at age 4 and more deception. Smart children lie more than slow children. A child that is disabled to the point of lacking verbiage, for example, may deceive you by lunging in one direction and then grabbing something on the other side of you. But they are not going to show sophisticated verbal deceptions.

At what point do babies start deceiving their parents?

Fake crying, where the child is able to turn it off and turn it right back on depending on if the audience is there, starts at 6 months. I have a video I use in my lecture where this child is rolling on the ground bawling in front of his mom and their dogs and your heart goes out to him. Then the mother and the dogs leave the room and the child stops crying, gets back up on his feet, walks toward them. As soon as he sees them, he immediately flings himself on the ground and starts bawling again. He’s just trying to manipulate Mom.

And, as you point out in the book, children get better at deceiving the older they get.

They start telling so-called white lies at about age 5 and at age 2 or younger they can start pretending that a punishment is not something they care about, when they clearly do. The more cognitively talented the child becomes in general, the more subtle and sophisticated its deception becomes.

You do have some really fascinating information about the power of the placebo effect in medicine. What does the placebo effect tell us about the power of self-deception?

Like hypnosis, there needs to be a third party involved. It’s very hard to talk yourself into a placebo effect. You’ve got to have someone with a stethoscope and a white coat and acting like a doctor to get the placebo effect going. There’s something very important that’s not emphasized in the literature on placebo effect — there’s a lot of variability. About a third of us don’t show placebo effect, a third of us show a really strong one, and a third of us are kind of intermediate. The same thing is true of hypnosis.

I recently saw a guy in Jamaica to whom I gave some pills to calm him down because he’d just gone through a minor breakdown. I gave him a particular pill by the recommendation of a psychiatrist. They were pink pills — and they had a positive effect. When I came back to give him his refill, I had my own version of the pill that was identical, but was a white pill. I called him two days later and he openly sounded depressed. He says, “The other pill works better.” He was so happy when I showed up with a bunch of pink pills and took back the five remaining white ones.

You point out that women think very differently about sexual deceit depending on where they are in their cycle of ovulation. How so?

If a woman isn’t on the pill, you get all of these differences showing up right around the time of ovulation, which relate to the fact that that’s her time to get “different genes.” There are things, for example, called major histocompatability loci [on your genes] that are involved in the fights against parasites. They are highly variable. Most partners [in sexual partnerships] don’t match but some match on one [locus], some match on two, and in some cases they match on all three. Since women don’t want children who have [the same alleles or genetic code at the same locus] the more the woman matches with you the less she is going to want your genes for her children.

What they’ve shown is, at the time of ovulation, if you match in one or more of these there’s more verbally coerced sex — “Come on, you had a headache last week” — and there’s a greater tendency for her to employ fantasy to get off. She thinks about a past lover or somebody she’s attracted to while you are having sex.

Right. So during that period of ovulation, she’s less attracted to her husband or boyfriend, and more likely to think about having sex with someone else.

There’s an irony because we have pretty good evidence that women are at their most attractive at the time of ovulation. Their waist-to-hip ratios are slightly smaller, so they are more curvaceous. They are somewhat more symmetrical and the coloration of their face is better. The time at which she is most attractive to you is the time at which she’s least attracted to you. And the men are impervious to this.

I know a joke, although women in this country don’t like it. If women are so good at multitasking, how come they can’t have sex and a headache at the same time? I told this story to a Jamaican woman and she starts explaining to me, “No, we’re using the headache to avoid sex.” And I say, “That’s the whole joke!”

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that problem between gay men.

How old are you, Thomas?

I’m 27.

Oh fuck. You’re in heaven!

Ha! Thanks, but speaking of gayness, you make some fascinating connections between being in the closet and the strength of your immune system in the book.

Homosexual men have been very intensively studied in the U.S. for a number of years in connection with HIV and AIDS. You suffer more from cancer if you are in the closet. Bronchitis ain’t deadly, but it’s certainly annoying — and once more you suffer more from it if you’re in the closet. It’s a graded phenomenon — so for every extra degree of outness there’s an improvement [in health]. It also shows up when you measure immune parameters in saliva that generally correlates with immune strength.

And they had a study showing the same thing I just mentioned for HIV positive men. What is your guess, Thomas? Do you think people are more likely to engage in unprotected sex if you are in the closet or if you’re out of the closet.

When they’re in the closet.

And why’s that?

Because I think a lot of closeted men think that “only gay men” have protected sex and that if they’re not gay, they don’t need to.

You’re right, men in the closet practice more unprotected sex. Pretend that you and I are both gay men but I’m in the closet and you’re out. Now you’ve got three condoms in your pocket and one more in your boot in case there’s an orgy. Now, me, I’m going out to a heterosexual party and I’m not intending to do anything homosexual that night. But after four drinks and at 12:30 at night my car turns left instead of right and I ain’t got no condom.

Now the reason that’s relevant to HIV is this: If you’ve got two strains of HIV inside you, the two parasites compete for dominance. They each want to be the one replicating and passed on in your sperm. That means faster, in theory, progression into AIDS and 20 percent earlier death. So there’s an overwhelming relationship between being in the closet and having a compromised immune system.

Which, as you point out in the book, is a very strong argument against “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was an immunological disaster. But that’s typical of Bill Clinton. He always went in for verbalistic solutions.


Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor.More Thomas Rogers

Trances People Live 101

Magazine For Hypnosis and
Hypnotherapy

Hypnosis Book Reviews...

Trances People Live - Healing approaches in Quantum Psychology

Stephen Wolinsky Ph.D

Stephen Wolinsky Ph.D began his clinical practice in Los Angeles, California in 1974. Working as a Gestalt and Reichian therapist. He also trained in Hypnosis, Psychosynthesis, Psychodrama/ Psychomotor and Transactional Analysis. In 1977 he travelled to India where he spent six years studying meditation. He moved to New Mexico in 1982 to resume a clinical practice. There he began to train therapists in Eriksonian hypnosis and Family therapy. He conducted year long trainings entitled: Integrating Hypnosis with Psychotherapy and Integrating hypnosis with Family therapy. He is the author of many books and is the founder of Quantum Psychology.

In Trances people live Dr Wolinsky has created a unique project that combines his six years of studying in the Far East with his 20 years as a therapy student and practitioner. His unique combination of eastern philosophy, Ericksonian psychotherapy, historic psychotherapy as well as western religion and an interest in physics makes for a fascinating piece of writing.

In this book he is presenting us with a new conceptual framework for trance which is easily translatable. His concept is saying that within the bounds of our everyday experiences we are creating a self induced trance. He is almost saying that trance is a new word for feelings. He is able to find an intriguing way to teach others how to experience the transformational insight that 'they are not their problem'. He makes it clear that symptoms are found within our own self-hood but also includes the idea that the psychotherapy experience includes the therapists selfhood. He therefore stresses a great importance on the integrity of the therapist and shares his belief that the therapist-patient identity is a unity and that the therapist honesty and freedom to express himself is central to his own beingness.

In explaining and giving meaning to the ideas of Quantum psychology in a way that is easily understood and absorbed he explains the discoveries that were made in the scientific community. Heisenberg changed the world of physics through his discovery that the instrument of measurement as well as the observer of the experiment influences the outcome.

This has given way to an array of philosophical interpretations especially that of Fred Wolf (1981) who speculated "How could there be a mechanical universe out there if the universe changed every time we altered how we observe it?"

To translate this into language that we can understand, it means that how we subjectively experience events, interactions, and our own inner self is observer- created- created by us. This reality suggests a further one: that we, as the knowers of our experience, choose how an experience is experienced.

This is where we delve into the realms of deep trance phenomena, the medium in which our creative activity takes place. This is where we select how experiences are perceived, interpreted, and understood.

In this book the phenomena of hypnotic trance is viewed as a self-generated, self-created reality that appears to happen to us. In Dr Wolinsky's view these self-created realities are what can often result in symptoms or problems. Once we can acknowledge the observer-creator within that is creating these trances we can begin a deeper process of assuming responsibility for the part we play in (consciously or unconsciously) creating our own realities.

Dr Wolinsky believes that the task of the therapist is one of observing and identifying the self-generated problem state or hypnotic trance and de-hypnotizing the person out of the trance he or she is already in.

For the reader there is a wealth of fascinating information, a thorough and clear explanation of the theory, with many examples and case studies to draw from. It gives a very different way of looking at all of the different aspects of deep trance phenomena. In many respects it calls in to question many of the ideas that we have developed and understood and turns them on their heads.

Stephen Wolinsky would have us believe that Quantum Consciousness is only bounded by the limitations of our current conception of reality. Could this be the missing piece of the dysfunctional puzzle. If we can learn to identify the kind of trance states that create our problems or symptoms we could have the tool to finally dissolve the 'glue' that holds our problems to us in the present moment.

For me this book is a wonderful journey into the world of Quantum psychology, it is easily readable, very enjoyable and immensely thought provoking.

Where does it take us, now, with the notion of hypnosis, is it a state where we go or is it life?

Reviewed by: Lorraine Flaherty

Review by kind permission of The London College of Clinical Hypnosis

Trances People Live



Trances People Live

The notion of trance is often times very closely linked to that of hypnosis. People think that the only time they go into a trance is when they have somebody dangling a pocket watch in front of their nose. Furthermore, a chicken like state is also commonly associated with trance…All this could not be further from the truth. “Trance may be understood as a matter of functionality and efficiency ~ to economize consciousness resource usage” (Wikipedia). In fact, we are in some sort of trance all the time, and all we do is change between the trances we live through our day…

Many times trance is defined as an altered state of consciousness. While this is a definition that is good to shout of quickly at a game show, what actually is a altered state of consciousness. To me the formulation suggests that there is something like a un-altered state or normal state. Could someone explain to me what that feels like? The only thing I know is that I go through a whole load of different states throughout the day, and none of them would classify as normal….

From the wikipedia definition, we can deduct the following: Trance is a narrow focus of attention. While in some hypnotic inductions this narrow focus might be achieved through a shiny object or dot on the wall, in our day to day life we tend to create this narrow focus all by ourselves. Think about problems: Once we have one, it does tend to take up quite a bit of our thinking capacity, and sometimes this can go so far that we don’t think about anything else. One might even say that people are in a “problem trance”.

The same is true when you have a really great time with a friend. You are so focused on the conversation, you are enjoying yourself so much, that time just flies by. One hour turns into five minutes. This phenomenon, known in hypnotic circles as time distortion, requires quiet a deep level of trance. Here, one could say that you are in a “happiness trance”.

So, the fact is that we trance out and about all day long. To some extent, everything can be seen as a trance state, as a narrow focus of attention, simply because there is only so much attention to go around. What we should learn is how to control these trance states and make them work in our favor, so that we can have the most of what we want. So, do enjoy your trances throughout the day….

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Desperately Seeking Intervention

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


Desperately Seeking Intervention

How do you know if the community you live in is healthy? What are the symptoms of societal sickness?

Is civil strife a good indicator?

What about wide-scale despair or a prevalent lack of hope for the future?

***

According to a recent report published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every 300 U.S. adults attempted suicide in the past year. That’s 2700 a day, 100 per hour and almost two per minute. There were almost as many attempted suicides as abortions last year.

The two biggest reasons people attempt suicide are depression and psychosis. There are, of course, folks who harbor a sober, philosophical desire to die, whether to control their own destiny or alleviate suffering, but most are simply depressed or psychotic.

There’s obviously plenty to be depressed or sick about in this country. We’re not healthy. We’re knowingly and willfully self-destructive in terms of our diets, our sedimentary lifestyles and our environment. We’re obsessively fixated on youthfulness and resort to injections and implants and try crèmes and pills to stay looking young—anything to avoid the appearance of wisdom.

We toil away at non-vital vocations that turn us into listless automatons. We’re surrounded by technologies that allow us to communicate with everyone, but we rarely have anything reasonable or meaningful to say. Our nation and our species are going down the proverbial tubes and we have very little idea of what can be done about it.

We’re obviously depressed. But when one in every 300 members of a nation’s citizenry tries to kill themselves in a given year, it’s time to consider whether individual depression isn’t simply a symptom of collective psychosis.

One of the chief symptoms of psychosis is delusion. Victims harbor false beliefs that are persistent and organized and resistant to correction or logic.

Doesn’t that describe us perfectly?

We believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. We deny evolutionary theory even though our understanding of our own biology is based on it. We deny climate change even though its effects are already changing our existence. We believe that America is a good place to live even though success in our society is based more on ruthlessness than responsibility, and real honesty, in general, is considered naïve. And we insist the United States is still a great nation even though it hasn’t been a positive force in the world for years.

Something is wrong with us.

We are depressed as a nation and psychotic as a people.

As the middle class—the chief bastion of normalcy and, arguably, decency, in our society—is slowly being amputated, our thought processes are confused. As our national glory fades, we talk now, mostly to ourselves. Our behavior is becoming strange and possibly dangerous, but we only absorb and process information that confirms our psychosis.

There needs to be intervention, but we protect our delusions with patriotic fervor. And we guard our dementia as if it were religion.

E.R. Bills is a writer from Ft Worth, Texas. His recent works appear in Fort Worth Weekly, South Texas Nation, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth Magazine, etc. He can be reached at: erbillsthinks@gmail.com. Read other articles by E.R..