Surprisingly, so the story goes, all eight were not busy the next month, and all eight - three psychologists, one graduate student, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife - agreed to take the time to try this treacherous trick, along with Rosenhan himself, who could hardly wait to get started. Pseudopatient Martin Seligman says, "David just called me up and said, 'Are you busy next October?' "and I said, 'Of course I'm busy next October', but by the end of the conversation he had me laughing and saying yes."
First, there was training. Rosenhan instructed his confederates very, very carefully. Five days prior to the chosen date, they were to stop shaving, showering and brushing their teeth. And then they were, on the appointed date, to disperse to different parts of the country, east to west, and present themselves at various psychiatric emergency rooms. Some of the hospitals Rosenhan had chosen were posh and built of white brick; others were state-run gigs with urine- scented corridors and graffiti-scratched walls. The pseudopatients were to present themselves and say words along these lines: "I am hearing a voice. It is saying thud." Rosenhan specifically chose this complaint because nowhere in psychiatric literature are there any reports of any person hearing a voice that contains such obvious cartoon angst.
Upon further questioning, the eight pseudopatients were to answer honestly, save for name and occupation. They were to feign no other symptoms. Once on the ward, if admitted, they were immediately to say that the voice had disappeared and that they now felt fine.
The article's author, psychologist Lauren Slater, decides to repeat the experiment in 2004. There are several differences - the doctors and hospital workers are far more humane nowadays, and where they once locked people up irresponsibly they now drug people irresponsibly.
I am prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants. At no point does an interview last longer than 12 and a half minutes, although at most places I needed to wait an average of two and a half hours in the waiting room. No one ever asks me, beyond a cursory religious-orientation question, about my cultural background; no one asks me if the voice is of the same gender as I; no one gives me a full mental status exam, which includes more detailed and easily administered tests to indicate the gross disorganisation of thinking that almost always accompanies psychosis. Everyone, however, takes my pulse.
There's a lot more to Slater's account - read the whole thing, is my rather cliched advice. The article is taken from her about-to-be-released book Opening Skinner's Box, which I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for.
]]>Dubya couldn't remember the names of foreign leaders, but that didn't ground him. No one ever lost macho points for being stupid. Male hysteria is another story. Most women recoil from it, and most men show contempt, which is why late-night comics (all of them guys) rushed to piss on Dean. In a more relaxed time, his performance might have been regarded as passionate and roguish. But in this anxious age, it tapped into one of the worst nightmares for many men: losing your grip in a clinch. For a wannabe dude-in-chief, that's not just a sign of instability; it's a violation of gender expectations.
Via The Mahablog.
Update: Gabriel Rosenberg has written an excellent response, too.
Court records indicate Circuit Judge Gene Stephenson made the comment earlier this week while looking at a photograph of the victim. The record quotes the judge as saying, "Why would he want to rape her? She doesn't look like a day at the beach."
They might ask him to be removed? Might? Jesus. I'd ask for him to be mauled by bears. Via Trish Wilson.
Now she sits in another prison, awaiting a deportation hearing scheduled for today. Suarez is a permanent legal resident, but not a U.S. citizen, and immigration law says that, with an aggravated felony on her record, she is to be deported.
"Justice," Suarez said, "is so hard to understand."
The lady has a gift for understatement. Via TalkLeft.
First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages?
If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.
I wish the interview were longer and more detailed, but what little there is, is interesting. Via Boing Boing.
]]>1888: (Birthday) Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota Indian (Sioux) anthropologist who studied Dakota Indian life for more than 40 years, was born at White Swan, South Dakota, on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. Deloria always lived at extreme poverty levels as she worked with noted anthropologist Frank Boaz and later Ruth Benedict. For the first time in history, life in the Indian culture was seen from a woman's perspective.
1958: (A First) The British House of Lords passed law (confirmed by the House of Commons Feb. 13) that seated women in the House of Lords for the first time in its six and one half centuries of existence. The day in now known as Woman Peerage Day.
]]>Which brings me to "Wimps and Barbarians," by Terrence O. Moore, the Mount Everest of fisking. The essay comes with an unstinting recommendation from Sara at Diotima and appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, so it's probably not a practical joke.
Then again, maybe Moore is a joker. How else to explain a high school principal who writes this:
I swear, just a handful of paragraphs after expressing a determination not to appear "old and boring," the man is complaining that those darn young people dress in those damned modern fashions and listen to that awful rock and roll music. Oh, and he makes fun of them for having a teenage vocabulary. (Like, how original.)
Think I'm exaggerating?
Recognizing other barbarians by their ball caps, one barbarian can enter into a verbal exchange with another anywhere: in a men's room, at an airport, in a movie theater. This exchange, which never quite reaches the level of conversation, might begin with, "Hey, what up?" A traditional response: "Dude!" The enlightening colloquy can go on for hours at increasingly high volumes. "You know, you know!" "What I'm sayin'!" "No way, man!" "What the f---!" "You da man!" "Cool!" "Phat!" "Awesome!" And so on. Barbarians do not use words to express thoughts, convey information, paint pictures in the imagination, or come to a rational understanding.[...]
[Heavy metal] is impossible to dance to. You can, of course, thrust your fist over and over into the air. Heavy metal lacks all rhythmic quality, sounding more like jet engines taking off while a growling male voice shouts repeated threats, epithets, and obscenities. Heavy metal lacks all subtlety, reflection, harmony, refinement—in a word, civilization.
Okay, so we're not going to seem tired or fussy. First step: let's attack teenage fashion, teenage vocabulary, and teenage music. That sure won't make us seem old or boring!
Here's another giggle-worthy bit:
Picture it: you're a teenager in high school, a bit insecure about masculinity (as nearly all teen boys are). Suddenly, your ex-marine principal Mr. Moore gets in your face and barks "When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?" The question, full of contempt, assumes its own answer; but you can't return the contempt, because if you do he'll throw you in detention or worse.
Is it any surprise that teens react to this "simple" question by stammering and looking at the ground? Not to anyone who has any ability to put himself in a teenager's shoes. But if Principal Moore could put himself in other people's shoes, he'd know better than to rail against that Awful Music Kids Like.
Moore's lack of irony isn't funny (okay, it isn't just funny); it also reveals a significant intellectual weakness, which is that Moore doesn't examine himself or his own ideas critically. Obvious self-contradictions go by without comment; necessary premises underlying his essay are simply assumed, rather than supported with facts or even argument.
For example, the central premise of Moore's article: Manhood is in decline. Over and over, Principal Moore laments "how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness." We must return to the golden age of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when men were men.
Of course, Principal Moore's younger students have grandfathers who, back in the day, wore their hair long, smoked pot and listened to Bob Dylan. And the boring, old Principal Moore's of that day tore their hair out and lamented that young men nowadays lacked all manhood.
This brings up an essential point, one completely ignored by Principal Moore: How does he know manhood is in decline? If Moore wasn't ignorant of history, he'd know that chicken littles have been declaring "the manhood is failing! The manhood is failing!" for at least a century and probably much longer.
For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, who wrote in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1908; modernize the language slightly and it could be taken straight from Principal Moore's article:
It is not the making of the physical "mollycoddle" we need fear, but of the mental and moral one. It is weaklings of this sort, unreinforced with the proper stamina of soul, that have brought about the hideous reign of graft and crime that seems to devastate our land.
Like Principal Moore, Scheffauer is certain that the young men of his day are failing at manhood - so certain that he doesn't bother providing any evidence to support his thesis. Scheffauer was by no means alone in his concern - on the contrary, that public schools (and woman teachers) were failing to make boys into virtuous men was a major concern of macho intellectuals nationwide (it was partly to address these concerns that the Boy Scouts were created in 1910).
And so it's been for every generation of Americans. Principle Moore says that young men of today are disappointing compared to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But when the grandpas and great-grandpas were young men, they too were criticized for their lack of proper manhood.
So what's the deal? Is it possible that manhood has been in a state of tragic decline in every generation for over a century? Maybe, but I doubt it. With hindsight, the men of the 1900s don't seem vastly manlier than the men of the 1930s, for example. The young men (and women, who Principal Moore ignores) who fought the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s do not, to me, seem less manly and virtuous than their 1920s counterparts. In short, there doesn't seem to be much reason to think manliness has ever been in crisis, even though we've never lacked for chicken littles who tell us otherwise.
But Principal Moore doesn't address this history - in fact, there's no reason to think he's aware of the history of his views.
This isn't the only case where Moore appears uninformed on his subject. For instance, one of the many villains of Moore's piece (along with rock music, baseball caps, and female teachers) is the lack of spanking:
It's the "of course" that amazes me, because it speaks of a self-confidence in one's own rightness completely unshaken by decades of research finding the opposite. Is Principle Moore so ignorant of the research that it doesn't even occur to him to attempt to support his "of course" with evidence, or to explain why the last 45 years of research on spanking has all been wrong? From an article on spanking by Murray Straus (a favorite social scientist of anti-feminists, by the way, cited often by Christina Hoff Sommers) in Society (Sept 2001 issue):
Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn't even bother to make an argument, or to address the fact that opposing views appear considerably more supported by research. It's as if he believes that his contempt for opposing views, in and of itself, rebuts those views. More likely, Moore is so positive that he must be correct that he couldn't be bothered researching what peer-reviewed studies have found about spanking. Is doing research - and, indeed, knowing what you're talking about - too wimpy for a real man like Principal Moore? Maybe.
That's part one of my climb up Mount Moore. In part two, I'll get to what I really disliked about this essay.
]]>1912: (Birthday) Martha Griffiths, U.S. Representative from Michigan, first woman on House Ways and Means Committee, and fighter for equal rights, born in Pierce City, Missouri.
1926: (A First) Violette Neatly Anderson, became the first black female lawyer to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
1943: (A First) Ruth Cheney Streeter became the first woman to reach the rank of Major with the U.S. Marines. She became a lieutenant colonel in 1943 and a full colonel in 1944.
]]>One thing that struck me about the article, though, is who is quoted. Record company executives are quoted. Law professors are quoted. What's missing, though, are quotes from artists on either side of this issue - although both sides make it clear that they are fighting for artists' best interests.
]]>Jim Henley responds:
It's possible to subscribe to both Jim's and Eve's interpretations for the pirate comic. However, Eve's interpretation is very strongly supported by the text; in the final chapter, talking to Jon, Veidt explains that he's been dreaming of "swimming towards a hideous...." This is a reference to the only other image of swimming in Watchmen; the protagonist of the pirate comic swimming towards the hideous pirate ship after murdering his own family and townsfolk. Veidt, like the main character in the pirate comic, is the destruction he fears.
The superhero as (in Eve's term) "blood-soaked utopian" was one of Alan Moore's favorite themes in his 1980s superhero comics; it can be seen not only in Adrien Veidt, but also in the title characters of V for Vendetta and Miracleman. V of V for Vendetta is the closest relative to Adrian Veidt; like Veidt, V is essentially a terrorist, who creates desired political change through visible acts of violence and murder.
Miracleman isn't such a clear example, because the worse of the carnage happens mostly against Miracleman's will, as he fights a supervillain in London. Nonetheless, in the battle Miracleman's hands are far from clean: for example, he picks up an automobile with a terrified family inside and hurls it at his enemy, killing everyone in the car. The fight which leads to Miracleman's leftist utopia/dictatorship ends when Miracleman murders an eleven year old boy.
To me, the bloody ends of Moore's political fantasies have always felt like human sacrifice; to create utopia, it is first necessary to make a large-scale human sacrifice. (Similar themes are found in Moore and Campbells Jack the Ripper novel From Hell - although in that case, the sacrifices were not murdered in the name of social improvement).
Moore's comics seem to imply that real political improvement can happen only with extremes; only violent, shocking death can create real progressive change. Not exactly an inspiring message for leftists. Still, they're darn good comics.
]]>1908: (A First) Julia Ward Howe becomes the firest woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
...
In 1868 Julia Ward Howe joined Caroline Severance in founding the New England Woman's Club. She also signed the call to the meeting that formed the New England Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president, 1868-77 and 1893-1910. In 1869 she and Lucy Stone led the formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association when its members separated from the National Association of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Howe presided over the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, 1870-78 and 1891-93. From its first issue in 1870 she edited and contributed to the Woman's Journal founded by Lucy Stone.
"During the first two thirds of my life," Howe recalled, "I looked to the masculine idea of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. . . . The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood—woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances."
...
In the1870s, during the Franco-Prussian war, Julia felt "the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. . . . a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed." She began a one-woman peace crusade that began with an impassioned "appeal to womanhood" to rise against war. She translated her proclamation into several languages and distributed it widely. In 1872 she went to London to promote an international Woman's Peace Congress but was not able to bring it off. Back in Boston, she initiated a Mothers' Peace Day observance on the second Sunday in June and held the meeting for a number of years. Her idea spread but was later replaced by the Mothers' Day holiday now celebrated in May.
1921: a study by the U.S. House of Representatives was released which showed motherhood was safer in 17 countries than in the United States. The study led to a federal funding for infant and maternity care.
Recent studies during the 1990s shown the U.S. still lagging behind other developed nations.
1986: The first women killed in the U.S. Space program when the Challenger explodes, and astronaut Judith Resnick and Christa McCauliffe died along with five male crew members shortly after launch at Cape Canaveral, FL. They became the first women killed in earth's space programs.
]]>I think Dean's campaign toppled when he failed to win the Iowa primary simply because he failed to live up to (outrageous) expectations. When people saw Dean come in third in Iowa I think they started to view his campaign as all hype whether it ever actually was or not.
All in all, I'm curious to see how things play out in February.
]]>''This is not narco-traffic secrecy,'' says Sharon B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice Mission. ''These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women and children sold every single day. If they're hidden, their keepers don't make money.''
I.J.M.'s president, Gary Haugen, says: ''It's the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day.''
But border agents and local policemen usually don't know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles -- one of the country's busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic -- considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.
I wish I had some interesting feminist theory to offer here, but really I don't have anything to say besides: [some] people suck. I recommend reading the entire article, although there's a lot in there which is sickening.
UPDATE: But then again... It's unfortunate that I focused on the numbers here, because (as this Slate article, cited in comments by "Patrick O," argues) the numbers given in the Times article may be badly exaggerated. Slate argues that the real numbers are essentially impossible to know:
On the other hand, I'm don't find Slate's primary argument - "if it happened, then the police would be busting slave houses more often" - very convincing. I can see dozens of drug dealers and prostitutes any night by just walking through the right neighborhood, and I'm sure the police know of them. If we accept Slate's logic, that must mean the dealers and streetwalkers don't exist. Merely because the police know of something doesn't mean that they will priortize it. Furthermore, the number of locations suggested by the article - dozens in New York City, hundreds nationwide - is actually not fairly small, compared to the scale of (respectively) NYC and the United States.
Slate is correct to point out that some of the anecdotes in the Times article are hard to buy - in particular the description of prostituted women and girls in Vista, California smacks of overelaboration. From Slate:
If that's how San Luis Rey River works, one would imagine that the health worker then blew the whistle, the cops raided the reed brothel, and people went to jail or were deported. Maybe those events transpired, and maybe they didn't. Landesman doesn't say! Instead, he writes, "It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute." The reader naturally expects Landesman to stake out the site with the deputy, but instead the scene terminates.
As Corwin suggests in my comments, such stories bring the McMartin preschool trials to mind. It would be a much better article had the Times writer ever exhibited skepticism. On the other hand, just because the writer was probably fed some hooey by a California cop doesn't mean the entire article is junk.
]]>1900: (Birthday) Georgia Neese Clark, first woman to hold the office of Treasurer of the United States (1949) born in Richland, Kansas.
1964: (A First) Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. senator from Maine, announces her candidacy for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Smith started her policitcal career when she succeeded her husband as U.S. Representative in 1940. After serving 4 terms in the House, she was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first woman elected to both houses of Congress.
Just out of curiousity, what is "evil chemistry" and "evil biology"? Perhaps evil biology is Lady Justice's bared breasts, and evil chemistry is... What? A class at the School of Evil? One of Dr. Evil's doctoral classes for his degree in evil? If that's the case, then I propose that John Ashcroft is Dr. Evil, valuable ally to Fratman and Robbin'. "Quick, boy-drunkard, to the Frat Cave!"
Uh-huh... The first chapter argues that women are more susceptible to deception because Satan tempted Eve first instead of Adam. This means, of course, that Satan will not only tempt women but will also try to drag women's husbands and children into sin through them. But that's okay because men are ultimately held responsible for their wives' misdeeds.
I just have to keep reminding myself that these people are not representative of all Christians any more than the fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia are representative of all Muslims.
That's the seven o'clock edition of the news. Goodnight.
If that was a bit too unhappy for you, I can recommend a couple good books:
So when I read that the World Economic Forum had a session this past weekend on blogging (specifically, the session is titled "Will Mainstream Media Co-Opt Blogs and the Internet?") I couldn't help but chuckle a little bit. I don't think that the mainstream media will ever be able to co-opt the internet entirely because the internet is, by its nature, a decentralized medium. New servers and new sites can always be created and connected to the internet, allowing for ways around the mainstream media's servers and sites. I can conceive of only two impediments to the decentralized nature of the internet. On impediment is corporate regulation in two forms: by means of software that cannot go to sites that haven't been certified by the company or companies producing the operating system and web browser, or by means of search engines that won't register sites that haven't been certified by the search engine's founders and funders, either of which would create a monopoly and prevent customers from finding viable alternatives. The other impediment is government regulation along the lines of the FCC's regulation of television and radio. Thankfully the first impediment can be conquered by open source software and its infinite, easy mutability (unless the operating system begin to be hardwired into the computer systems themselves, in which case alternative chip manufacturers, be they companies or pirates, would pop up). The second impediment is not currently an issue as the range of the internet is theoretically infinite, meaning that a server that is illegal in the United States can be moved to a friendlier country without much problem.
Blogging as a method of communication can't be co-opted by the mainstream media any more than the internet can be because of the server issue I just mentioned. I do think, though, that the line between blogs and the mainstream media is going to become fuzzier. Right now blogs are defined largely by their small size, their independence, the frequency with which they update, and (in many cases) their degree of interactivity. In other words, if the New York Times were run like a blog Paul Krugman could write a new column every day instead of just on Tuesdays, his Wednesday column on economics could be significantly longer than his Thursday column on his dissatisfaction with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD sets, and you could comment on his articles directly without having to go through him or an editor. (Unless, of course, he runs his column like Andrew Sullivan or Josh Marshall in which case you can't comment; personally, I think this is rather arrogant but that could just be me.)
Things like what I described with Paul Krugman are already happening in the mainstream media. The print and digital political magazines are starting to have blogs, either written anonymously or written by specific pundits. Usually these are single-topic blogs, but not all of them are. Slate has a more or less free-for-all comment system called the Fray (although it's obvious from comments made in their articles that the writers for Slate consider themselves quite above the Fray).
Meanwhile some blogs seem to be becoming more like interactive, free-form versions of online magazines with the posters writing what are essentially articles (rather than two or three sentence link posts) and usually, gasp, entering into the comment threads to discuss their works. A precious few blogs, like the Daily Kos are becoming hybrids between the aforementioned interactive magazines and a community with blogs within the blog.
(An aside: I've noticed that when it comes to write political blogs, bloggers who had established themselves previously through opinion pieces in news papers and magazines are significantly less likely to allow comment threads or to respond to comments in the comment threads than those who were not established pundits when they started blogging. Compare Atrios and Josh Marshall on the left or Andrew Sullivan and Tacitus on the right and you may see what I'm talking about.)
Billmon, who is attending the World Economic Forum for his day job, attended the session on blogs and posted his thoughts on the subject. In addition to a number of good comments and observations, he said:
This is true. The concept of buying up blogs is ludicrous because blogging is a way of using the written word. It'd be as futile as trying to buy up novel-writing or buy up the medium of the short story or, like Billmon said, like trying to catch snowflakes.
I don't think that this is what Billmon was getting at, though. He seems to be saying that trying to buy up blogs would be like trying to catch snowflakes because the corporate touch would liquidate the blog's audience by changing its content, thus corporations would be flailing about, buying up blogs, and being frustrated in their efforts as they chased readers away to new blogs. I think that Billmon has a point and yet could still be wrong. I don't think that corporate contact would be the touch of death for blogs because any smart corporation would begin its relationship with bloggers not by trying to take over control of the blog but through simple sponsorship. "We like what you're doing and we'd like to pay you $X a year to just keep doing what you're doing." The quality of the blog wouldn't immediately suffer, I don't think, but it would begin the slow creep of corporate control into the blogsphere. I wouldn't be surprised if, given a few more years, all of the major blogs were corporate-sponsored, if not outright corporate-owned, with a relatively constant number of unpaid, unknown bloggers. There may be a few big independent bloggers, and while I think they'll be as well-written I don't think they'll be as big as the corporate-sponsored ones.
So far I've talked about "blogs" while actually meaning "political blogs." I'm not sure what the future is for other types of blogs like personal blogs (online diaries) and non-political commentary blogs (like for movies, games, and the like). I keep thinking that we'll see a rise in the number of personal blogs as more teenagers (not to stereotype, but you know) grow up with the internet and use the internet to communicate with their friends. I wouldn't be surprised if blogs slowly took over the job of e-mail forwards to share articles with friends and family. (I can see it now: You MUST post this story on your blog within five minutes of reading it or you will never have a girlfriend again! And all the gay men say, "So?") Then again, forwarding, like spamming, forces your views into a location that people are checking for their own gain whereas a blog requires effort on the part of other people to come to you.
So while I recognize that futurists are almost inevitably full of it, and amateur futurists are even more full of it, I'll make a prediction on the future of blogging: We'll see fewer and smaller independent blogs as large, corporate-sponsored blogs eat up the readership, and in some cases the writers, of smaller blogs. And that's all I'll commit to. I think that, as Billmon fears later in his aforementioned post, the Golden Age of free-for-all blogging is just about up.
]]>1944: (Birthday) Angela Davis, black militant teacher, lecturer, activist, and author born in Birmingham, Alabama. She wrote Women, Race and Class in 1980; was tried and acquitted of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy (1971) stemming out of a shoot-out at the Marin Country Courthouse (1970), and ran for Vice President on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984.
1951: (A First) Paula Ackerman, becomes the first woman in the United States to serve as spiritual leader with rabbinical duties and authority.
Have a look-see at all the categories, cast a couple votes, and discover a lot of great stuff out there in the left-leaning blogsphere.
]]>