Let's talk about the degree to which it's currently considered acceptable to ascribe lawyerly skills to gender.
Is the NYT being sexist? Is it okay because it's kind of subtle? Is it okay because if there's a special goodness in femininity, it lends momentum to the progressive trend of including more and more women in the legal profession?
If the answer to the last question is yes, imagine a similar statement made about a male lawyer, suggesting that his maleness brought extra value to his lawyering: Would that not be okay? If not, is that because you can say (in so many words) that it's better to be female, but it's retrograde to say (subtly as well as unsubtly) that it's better to be male?
If you've bought into the notion that it is acceptable to say (with some subtlety) that it's better to be female, because that seems progressive, why is it progressive to promote women using the traditional stereotype of women as maternal and nurturing? Why isn't that precisely what is sexist?
Do you think, in the long run, it is helpful to the success of women in the legal profession to portray them as good at mothering and being sensitive to other people's feelings?
Waunakee High School's varsity dance team is headed to a state competition today, but advocates for the mentally ill are upset by what got them there — a "we get crazy" routine featuring all 18 dancers bouncing to hip-hop music, their hair wild, heavy black makeup on their snarling faces, and costumes made to resemble straitjackets and restraints with the words "Psych Ward" on them.
News of the routine spread fast this week after photos of the dancers in their costumes were published in the Waunakee Tribune. "The pictures are quite disturbing," says Hugh Davis, executive director of Wisconsin Family Ties. "We had parents and kids with mental health issues standing in the office with tears in their eyes. This brings up painful memories. It is incredibly insensitive."
Do you remember the terrible tizzy in 1966 over "They're Coming to Take Me Away"? We all loved it, thought it was hilarious, it was played on the radio... and then it was gone... squelched by political correctness back before we'd seen enough political correctness to say "political correctness."
"... the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
A sentence written by Jack Kerouac, submitted in a contest to pick the best sentences, chosen as one of the 3 best sentences, by Stanley Fish, who has written a book called "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One," which I just bought, and you could buy too, using this link, causing Amazon to send 8% of the purchase price to me and making me go "Awww!"
Far from the undisciplined, semi-delusional dropout described by friends, Jared Loughner appeared to be a young man with laser focus when it came to planning and carrying out a shooting spree outside a strip-mall Safeway last week, local law enforcement authorities alleged Friday....
Dupnik made multiple statements drawing connections between conservative "rhetoric" and Saturday's crime.... At a time when most politicians were behaving responsibly, why was Sheriff Dupnik speaking with a reckless disregard for the truth...?...
The Arizona Republic reported Wednesday that Dupnik's department was "refusing to release a wide range of public documents about the man charged in Saturday's shooting rampage that left six dead and more than a dozen wounded." Later that day, the Republic reported, the department relented and released "12 sets of incident reports" about police calls to the Loughner home or Jared Loughner's high school....
It's quite possible that Dupnik simply enjoys shooting off his mouth.
More likely he enjoys covering his ass. Shame on all the journalists who scurried forward with their big old newsrags to help him cover said ass.'
IN THE COMMENTS: Irene (who knows such things) says:
A juvenile point: the surname "Dupnik" derives from "Dupa," a word used in Slavic- and Baltic-speaking languages. The word "dupa" means "ass."
"Dupnik" can translate as "assman." There is a bawdy dance — usually done at vodka-infused weddings — called the "dupnik," during which the partiers "fist bump" their cheeks.
Shouldn't we learn to be perceptive, analytical, and aware that some of the individuals among us are, in fact, mentally sick and need something other than tolerance and wishful thinking about how good they might be? So why is the First Lady telling us to teach kids the opposite?
We can also teach our children about the tremendous sacrifices made by the men and women who serve our country and by their families. We can explain to them that although we might not always agree with those who represent us, anyone who enters public life does so because they love their country and want to serve it.
But that's quite obviously untrue! Some people seek power for the wrong reasons or go astray after they've reached power. We need to observe the government with a clear, active, and critical eye. I can certainly understand how someone who holds power would love to turn off the criticism, but that is not the system we have, and it's self-serving for government officials to tell us to inculcate these false beliefs in children.
It would make more sense to teach creationism instead of evolution than to teach these wishful lies about government since children need to learn how to be effective citizens and lulling them into passive admiration of the government undermines the democratic process. Believing or not believing in creationism, by contrast, isn't going to change what happened in the grand expanse of evolutionary time.
Following the advice in the Shaker hymn that followed the President's speech last night, I kept it simple. I highlighted the passage in the speech about how we should take "a good dose of humility" and not "use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another." But I'm not a Shaker, and I'm a little wary when the most powerful man in the world advises the masses to be humble and come together as one. So I want to look at what he said just before that:
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "when I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
But "there is evil in the world" is a simple explanation!
For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack.
How about: Jared Loughner is a lunatic? Okay, Obama said "exactly." Yes, I agree with his very minor point that we cannot know the precise content and etiology of Loughner's madness. But as we try to understand the political landscape of the real world where non-insane people live, those details don't matter. We have a simple explanation and it's a damned good one. Yet the President tells me I ought to "guard against" thinking in such simple terms. Why? Sometimes it is simple! Jared Loughner is a lone crazy guy. There is evil in the world and it burst forth last Saturday. It's not like labeling al Qaeda "evil" and moving on, because Loughner wasn't part of a web of activity. I think what we need to "guard against" is using Loughner as an example of some larger problem that we need to solve.
Obama continued:
None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.
True. We can't know with certainty what his mental processes were, but we are justified in taking it as our working theory that the man was crazy in a way that doesn't relate to the real-world political issues that are worth putting our energy into trying to figure out — other than the real-world issue of identifying and restraining dangerously psychotic persons.
So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.
That's what Obama said just before the passage I highlighted in last night. He goes on to push back those who've used the massacre as an occasion to make partisan political arguments — something he's strongly correct about. All right, then. What are we supposed to examine? We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future. Does he mean old assumptions about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill? Does he mean gun control? Does he mean limits on free speech? Now, there are some details we need to hear about and debate. If freedom of speech is the "old assumption" we should be "willing to challenge," I'm going to fight.
For those of you who still want to argue, straining against the evidence, that the terrible political rhetoric pushed Loughner over the line, let me help you. I've studied law for 30 years, and I know how to extract an argument using what little is available.
Ready?
Here goes...
The overheated rhetoric in America was so repugnant that Jared Loughner couldn't bear to engage with it. Alienated and left to his own thoughts, he became mentally disordered, leading to the massacre. If only the political debate had been more gentle and inviting, he might have watched television and listened to the radio, and then his mind would have contained more conventional ideas, precluding the insane, murderous thoughts.
AND: I was just talking with Meade about my (deliberately strained) theory, and he said that a young guy like Loughner would not have been drawn in by more politely stated political commentary. A marginal individual — especially a person with a propensity toward violence — would probably be susceptible to more aggressive, more vivid commentary. What did Loughner consume instead of politics? Wasn't it violent video games and movies? By contrast, the news — even the commentary pundits decry as vicious — would seem bland and insipid.
Now, I think he was psychotic, in which case, none of this explanation applies, but let's assume you want to work with the idea that he was a marginal citizen who might have been normalized if the community socialized him more appropriately with debate and dialogue. What could have reached him? Probably not some namby-pamby paragon of niceness.
Some people displayed a crazed hunger for a vicious murderer who was inspired by the criticism of the government that has been so powerful over the last 2 years. Jared Loughner was not that guy, and, of course, they looked ridiculous and despicable jumping to say that he was.
Now, what if it were really true that incendiary political rhetoric pushed mentally unstable individuals over the edge and caused them to act out murderously? Picture such a mentally unstable person reading and listening to the rhetoric that spewed out over Jared Loughner.
I'm imagining a young man who takes it to heart that the Tea Party and the right wingers are ruining America and thwarting our fine President and the Democrats in Congress who set out to bring us hope and change.
He might think: Oh, if only Jared Loughner really had turned out to be the Tea-Party-inspired wingnut the liberals and lefties originally thought he was! How effective that would have been in squelching the right!
This mentally unstable young man decides that he could be what the left hoped Jared Loughner was. "Loughner2" tweaks his Facebook page with the titles of conservative books and joins various right-wing groups on-line. He sets about making Tea-Party-style pronouncements in the comments sections of various left- and right-wing blogs, stressing the right-wing rhetoric he's heard and restating it with a sharper edge of violence. He stocks his house with books written by the right-wingers most demonized by the left. He hangs a big Gadsden Flag on his living room wall.
Then, believing he is sacrificing himself for the greater good of the liberal cause, Loughner2 goes on his shooting spree. The pundits who revealed their raging hunger for a right-wing murderer will finally have the rich feast they deserve, he tells himself. Loughner2, like Loughner1, grins ghoulishly in his mug shot. He steels himself the hatred of the world and the secret pleasure of reading, from his prison/asylum cell, about the left-wing paradise he has made possible.
Do you think that's an absurd fantasy? Then you don't really believe that inflammatory rhetoric inspires unstable individuals to act. If you're one of those who's been saying it does, then admit that you've been lying. Or take responsibility for the effect your words are now having in the minds of the deranged.
Richard Cohen* still rides a bike, but his mind is going. I mean, he's riding his bike, listening to a folk rock channel he created on Pandora on his iPhone, and for some reason, instead of throwing new stuff at him, which I think is the point of Pandora, it keeps playing the old Neil Young song "Ohio."
Cohen plunges into his 40-year-old memories about how awful it was when the National Guard shot and killed 4 college students who were protesting the Vietnam War. And naturally, in Cohen's bike-drained, folk-music befuddled brain, that leads to what's wrong with... Glenn Beck!
Why don't you see? Back in 1970, the Governor of Ohio said the protesters were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent." Cohen weaves his literary magic for us dogged old WaPo readers:
That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals...
... fetishizes about liberals... To "fetishize" is to make a fetish of. How do you make a fetish ofabout something? Cohen's rugged bike path is studded with incomprehensible prepositions.
... and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage...
What language? You didn't even quote anything from Beck. Maybe you created a Pandora channel for Beck and you listen and ideate furiously while cycling, but I don't know what you're talking about. I don't pay much attention to the pudgy chattering TV pundit, but he doesn't seem to be raging. I have seen him crying. And oddly, in Cohen's first paragraph, he portrays himself struggling (while biking) to "repress a tear" when Neil sings "Ohio." Oh, compassion! It either builds credibility or it doesn't. (Depending on whether you're liberal or conservative.)
... that fuels too much of the Tea Party...
I'm supposed to have the right image of the Tea Party so I can just swallow that assertion whole. But I've been to Tea Party rallies — and heard about them from my husband — and the people seemed pretty nice and normal. To me, Cohen's attempt to smear ordinary people is what's ugly.
Cohen rants some more about how awful everything on the right sounds to his folk-music plugged old ears. He concludes:
I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.
Pedal on, aging columnist. Let the stream of consciousness wash down. Flow river flow. Wherever that river goes, that's where Richard Cohen wants to be.
And no, Richard Cohen doesn’t catch the irony: The dissent of Kent State protesters, he thinks, was met with deadly force because of rhetoric that “otherized them,” that turned them into a domestic enemy. Pretty much exactly what Richard Cohen is doing to the dissidents of the Tea Party movement.
Jure Robic, the endurance bicyclist, who pushed himself beyond sleep and beyond reason, rode 50 mph down an unpaved twisty hill and who knows what he was hallucinating when he hit that car and entered into the final, endless ride that is eternity.
[H]e once rode 518.7 miles in 24 hours....
One occasional feature of his training regimen, which included daily rides or other workouts stretching between 6 and 10 hours, was a 48-hour period without sleep: a 24-hour ride followed by a 12-hour break followed by a 12-hour workout. ... [He] rode 28,000 miles — more than the circumference of the Earth — every year.
His five victories in the Race Across America, an approximately 3,000-mile transcontinental ride that has been held annually since 1982, are unequaled....
The winner generally sleeps less than two hours out of 24 and finishes in less than nine days....
In 2005, Robic won the race and two weeks later won Le Tour Direct, a 2,500-mile European version with a course derived from Tour de France routes that included 140,000 feet of climbing — almost the equivalent of starting at sea level and ascending Mt. Everest five times. His time was 7 days 19 hours.
As each race went on, Robic’s temper grew shorter and occasionally exploded. He was prone to hallucinations. More than once he leapt off his bicycle to do battle with threatening attackers who turned out to be mailboxes.
Amazing. With races like this, somebody has to be the guy that can go to the greatest extreme. Robic was 45, and it's hard to see how he lasted that long.
After the argument [over the toilet] escalated to blows, the real-life Hannibal Lecter allegedly butchered his cellmate, carved out his victim's lung - mistaking it for the heart - and fried up part of the organ with onions on a makeshift grill before eating it....
The case has drawn scrutiny to the entire French penal system. It comes on the heels of last week's ruling by a tribunal in favor of 38 inmates and former inmates who sued over inhumane conditions at the same Rouen jail where Baudry was killed. The court ordered the French government to pay $430 to $21,500 dollars to each plaintiff, Agence France-Presse reported.
Cocaign himself testified Monday that the murder was a cry for help - and not just from the victim.
Cocaign said he warned prison officials that he was capable of violence, begging to be transferred for psychiatric treatment as he served time for several rapes, among other crimes.
"No one was listening to me," Cocaign told the court, according to the AFP. "I made several appeals for help, saying I was a man capable of being dangerous. I took action, and then they took me seriously."
A few more details here. The weapon allowed in the cell was a pair of scissors. Cocaign was not in prison for murdering anyone. He was only facing a charge of armed robbery charges. There were onions, olive oil, salt and pepper on a portable camping stove in the cell. Cocaign "initially claimed that he was fascinated by the 'inner workings of Baudry's personality' and 'wanted to take his soul', he later admitted that he was 'curious to see what he tastes like.'"
"If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd pay for the operation straight away. But we don't have the money. People can have their own beliefs on whether they think this is a good use of NHS money but I just want what will make my child happy."
This is the case of a 16-year-old boy who "began researching sex change operations last year" after the kids at school "taunted him for being gay and... he was excluded from school after getting into fights."
"The psychologist said she was satisfied that Bradley knew his own mind and was eligible for a sex change and immediately put him on a waiting list for an operation."
What an insane way to solve problems! I suppose it's easier for the government to pay £10,000 for an operation than to deal with the harassment of a gay kid at school. The poor mother is eager to "make my child happy," but why would surgery be the first choice or even any kind of choice if the truth is that the child is gay and surrounded by people who don't know how to behave with any sort of decency?
Notice how this is a problem with the government running everything — not only the school, but also the medical treatments. When it's all a matter of economics, look at how evil it can get. It's easier to lop off body parts that to persuade groups of young people to treat each other kindly. There is one victim, and there are many harassers, so go after the victim, but call him "patient," and keep up the pretense of a caring, all-embracing government-parent... who only wants to make us children happy.
As I've already said, Little Green Footballs is a blog that always repelled me. It felt hateful and extreme. But I've been aware that it flipped and became about calling other people hateful and extreme. So I took the trouble to read the story in the NYT. It's pretty weird:
IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m just not a joiner of these things,” he says.
The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next day,” Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.” He discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants — though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang, or “Flemish Interest.” Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.” And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a multicriminal society,” is more extreme than the commenters who appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the Internet.
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened.
So Belgium got to him?! Here's this guy who somehow can't go to a conference, and then he fixates on somebody in the audience at a conference, and then makes all kinds of connections from there. Well, there's something very strange about the mind of Charles Johnson. Does it mean anything more generally about right-leaning people on the web? Does the NYT want it to?
A very ignorant post from someone who knows nothing about it. I make no apologies for wanting to distance myself from European fascist groups -- and there is no doubt that they wanted to get me on their side at one point.
The expression "I make no apologies" would only make sense if I had somehow criticized him for wanting to distance himself from European fascist groups, which I didn't do. I just puzzled over how his mind put together the problem that he needed to take action about. I make no apologies for not knowing anything more about it than I could read in the New York Times... or for finding the old Little Green Footballs too hateful to want to read.
Althouse is clueless, yet her mouth still runs.
This kind of bullshit insult doesn't make me want to do any more research about Johnson. I read a NYT article about him and wrote a short post about it. If there is some mysterious backstory that's missing from the NYT, why not tell me about it? I'm not a useless, ignorant person because I don't know it, whatever it is. Why lash out like this? I'm sticking with my original impression that he's got too much free-floating anger. Toxic.
There is now a remarkable body of research that suggests that mental illnesses are not... spread evenly around the globe. They have appeared in different cultures in endlessly complex and unique forms. Indonesian men have been known to experience amok, in which a minor social insult launches an extended period of brooding punctuated by an episode of murderous rage. Southeastern Asian males sometimes suffer from koro, the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their body. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a mental illness related to spirit possession that brings forth dissociative episodes of crying, laughing, shouting, and singing....
The remarkable diversity... is rapidly disappearing. A few mental illnesses identified and popularized in the United States — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultural boundaries and around the world with the speed of contagious diseases. Indigenous forms of mental illness and healing are being bulldozed by disease categories and treatments made in the USA.
If only there were a systematic way of studying and analyzing how the human mind works, something... oh, we could call it "science" for lack of a better word. Ah, but, no, no, what's the use? We can only cry, laugh, shout, and sing a song to diversity.
So let me give him one. It's only fair. Andrew Sullivan, what if, with the same intensity and standards you've aimed at Palin, you went through the things Barack Obama has said and written? (Pick a segment of his career that is equivalent to the period you examined of Palin's.) What kind of a list would you end of with?
You say:
[S]omething is very seriously wrong. This is not about destroying anyone. It is about saving a system that perpetrated an error as huge as this one. And we cannot save this system until we fully understand the depth of the scandal in front of us: that this clinically delusional person had a good chance of having her finger on the nuclear button. And still does if she is not fully vetted and understood. I intend to keep doing that until the whole truth is in front of us.
If you don't want to pursue that truth wherever it takes us, read someone else.
I'm into pursuing the truth, which is why I propose that you test your judgment and style of analysis with the assignment I've proposed. I know this would be time consuming, and it will be extremely hard to work up the enthusiasm about it that welled up naturally over Palin.
So maybe others can help out. Let's try to put together an Obama list that equates as well as possible with Sullivan's Palin list. Then his assignment can be to reflect on his project of exposing Palin's lies and his conclusion that there is something truly different about her, something clinically delusional.
***
As for my assignment, I'll look at a couple more items from Sullivan's list tonight when I have some extra time. I'm not inclined to "debunk" them. I'm not Palin's defender. I will look at the items and say what I think, with an eye toward Sullivan's assertion: whether we are dealing with a person who is not just the usual politico but clinically delusional.
UPDATE: Sorry I didn't get around to doing a couple more items tonight. I guess some people would say I lied.
