Acceptance, huh? In the 'seventies, Sob Sisters with Leaky Waterworks (HT to Twain) convinced state and local governments to close what were then called "insane asylums," citing poor conditions, "human warehousing," and excessive patient sedation. Nobody, though, ever bothered to answer the question, "Where, then, do these patients go?"
Acceptance, huh? In the 'seventies, Sob Sisters with Leaky Waterworks (HT to Twain) convinced state and local governments to close what were then called "insane asylums," citing poor conditions, "human warehousing," and excessive patient sedation. Nobody, though, ever bothered to answer the question, "Where, then, do these patients go?"
One might now ask that same question to San Francisco residents who, before leaving home, consult "Snapcrap" on their phones in order to locate human feces on the streets.
Acceptance? No. Might make you feel all warm inside, but families of those attacked - some killed - on the street by the mentally ill could tell you: hope is not a plan.
Jim Willis - These are facts. October 31, 1963 was the Community Mental Health Act and the last piece of legislation Kennedy signed before his assassination. It never was fully implemented or funded. The goal was to close asylums that were like prisons in the 1950s only to go 70 years to have prisons handling mental illness all over again. I am often astonished by the pattern of passing of do-gooder legislation to тАЬdo the right thingтАЭ and then failing to fund or follow through.
Prisons and the ER. There's no other place for them to go. I have a student who just spent 2 weeks in the ER, for this reason. He likely has schizophrenia on top of Autism. I am in an online group for parents of adults who have Autism. Some of the stories are so terrifying. You read about mothers locking themselves in the bathroom, to escape a violent attack from an adult child. Students, where I work, have caused serious injuries and they're not adults. There's no help. There's no solution, just warm fuzzy ideas like "inclusion" and handling everything in the community, while the people being "included" are stressed out. Those around them are getting injured, not learning what they could be, and likely looking at having PTSD as a result. There is so much willful, deep denial going on.
I'm not going to "love" this comment, because that's truly the wrong reaction. I have some ex stories, too. I am truly sorry that you went through such a horrific experience.
ItтАЩs sad that these situations still occur but given the exigencies of the law I donтАЩt know what else can be done.
I have no faith whatsoever in psychology/psychiatry given what IтАЩve seen of it. When they declared him safe within three days of getting those stitches I knew reality had nothing to do with either.
Logical conclusion. What a sad and scary reality to be faced with. My story happened in the early 90's. I definitely have stories of the laws enabling the dangerous and not protecting the vulnerable. In the end, my son and I had a positive conclusion to our story. He was only a toddler, mercifully. He remembers none of it and I only told him what was necessary, as he got older.
Sadly it wasn't only the leftists who were complicit in this folly. Many conservatives were happy to see government less involved and spending less. A truly toxic mix. Vagrants - especially violent and disruptive ones - need to be removed from the streets and put into treatment, especially for drug and alcohol addiction. I've often noted that the main - indeed almost the only - reason for government is to "ensure domestic tranquility." If they cannot perform that most rudimentary and essential function they have no raison d etre.
Hollywood did their part. Without Big Nurse in Cuckoo's Nest it probably would never have happened so completely. Set back psychiatric nursing for at least a generation
That film didn't come out until 1975. The process of "deinstitutionaliation" was well underway by then.
I view desinstitutionalization as an over-reaction to what was a real problem. Some of those places were real snake pits. Some of the ones that are still in existence are still bad places.
The fact is, it's a duty of government that everyone would prefer to ignore. Bringing inpatient institutional care up to an adequate standard takes a lot of money and a lot of personnel. The people doing the hands-on care need to be paid a lot and given a lot of vacation/decompression time, otherwise there's a lot of job turnover and too many underqualified, unstable, and/or burned out people are doing the job. The facilities need to provide a humane physical environment, and that takes a lot of front-end investment. But in the long run, it's cheaper than jail or prison. A lot cheaper, once the lowered violent crime rate is taken into account.
That said, a small but noteworthy fraction of the mentally ill are some of the most dangerously violent people around. They need a prison-level of supervision and confinement that's much greater than what's appropriate for the majority of severely mentally ill people.
I was around then. In California. The movie merely depicted a set of institutional conditions that had already been officially addressed/kicked down the road, and it had minimal impact on public thinking (as compared with, for example, the book and movie The China Syndrome, which basically stopped the R&D of US nuclear power in its tracks for 40 years.)
I've read the book. didn't see the film. The book Cuckoo's Nest used the definitions and restrictions imposed in mental institutions as a metaphor for the rise of the Therapeutic State, and the effect of groupthink definitions on human liberty and expressive potential. (It's worth noting that the book made explicitly clear early on that most of the patients had voluntarily committed themselves!) It didn't focus exclusively on the conditions of mental institutions, or the more inhumane aspects of them. That would be more the focus of an earlier book (1946) and film (1948) of some renown, entitled The Snake Pit.
Ken Kesey's book One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) had a lot of aspects that place it beyond the bounds of social acceptability these days. It really does take out a pro-individualist, anti-authoritarian, anti-collectivist position on human behavior and individual liberty that verges on being an anarchist polemic. His next book, Sometimes A Great Notion, addresses the same questions in a different framework, while giving a more balanced and sympathetic appraisal of the pro-social, pro-community side of the argument. Cuckoo's Nest is closer to The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.
It's important to understand the history; for a good many years after deinstitutionalization, the State of California did an awful lot to try to help people with severe chronic mental health issues by funding group homes and making counseling, medication, and related services available to the population. But to a large extent, those efforts found themselves trying to fix problems that had been exacerbated by the huge increase in incarceration (anyone with a sincere interest in ameliorating mental illness as a public health problem needs to consider the record of jails and prisons in both causing mental and behavioral health problems, and turning minor problems into serious and intractable ones.) California has also increasingly found itself dealing with a dysfunctional population originating in other states. The same social tolerance that's allowed California to benefit from a brain drain way from from punitive and socially reactionary parts of the country has also ended up encouraging emigration from those states by outcast dysfunctional populations, including households with offspring.
California is definitely facing challenges and costs in recent years due to immigration, but only part of that burdensome immigrant population arrived from south of the US border. Nit-picking over the formalities aside of officially attributed status, the practical results have been the same. I doubt that Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, etc. would trade their populations of undocumented Mexicans doing dirty jobs for an influx of meth-heads, heroin addicts, and vagrants from elsewhere in the US. But that isn't an issue for those states; the severity of the climate alone works in favor of culling a dysfunctional homeless population. As does the severity of their laws, often. But there isn't a state in the Union that's permitted to bar immigration from other states. Not that it's even really doable.
So was I. I grew up in the Bay Area. Frances was another contributor. I stick by my point - in the popular mind both those movies depict mental hospitals as nightmare situations, (the voluntary committal status of Cuckoo's inmates is lost from popular memory - I've noticed this for decades). Hollywood depicts mental hospitals in a uniformly negative way. I almost threw in "China Syndrome" as another example but it was off topic. Same story. Corporations - same story. It is a relentless rant, scenario after scenario where the villains are institutions.
Unresponsive institutional power makes for a great screen villain. Not entirely without cause. The Shadow of this society gets uncovered every once in a while. But no one makes big-budget feature movies about the worst ongoing scandals, which remain practically unknown.
The thing is, I'm okay with that. I don't view movies as the heart of the problem, either way.
I have an issue with naturalistic "historical fiction" depictions in general. Even the best examples in literature are more about colorful storytelling and myth-making than historical accuracy. (Even though I've enjoyed some of them a lot, and a couple of them are among my favorite American novels- Last Go Round, The Good Lord Bird.)
My real problem is with a supposedly educated citizenry who can read nonfiction history and investigative journalism, and don't, preferring to get their "history" from movies, TV serials, and novels. With their "nonfiction" reading reserved for crap sham reportage and polemical grandstanding in the news cycle by their favorite partisan slanted news media sources. Whatever direction that slant might happen to take. Although it's clear that even readers of current events text and print articles are in the minority, and that most Americans are satisfied with the video versions.
At the turn of the 19th-20th century, muckraking journalists had real power to raise public awareness- and arouse outrage-with their investigative reportage. Not so much, these days.
When the ACLU and others successfully had the state institution emptied, the politicians in the states rejoiced because these institutions were expensive. They now could spend that money on other projects like lining their pockets.
There was a famous case a few years back. A woman in NYC was living on the street, defecting on the street and throwing her feces at tourists. The city arrested her and put her in a psychiatric institution. The ACLU cleaned her up put her on her meds and paraded before a judge. She now looked like an upstanding normal citizen and the judge ruled that she be released back into society. She is now back on the streets throwing feces at tourists. (God bless the democrats.)
I have said this before. There are no simple answers to complex problems. Only fools and politicians (but then I repeat myself) give simple answers to complex problems
Our worst example in canada is a guy named Vince Li. Diagnosed, on medication for his illness, then he decided he didnтАЩt like how they made him feel so he stopped taking them and ended up beheading a man on a greyhound bus with a pocketknife. And had a taste.
This was in 2008, locked him up, but as you may guess тАЬnot criminally responsibleтАЭ and heтАЩs been free with a new name since 2015.
IтАЩm sure heтАЩs on his meds, itтАЩs why I feel so safe.
Good morning Doc, what about the hypothesis that in some extreme cases, like anti-social behavior, the brain is wired differently. Is this still a thing in medical circles, and if so, whatтАЩs the answer?
I don't follow neuro research to any degree, so you know as much or more than I do. I always thought that, with enough work, we could use the tools we had (microscopes, extremely thin brain slices) and work it all out eventually. I now think that was wrong. Just too much data, too many things connected in too many ways.
With the development of diffusion tensor imaging we have a better estimate of nerve bundle pathways, but to my mind it will take massive computing power to eventually work out the final relationship between structure and function. And of course, how the hell does nature wire it up? I've resigned to the fact that I will be gone long before we have the faintest understanding.
The greatest mystery to me is this first-person thing. When I'm gone, the world will disappear. What puts "me" in this body or brain? Don't know. A lifelong atheist, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm wrong about that, too. I'd like to see what my old boss, Joe, has to say about it.
This тАШresignationтАЩ made me think of a friend who worked long and hard on her degree in neuroimaging. First she was getting her PhD at Urbana, then having a post doctoral at Stanford. She used to tell me fascinating things about the projects they did and how the brain operates and the research awaiting peer review on various subjects. She was the one who back in 2005 told me about an interesting phenomena of people with AIS syndrome ending up on fashion runways. That turned out to be the beginning of the current gender identity crisis among teen girls that we are living through today.
But for the I-cant-remember-how-many-years this immensely talented and restless researcher and engineer has been working at Facebook. Before she worked at Disney. And I canтАЩt help thinking тАШwhat a waist.тАЩ
I am wondering, did she choose these paths because she resigned to the fact she ll be gone before we have the fantiest of understanding how the brain wiring works? Or are we all resigning now because people highly trained in neurology like hers chose different, more exciting paths like working for Facebook..? Just random thoughts.
I think it was David Hume the 18th century British philosopher said we can never know what is real.
Descartes said our view of reality is obscured by demons therefore we can never discern what is real.
Other philosophers like Berkley said we make up our own reality. Our world is just a figment of our imagination. If you believe Berkley, yes, when you're gone the world disappears.
You have to take what I have written with a large grain of salt. I studied philosophy almost 60y ears ago. So I am really full of shit.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell discussed Berkeley in 1763. Boswell wrote, "After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop BerkeleyтАЩs ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against alarge stone, till he rebounded from it, тАШI refute it THUS".
DonтАЩt be so hard on yourself, Lonesome. What I think you just described (Berkley) is really a definition of solipsism. In that, what we see and experience all around us is unique only to us. Only you matter. And when you leave that reality will disappear.
That of course ignores all the other passengers on this reality ship we share, the ones in the car at the red light right beside you.
I'm not sure about what I am about to say. I think Berkley said when you turn your back on something, it all goes away but when you turn around your mind fills it back in.
Getting old is a funny thing. A bit of a physics geek, I've begun watching YouTube videos on cosmology, physics, and a lot of the engineering math I thought I'd forgotten. Sometimes I walk at night in this rural area and look at all the stars and think to myself that thousands of generations of people lay under those stars and couldn't possibly have known what they were, why they shone, and how far away they were. Then I realize that I know very little more than they did about the really fundamental questions.
And then I think about the amazing faith in something bigger that people have had for millenniaтАж a тАЬcreatorтАЭ of so much beauty and diversity in the worldтАж always inspires awe. Call it faith in what we canтАЩt prove. Happy belated Thanksgiving to you, Jim.
Thanks. I'm not for-definite sure of much - less every day - but I've always been pretty sure a supreme being doesn't live for the purpose of being worshipped or do any of the Old Testament stuff. It would be completely irrational. When I look at cosmology - especially space and time, which seems to be the only thing we know much about - it is very clear that we are so dumb about the things that make the world work. Maxwell described the hell out of electric and magnetic fields, but WHAT ARE THEY really? Could there be an intelligence that transcends space and time? An overreaching consciousness or being? I could live with that.
There are reputable physicists that believe this could all be a computer simulation.
There are too many paradoxes in all religions for me to believe in any of them. In the Old Testament, God makes him or herself out to be a cruel neurotic megalomaniac demanding constant worship. It just doesn't make sense to me that a being that created the universe has to be worshiped by piss ant creatures such as us.
I am at peace knowing when I die, that is the end of it. Who in their right mind would want to go to heaven for eternity? Eternity is a long, long, long time. I get impatient waiting for the elevator to come.
As Julian the Apostate said, "It didn't bother me that I didn't exist before I was born. Why should it bother me if I cease to exist after I am dead."
Funny you should mention that. I always attributed it to Twain - my personal fave author. The story I heard goes that someone was ribbing him about being very old and not long for the world. His alleged response was, "Listen. I was dead a million years before I was born and suffered no great inconvenience from it. I don't expect the next million to be any different."
It always bugged me that life was finite; every so often I would count the days behind and the days ahead, and a little panic set in. Now I don't worry about it because - like Twain - I have no memory of at least 4-1/2 billion years the earth existed and it causes me no pain. I don't expect the next 4-1/2 to be any different.
Twain on the Bible: тАЬYou believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?тАЭ
I am probably the most Christian-friendly atheist you'll ever meet. Part of it is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing; I firmly believe that if this nation be saved, the Jews and Christians will do it; nobody else has the strength of conviction confidently to discern right from wrong and publicly call it out. (just my opinion, of course). Part of it is a lifetime of seeing the cohesiveness and strength of most - not all, of course - Christian families, and the kind of children they rear. Part of it is interaction with local Amish. Yes, I know that the supernatural stuff is just nonsense, but their moral training is useful. I try to look at the greater good. One thing is for sure: observing many of today's utes, unmoored and rudderless, tells me that what we're doing is not the way to go.
Funny thing about faith. Often we can't see things we believe are not there. Parents sometimes don't see their child is obviously mentally ill, because they simply couldn't be (and it is obvious to everyone else). Democrats can't see that their policies lead to destruction, because they simply couldn't lead to destruction. Some religious fools can't smell a stinking con artist cause said con artist said "God bless you" while conning them, because that can't be so. And some atheists simply don't believe in the non-material world, even when they "imagine" the spirit of their recently deceased relative visiting them coincidentally the evening of their death . . . We have these paradigms of what is possible, and if we have faith that X is impossible, then X really has to hit us pretty hard on the head to get noticed, and even then . . . we can explain it away if we don't have faith that it could exist. In other words, if we have faith that it doesn't exist, then we will explain away any sign that it does exist. Once you have faith, though, then it becomes obvious.
It did not work that way for me. Nothing hit me hard on the head. I am an all about proof kind of person. One day I had what I suppose is an epiphany - that to believe as I do you have to accept it on faith. So simple. So elegant. Now I see my proof all around me.
Acceptance, huh? In the 'seventies, Sob Sisters with Leaky Waterworks (HT to Twain) convinced state and local governments to close what were then called "insane asylums," citing poor conditions, "human warehousing," and excessive patient sedation. Nobody, though, ever bothered to answer the question, "Where, then, do these patients go?"
One might now ask that same question to San Francisco residents who, before leaving home, consult "Snapcrap" on their phones in order to locate human feces on the streets.
Acceptance? No. Might make you feel all warm inside, but families of those attacked - some killed - on the street by the mentally ill could tell you: hope is not a plan.
Jim Willis - These are facts. October 31, 1963 was the Community Mental Health Act and the last piece of legislation Kennedy signed before his assassination. It never was fully implemented or funded. The goal was to close asylums that were like prisons in the 1950s only to go 70 years to have prisons handling mental illness all over again. I am often astonished by the pattern of passing of do-gooder legislation to тАЬdo the right thingтАЭ and then failing to fund or follow through.
Prisons and the ER. There's no other place for them to go. I have a student who just spent 2 weeks in the ER, for this reason. He likely has schizophrenia on top of Autism. I am in an online group for parents of adults who have Autism. Some of the stories are so terrifying. You read about mothers locking themselves in the bathroom, to escape a violent attack from an adult child. Students, where I work, have caused serious injuries and they're not adults. There's no help. There's no solution, just warm fuzzy ideas like "inclusion" and handling everything in the community, while the people being "included" are stressed out. Those around them are getting injured, not learning what they could be, and likely looking at having PTSD as a result. There is so much willful, deep denial going on.
тАЬPrisons and the ER. There's no other place for them to go.тАЭ
That was true in 1989. After the ex slices up his arms with a razor blade, requiring over 200 stitches, he was put on a 72 hour тАЬhold.тАЭ
They released him after determining that he wasnтАЩt a danger to himself or others despite the 200+ 72 hour old sutures still in his arms.
He showed up at the door angry with me for signing the paperwork for the hold.
It wasnтАЩt a good afternoon.
I'm not going to "love" this comment, because that's truly the wrong reaction. I have some ex stories, too. I am truly sorry that you went through such a horrific experience.
ItтАЩs sad that these situations still occur but given the exigencies of the law I donтАЩt know what else can be done.
I have no faith whatsoever in psychology/psychiatry given what IтАЩve seen of it. When they declared him safe within three days of getting those stitches I knew reality had nothing to do with either.
Logical conclusion. What a sad and scary reality to be faced with. My story happened in the early 90's. I definitely have stories of the laws enabling the dangerous and not protecting the vulnerable. In the end, my son and I had a positive conclusion to our story. He was only a toddler, mercifully. He remembers none of it and I only told him what was necessary, as he got older.
Yeah my kids were far too young to remember it and for that IтАЩm grateful.
They had the normal why questions growing up and I had to figure out how to explain without giving too much information.
Ultimately my husband is their Dad and the inevitable rejection by their bio dad was balanced by the man who helped raise them.
Hard stuff all the way around. I wish mine were a unique story but alas, itтАЩs far too common.
Sadly it wasn't only the leftists who were complicit in this folly. Many conservatives were happy to see government less involved and spending less. A truly toxic mix. Vagrants - especially violent and disruptive ones - need to be removed from the streets and put into treatment, especially for drug and alcohol addiction. I've often noted that the main - indeed almost the only - reason for government is to "ensure domestic tranquility." If they cannot perform that most rudimentary and essential function they have no raison d etre.
Hollywood did their part. Without Big Nurse in Cuckoo's Nest it probably would never have happened so completely. Set back psychiatric nursing for at least a generation
That film didn't come out until 1975. The process of "deinstitutionaliation" was well underway by then.
I view desinstitutionalization as an over-reaction to what was a real problem. Some of those places were real snake pits. Some of the ones that are still in existence are still bad places.
The fact is, it's a duty of government that everyone would prefer to ignore. Bringing inpatient institutional care up to an adequate standard takes a lot of money and a lot of personnel. The people doing the hands-on care need to be paid a lot and given a lot of vacation/decompression time, otherwise there's a lot of job turnover and too many underqualified, unstable, and/or burned out people are doing the job. The facilities need to provide a humane physical environment, and that takes a lot of front-end investment. But in the long run, it's cheaper than jail or prison. A lot cheaper, once the lowered violent crime rate is taken into account.
That said, a small but noteworthy fraction of the mentally ill are some of the most dangerously violent people around. They need a prison-level of supervision and confinement that's much greater than what's appropriate for the majority of severely mentally ill people.
It helped provide popular support for it though.
I was around then. In California. The movie merely depicted a set of institutional conditions that had already been officially addressed/kicked down the road, and it had minimal impact on public thinking (as compared with, for example, the book and movie The China Syndrome, which basically stopped the R&D of US nuclear power in its tracks for 40 years.)
I've read the book. didn't see the film. The book Cuckoo's Nest used the definitions and restrictions imposed in mental institutions as a metaphor for the rise of the Therapeutic State, and the effect of groupthink definitions on human liberty and expressive potential. (It's worth noting that the book made explicitly clear early on that most of the patients had voluntarily committed themselves!) It didn't focus exclusively on the conditions of mental institutions, or the more inhumane aspects of them. That would be more the focus of an earlier book (1946) and film (1948) of some renown, entitled The Snake Pit.
Ken Kesey's book One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) had a lot of aspects that place it beyond the bounds of social acceptability these days. It really does take out a pro-individualist, anti-authoritarian, anti-collectivist position on human behavior and individual liberty that verges on being an anarchist polemic. His next book, Sometimes A Great Notion, addresses the same questions in a different framework, while giving a more balanced and sympathetic appraisal of the pro-social, pro-community side of the argument. Cuckoo's Nest is closer to The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.
It's important to understand the history; for a good many years after deinstitutionalization, the State of California did an awful lot to try to help people with severe chronic mental health issues by funding group homes and making counseling, medication, and related services available to the population. But to a large extent, those efforts found themselves trying to fix problems that had been exacerbated by the huge increase in incarceration (anyone with a sincere interest in ameliorating mental illness as a public health problem needs to consider the record of jails and prisons in both causing mental and behavioral health problems, and turning minor problems into serious and intractable ones.) California has also increasingly found itself dealing with a dysfunctional population originating in other states. The same social tolerance that's allowed California to benefit from a brain drain way from from punitive and socially reactionary parts of the country has also ended up encouraging emigration from those states by outcast dysfunctional populations, including households with offspring.
California is definitely facing challenges and costs in recent years due to immigration, but only part of that burdensome immigrant population arrived from south of the US border. Nit-picking over the formalities aside of officially attributed status, the practical results have been the same. I doubt that Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, etc. would trade their populations of undocumented Mexicans doing dirty jobs for an influx of meth-heads, heroin addicts, and vagrants from elsewhere in the US. But that isn't an issue for those states; the severity of the climate alone works in favor of culling a dysfunctional homeless population. As does the severity of their laws, often. But there isn't a state in the Union that's permitted to bar immigration from other states. Not that it's even really doable.
So was I. I grew up in the Bay Area. Frances was another contributor. I stick by my point - in the popular mind both those movies depict mental hospitals as nightmare situations, (the voluntary committal status of Cuckoo's inmates is lost from popular memory - I've noticed this for decades). Hollywood depicts mental hospitals in a uniformly negative way. I almost threw in "China Syndrome" as another example but it was off topic. Same story. Corporations - same story. It is a relentless rant, scenario after scenario where the villains are institutions.
Unresponsive institutional power makes for a great screen villain. Not entirely without cause. The Shadow of this society gets uncovered every once in a while. But no one makes big-budget feature movies about the worst ongoing scandals, which remain practically unknown.
The thing is, I'm okay with that. I don't view movies as the heart of the problem, either way.
I have an issue with naturalistic "historical fiction" depictions in general. Even the best examples in literature are more about colorful storytelling and myth-making than historical accuracy. (Even though I've enjoyed some of them a lot, and a couple of them are among my favorite American novels- Last Go Round, The Good Lord Bird.)
My real problem is with a supposedly educated citizenry who can read nonfiction history and investigative journalism, and don't, preferring to get their "history" from movies, TV serials, and novels. With their "nonfiction" reading reserved for crap sham reportage and polemical grandstanding in the news cycle by their favorite partisan slanted news media sources. Whatever direction that slant might happen to take. Although it's clear that even readers of current events text and print articles are in the minority, and that most Americans are satisfied with the video versions.
At the turn of the 19th-20th century, muckraking journalists had real power to raise public awareness- and arouse outrage-with their investigative reportage. Not so much, these days.
Maybe everyone involved in that should be given shovels and baggies and directed to look for feces in SF.
ItтАЩs a start
When the ACLU and others successfully had the state institution emptied, the politicians in the states rejoiced because these institutions were expensive. They now could spend that money on other projects like lining their pockets.
There was a famous case a few years back. A woman in NYC was living on the street, defecting on the street and throwing her feces at tourists. The city arrested her and put her in a psychiatric institution. The ACLU cleaned her up put her on her meds and paraded before a judge. She now looked like an upstanding normal citizen and the judge ruled that she be released back into society. She is now back on the streets throwing feces at tourists. (God bless the democrats.)
I have said this before. There are no simple answers to complex problems. Only fools and politicians (but then I repeat myself) give simple answers to complex problems
Our worst example in canada is a guy named Vince Li. Diagnosed, on medication for his illness, then he decided he didnтАЩt like how they made him feel so he stopped taking them and ended up beheading a man on a greyhound bus with a pocketknife. And had a taste.
This was in 2008, locked him up, but as you may guess тАЬnot criminally responsibleтАЭ and heтАЩs been free with a new name since 2015.
IтАЩm sure heтАЩs on his meds, itтАЩs why I feel so safe.
Great to see justice in action
Don't leave out the voters. They are joined at the hip with their politicians.
Good morning Doc, what about the hypothesis that in some extreme cases, like anti-social behavior, the brain is wired differently. Is this still a thing in medical circles, and if so, whatтАЩs the answer?
I don't follow neuro research to any degree, so you know as much or more than I do. I always thought that, with enough work, we could use the tools we had (microscopes, extremely thin brain slices) and work it all out eventually. I now think that was wrong. Just too much data, too many things connected in too many ways.
With the development of diffusion tensor imaging we have a better estimate of nerve bundle pathways, but to my mind it will take massive computing power to eventually work out the final relationship between structure and function. And of course, how the hell does nature wire it up? I've resigned to the fact that I will be gone long before we have the faintest understanding.
The greatest mystery to me is this first-person thing. When I'm gone, the world will disappear. What puts "me" in this body or brain? Don't know. A lifelong atheist, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm wrong about that, too. I'd like to see what my old boss, Joe, has to say about it.
There is a book, "I Am That" which I suspect you will find interesting. It's online and described in Wikipedia. Lots of discussions on this topic.
This тАШresignationтАЩ made me think of a friend who worked long and hard on her degree in neuroimaging. First she was getting her PhD at Urbana, then having a post doctoral at Stanford. She used to tell me fascinating things about the projects they did and how the brain operates and the research awaiting peer review on various subjects. She was the one who back in 2005 told me about an interesting phenomena of people with AIS syndrome ending up on fashion runways. That turned out to be the beginning of the current gender identity crisis among teen girls that we are living through today.
But for the I-cant-remember-how-many-years this immensely talented and restless researcher and engineer has been working at Facebook. Before she worked at Disney. And I canтАЩt help thinking тАШwhat a waist.тАЩ
I am wondering, did she choose these paths because she resigned to the fact she ll be gone before we have the fantiest of understanding how the brain wiring works? Or are we all resigning now because people highly trained in neurology like hers chose different, more exciting paths like working for Facebook..? Just random thoughts.
I think it was David Hume the 18th century British philosopher said we can never know what is real.
Descartes said our view of reality is obscured by demons therefore we can never discern what is real.
Other philosophers like Berkley said we make up our own reality. Our world is just a figment of our imagination. If you believe Berkley, yes, when you're gone the world disappears.
You have to take what I have written with a large grain of salt. I studied philosophy almost 60y ears ago. So I am really full of shit.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell discussed Berkeley in 1763. Boswell wrote, "After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop BerkeleyтАЩs ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against alarge stone, till he rebounded from it, тАШI refute it THUS".
DonтАЩt be so hard on yourself, Lonesome. What I think you just described (Berkley) is really a definition of solipsism. In that, what we see and experience all around us is unique only to us. Only you matter. And when you leave that reality will disappear.
That of course ignores all the other passengers on this reality ship we share, the ones in the car at the red light right beside you.
I'm not sure about what I am about to say. I think Berkley said when you turn your back on something, it all goes away but when you turn around your mind fills it back in.
Don't confuse humility with F.O.S..
Getting old is a funny thing. A bit of a physics geek, I've begun watching YouTube videos on cosmology, physics, and a lot of the engineering math I thought I'd forgotten. Sometimes I walk at night in this rural area and look at all the stars and think to myself that thousands of generations of people lay under those stars and couldn't possibly have known what they were, why they shone, and how far away they were. Then I realize that I know very little more than they did about the really fundamental questions.
What is F.O.S.?
I apologize - you said you might be full of s**t - F.O.S..
And then I think about the amazing faith in something bigger that people have had for millenniaтАж a тАЬcreatorтАЭ of so much beauty and diversity in the worldтАж always inspires awe. Call it faith in what we canтАЩt prove. Happy belated Thanksgiving to you, Jim.
Thanks. I'm not for-definite sure of much - less every day - but I've always been pretty sure a supreme being doesn't live for the purpose of being worshipped or do any of the Old Testament stuff. It would be completely irrational. When I look at cosmology - especially space and time, which seems to be the only thing we know much about - it is very clear that we are so dumb about the things that make the world work. Maxwell described the hell out of electric and magnetic fields, but WHAT ARE THEY really? Could there be an intelligence that transcends space and time? An overreaching consciousness or being? I could live with that.
There are reputable physicists that believe this could all be a computer simulation.
There are too many paradoxes in all religions for me to believe in any of them. In the Old Testament, God makes him or herself out to be a cruel neurotic megalomaniac demanding constant worship. It just doesn't make sense to me that a being that created the universe has to be worshiped by piss ant creatures such as us.
I am at peace knowing when I die, that is the end of it. Who in their right mind would want to go to heaven for eternity? Eternity is a long, long, long time. I get impatient waiting for the elevator to come.
As Julian the Apostate said, "It didn't bother me that I didn't exist before I was born. Why should it bother me if I cease to exist after I am dead."
Funny you should mention that. I always attributed it to Twain - my personal fave author. The story I heard goes that someone was ribbing him about being very old and not long for the world. His alleged response was, "Listen. I was dead a million years before I was born and suffered no great inconvenience from it. I don't expect the next million to be any different."
It always bugged me that life was finite; every so often I would count the days behind and the days ahead, and a little panic set in. Now I don't worry about it because - like Twain - I have no memory of at least 4-1/2 billion years the earth existed and it causes me no pain. I don't expect the next 4-1/2 to be any different.
Twain on the Bible: тАЬYou believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?тАЭ
тАХ Mark Twain
I am probably the most Christian-friendly atheist you'll ever meet. Part of it is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing; I firmly believe that if this nation be saved, the Jews and Christians will do it; nobody else has the strength of conviction confidently to discern right from wrong and publicly call it out. (just my opinion, of course). Part of it is a lifetime of seeing the cohesiveness and strength of most - not all, of course - Christian families, and the kind of children they rear. Part of it is interaction with local Amish. Yes, I know that the supernatural stuff is just nonsense, but their moral training is useful. I try to look at the greater good. One thing is for sure: observing many of today's utes, unmoored and rudderless, tells me that what we're doing is not the way to go.
It may have been Twain, my favorite political philosopher. I despise politicians as much as he did.
I attributed the quote to Julian because I read it 50 years ago.in Gore Vidals "Julian". Vidal was a leftwing nut case but he wrote great books.
That is why it is called faith.
Funny thing about faith. Often we can't see things we believe are not there. Parents sometimes don't see their child is obviously mentally ill, because they simply couldn't be (and it is obvious to everyone else). Democrats can't see that their policies lead to destruction, because they simply couldn't lead to destruction. Some religious fools can't smell a stinking con artist cause said con artist said "God bless you" while conning them, because that can't be so. And some atheists simply don't believe in the non-material world, even when they "imagine" the spirit of their recently deceased relative visiting them coincidentally the evening of their death . . . We have these paradigms of what is possible, and if we have faith that X is impossible, then X really has to hit us pretty hard on the head to get noticed, and even then . . . we can explain it away if we don't have faith that it could exist. In other words, if we have faith that it doesn't exist, then we will explain away any sign that it does exist. Once you have faith, though, then it becomes obvious.
It did not work that way for me. Nothing hit me hard on the head. I am an all about proof kind of person. One day I had what I suppose is an epiphany - that to believe as I do you have to accept it on faith. So simple. So elegant. Now I see my proof all around me.