Killer of Sacred Cows
Friday, August 10, 2007
Michael Moore's "Sicko," or, Jesus Was A Socialist
I've just finished watching Michael Moore's "Sicko." And I have some thoughts on the matter.
Here's the thing about medical care: We all need it. Most liberals that I know agree that we should, as a society, cover people's needs. This is addressed largely to the people out there who hate that idea - the ones who think the current American system is the best in the world. The ones who live in a society of "me" instead of a society of "we." The ones whose motto is: Everyone look out for number one and devil take the hindmost.
If you think that a doctor should profit from his or her work to the tune of a living wage - a single mid-sized car, a five-figure income, a two- or three-bedroom house - hey, I'm all for it. That goes for a medical researcher developing new drugs, a pharmacist dispensing them, or anyone else working in the medical field. Everyone deserves a living wage.
If you think that a doctor, or anyone else working in the medical field, should profit from his or her work to the tune of a Mercedes-Benz, a six- or seven-figure income, a six- or seven-bedroom house, or a closet full of Armani suits, you've got another think coming.
If you think that a bureaucratic paper-pushing CEO should profit off of health care for anything more than a living wage, I'm going to fight you with everything I've got.
See, the privatization of health care is immoral. Flat-out. It's immoral. It's sinful. It's wrong.
It is not moral to keep people from necessary health care just so you can save the money it would have cost and get yourself another Armani suit instead.
It is not moral to run medicine, or hospitals, or insurance companies as for-profit businesses.
It is not moral to deny people care that they have paid for.
It is not moral to deny people coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
In point of fact, It is FUCKING IMMORAL to profit on anyone's medical woes. FUCKING IMMORAL. No, it's more than that. It's FUCKING EVIL.
A doctor does not need a closet full of Armani, or three or four Mercedes, or a palatial estate. Neither does a CEO. Nobody *needs* to make more than a five-figure income. NOBODY. If you think you *need* that Mercedes, or that six-bedroom house, think again.
If you support the privatization of health care, you sicken me. More to the point: If you are pro-profit, you are anti-human.
A memo which responded to "Sicko," written by the CEO of Blue Cross, said snarkily: "As a viewer, you are made to feel ashamed to be an American, a capitalist, and part of a 'me' society instead of a 'we' society." Well, guess what, bucko? First of all, you SHOULD be ashamed. Secondly, we are NOT a 'me' society - we just think we are! We pretend to be, and the pretense is wearing thin. Regardless of vaunted American individualism, there is no such thing as a "me" society anywhere on this earth. Society is not a group of one. Society is inherently a "we."
As a member of a "we," you have obligations to the other members of the "we." That's the poor person who doesn't have insurance or a job. That's the person who just lost their job because of cutbacks and can't afford COBRA. That's the person who's working three jobs to make ends meet and can't get health coverage because he's not working full-time at any of them. We ALL owe each other whatever help we can give each other. Medical care is a moral issue, and it should be supported COMPLETELY by taxes.
It's time to repeal the laws that allow insurance company executives to get away with murder by neglect. If someone dies and you could have covered their treatment but you didn't, that's murder. You had intent, motive and opportunity, and you opted to keep the money rather than save the patient. That's MURDER.
It's time to repeal the laws that allow insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
It's time to enact laws that make for-profit medical care illegal and require all health care to be provided on a non-profit, taxpayer-covered basis.
If this makes you uncomfortable - if what I'm calling for makes you angry, or annoyed, or pissed off because how dare I challenge the capitalist system, just remember: It could be you next. All it takes is a cancer diagnosis or a car accident to make you one of the people whose entire life savings disappears due to the co-payments, the deductibles, and the non-covered conditions. You are not immune from these possibilities. 75% of able-bodied Americans become disabled at some point in their lives - and when you're disabled enough, you can't work. When you can't work, health care goes away. Then what are you going to do?
The root of the problem is unchecked capitalism. Unchecked, unregulated capitalism is the best way to create a class system with the extremely rich and the extremely poor and nobody in between. It's wrong. It's evil. Jesus did not preach capitalism. Buddha did not recommend it. Neither did Muhammed.
Guess what? Unchecked capitalism is also in direct contradiction to American values! What are American values? Freedom, liberty, justice, equality, right? Well, unchecked capitalism:
- Contradicts the value of freedom - those who have no choices are not free, and those who have no money have no choices
- Contradicts the value of liberty - because those who are shackled to debt and trapped in fear have no liberty
- Contradicts justice - because it is unjust to penalize people who do not have money just because they do not have money
- Contradicts equality - because only those who have money will profit from such a system, and that is inherently unequal.
It's also in direct contradiction to Christian values. Jesus said "Sell all you have, and give it to the poor." Paul required his followers to live in socialist communities, caring for those who cannot care for themselves - the widows, the orphans, the poor. Socialized medicine and socialized economy - communalist living - is the Christian way.
If you're a die-hard capitalist, or if you think this is a Christian nation - and especially if you're both - then great! Do what Jesus said, then: sell all you have, and give it to the poor... and then see how long you last when the "Christian" government doesn't provide you medical care. See how long you last when you're one of the poor.
If anyone can provide me with a good reason - a moral reason - for allowing capitalism to run rampant and unchecked, I'm all ears... but I doubt you'll be able to provide one. Justify denying health care to anyone. Justify it. Show me how it's moral.
And then, when you can't, sign up to help me get those laws changed. ¶ 8/10/2007 01:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Here's the thing about medical care: We all need it. Most liberals that I know agree that we should, as a society, cover people's needs. This is addressed largely to the people out there who hate that idea - the ones who think the current American system is the best in the world. The ones who live in a society of "me" instead of a society of "we." The ones whose motto is: Everyone look out for number one and devil take the hindmost.
If you think that a doctor should profit from his or her work to the tune of a living wage - a single mid-sized car, a five-figure income, a two- or three-bedroom house - hey, I'm all for it. That goes for a medical researcher developing new drugs, a pharmacist dispensing them, or anyone else working in the medical field. Everyone deserves a living wage.
If you think that a doctor, or anyone else working in the medical field, should profit from his or her work to the tune of a Mercedes-Benz, a six- or seven-figure income, a six- or seven-bedroom house, or a closet full of Armani suits, you've got another think coming.
If you think that a bureaucratic paper-pushing CEO should profit off of health care for anything more than a living wage, I'm going to fight you with everything I've got.
See, the privatization of health care is immoral. Flat-out. It's immoral. It's sinful. It's wrong.
It is not moral to keep people from necessary health care just so you can save the money it would have cost and get yourself another Armani suit instead.
It is not moral to run medicine, or hospitals, or insurance companies as for-profit businesses.
It is not moral to deny people care that they have paid for.
It is not moral to deny people coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
In point of fact, It is FUCKING IMMORAL to profit on anyone's medical woes. FUCKING IMMORAL. No, it's more than that. It's FUCKING EVIL.
A doctor does not need a closet full of Armani, or three or four Mercedes, or a palatial estate. Neither does a CEO. Nobody *needs* to make more than a five-figure income. NOBODY. If you think you *need* that Mercedes, or that six-bedroom house, think again.
If you support the privatization of health care, you sicken me. More to the point: If you are pro-profit, you are anti-human.
A memo which responded to "Sicko," written by the CEO of Blue Cross, said snarkily: "As a viewer, you are made to feel ashamed to be an American, a capitalist, and part of a 'me' society instead of a 'we' society." Well, guess what, bucko? First of all, you SHOULD be ashamed. Secondly, we are NOT a 'me' society - we just think we are! We pretend to be, and the pretense is wearing thin. Regardless of vaunted American individualism, there is no such thing as a "me" society anywhere on this earth. Society is not a group of one. Society is inherently a "we."
As a member of a "we," you have obligations to the other members of the "we." That's the poor person who doesn't have insurance or a job. That's the person who just lost their job because of cutbacks and can't afford COBRA. That's the person who's working three jobs to make ends meet and can't get health coverage because he's not working full-time at any of them. We ALL owe each other whatever help we can give each other. Medical care is a moral issue, and it should be supported COMPLETELY by taxes.
It's time to repeal the laws that allow insurance company executives to get away with murder by neglect. If someone dies and you could have covered their treatment but you didn't, that's murder. You had intent, motive and opportunity, and you opted to keep the money rather than save the patient. That's MURDER.
It's time to repeal the laws that allow insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
It's time to enact laws that make for-profit medical care illegal and require all health care to be provided on a non-profit, taxpayer-covered basis.
If this makes you uncomfortable - if what I'm calling for makes you angry, or annoyed, or pissed off because how dare I challenge the capitalist system, just remember: It could be you next. All it takes is a cancer diagnosis or a car accident to make you one of the people whose entire life savings disappears due to the co-payments, the deductibles, and the non-covered conditions. You are not immune from these possibilities. 75% of able-bodied Americans become disabled at some point in their lives - and when you're disabled enough, you can't work. When you can't work, health care goes away. Then what are you going to do?
The root of the problem is unchecked capitalism. Unchecked, unregulated capitalism is the best way to create a class system with the extremely rich and the extremely poor and nobody in between. It's wrong. It's evil. Jesus did not preach capitalism. Buddha did not recommend it. Neither did Muhammed.
Guess what? Unchecked capitalism is also in direct contradiction to American values! What are American values? Freedom, liberty, justice, equality, right? Well, unchecked capitalism:
- Contradicts the value of freedom - those who have no choices are not free, and those who have no money have no choices
- Contradicts the value of liberty - because those who are shackled to debt and trapped in fear have no liberty
- Contradicts justice - because it is unjust to penalize people who do not have money just because they do not have money
- Contradicts equality - because only those who have money will profit from such a system, and that is inherently unequal.
It's also in direct contradiction to Christian values. Jesus said "Sell all you have, and give it to the poor." Paul required his followers to live in socialist communities, caring for those who cannot care for themselves - the widows, the orphans, the poor. Socialized medicine and socialized economy - communalist living - is the Christian way.
If you're a die-hard capitalist, or if you think this is a Christian nation - and especially if you're both - then great! Do what Jesus said, then: sell all you have, and give it to the poor... and then see how long you last when the "Christian" government doesn't provide you medical care. See how long you last when you're one of the poor.
If anyone can provide me with a good reason - a moral reason - for allowing capitalism to run rampant and unchecked, I'm all ears... but I doubt you'll be able to provide one. Justify denying health care to anyone. Justify it. Show me how it's moral.
And then, when you can't, sign up to help me get those laws changed. ¶ 8/10/2007 01:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, August 02, 2007
The difference between sin and crime
Last night, I got the opportunity to show my partner Danny this video, which I found through a friend on LiveJournal. There's also a great essay by Anna Quindlen about it here. Additionally, in her own essay about it, my LiveJournal friend talks about how these people have a real problem understanding the difference between morality and legality: specifically, that never the twain shall meet, and trying to mix them usually results in failure.
When I showed this video to Danny, his response was interesting, and got me thinking. He said "The problem is, these people don't understand the purpose of the law. What they want from the law is a validation of their religious belief, and that's not what law is for." I think he's right.
When you watch this video, you can almost see the gears turning, freezing, and jamming up in these folks' heads. They haven't thought it through. In some cases, they not only haven't thought it through, but they have avoided thinking about it at all. They literally have no answer as to what should happen to women who have abortions; they only think as far as legitimizing their views on abortion by making those views into law.
I think that's a pretty important observation. Simply put, it's about definitions. There's a disconnect there because they don't get that the law - at least, criminal law - isn't about validation of belief but about assignment of penalties. Laws do not, or at least should not, exist to simply promote the majority's values. They should exist to prevent or punish harm caused to other people through any number of vectors (personal assault, financial harm, etc.). Laws that have no penalty attached are generally unenforceable... and if there's no penalty or point, then the law doesn't mean anything, doesn't accomplish anything. It's just words in a book. The law is supposed to say "IF you do [x], THEN [y] will happen to you." You have to have both parts to make workable law. Otherwise, it's just a statement - a validation of some belief or other.
The problem is, in the world that these people live in (inside their heads and their shared collective consciousness), the point is that Good People Don't Break Laws. Law isn't about avoiding penalties. It's about not doing bad things. That's a problem, because for most people, the law isn't like that. Most of us trust our own judgement to decide whether a law is functional or not, and weigh the risks involved in breaking it. We all do that - speeding on the freeway being a prime example. I don't feel enormous guilt about going a few miles per hour over 65, especially when everyone else around me is doing it too and to slow down to the speed limit would create a traffic hazard. There are a lot of laws like that. But it seems to me that the viewpoint of the criminalize-abortion (and criminalize-homosexuality, and criminalize-polyamory, and criminalize-obscenity, and criminalize-immorality-in-general) movements seems to boil down to: if it's against the law, people won't do it.
Quindlen's article also points out that this is the Daddy State treating women like they're children, as if they aren't able to think for themselves. Women, in this view, are considered nearly innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the wrong clinic with their feet up in the stirrups at the wrong time; it's the doctors who do the deed who are the criminals. Even the idea of a woman giving herself an abortion with a bent coat hanger does not change this viewpoint - because what virtuous, good woman would do that? None, right?
This explains a lot of the motivation behind laws which criminalize consensual or personal decisions, such as polyamorous relationships, homosexuality, obscenity, gay marriage, and abortion. In all cases, the people who are trying to pass the law apparently think that simply having a law in place will stop people from engaging in these actions that they find so repulsive. If there's a law against homosexual behavior, people won't do it, right? If there's a law that says you can't have more than one partner, people won't have one, right? If there's a law that says you, a woman, can't make a simple decision about your reproductive health and welfare, then you won't do it, will you?
If only things were that simple! If they were, I could lobby for all kinds of laws, such as laws criminalizing non-critical thinking, abuse in the name of religion, and neoconservatism. I'm sure the world would be a much calmer place. But then again, I'm not willing to take people's choices away from them, no matter how much those choices annoy, frustrate, or irritate me - and no matter how much I rant and rave about the effects those choices have on me. If nothing else, it makes those who choose them quite obvious, so I can avoid or mock them as I please.
My partner also observed that these people don't think in terms of crime. They think in terms of sin. The disconnect may be too big to fix, because they may think of crime in terms of sin - confusing law with The Law.
Frankly, I think that's both sad and scary. It explains so much of the dominionist, fundamentalist, and uber-religious movements in this country and elsewhere... and at the same time, I haven't a clue how we can pierce the veil of ignorance and educate these folks as to the differences between law and The Law. I really don't. Apart from large billboards saying "SIN AND CRIME ARE TWO DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED THINGS," which probably won't penetrate but will simply give them that confused, someone's-speaking-Greek-again look. It's a problem of cultural context. In their context, anything bad is automatically both sin and crime. The two terms are pretty much synonymous. In the reality-based community, sin and crime are two totally separate things.
In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, culturally defined terms actually have a huge impact on this entire problem of dominionism and fundamentalism. Words like "marriage," "relationship," "partnership," "husband," "wife," "family" - all of these have culturally-defined meanings which vary from subculture to subculture. "Family" means one thing to a Dominionist, something else to a gay person, and something else again to an average suburbanite. Similarly, certain subcultures (such as dominionism) assume that two different words that mean the same thing in their culture will mean the same thing in the greater culture as well, even though they don't. This way lies much confusion and misunderstanding, for all sides.
I wonder if it might be as simple as sitting someone down who thinks that "sin" and "crime" mean the same thing and explaining, slowly and gently, that although those two words mean substantially the same thing in their religion, they don't mean the same thing in the larger culture, and explaining what each word does mean. I wonder if that would have any effect at all.
Probably not, but then again, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
When I showed this video to Danny, his response was interesting, and got me thinking. He said "The problem is, these people don't understand the purpose of the law. What they want from the law is a validation of their religious belief, and that's not what law is for." I think he's right.
When you watch this video, you can almost see the gears turning, freezing, and jamming up in these folks' heads. They haven't thought it through. In some cases, they not only haven't thought it through, but they have avoided thinking about it at all. They literally have no answer as to what should happen to women who have abortions; they only think as far as legitimizing their views on abortion by making those views into law.
I think that's a pretty important observation. Simply put, it's about definitions. There's a disconnect there because they don't get that the law - at least, criminal law - isn't about validation of belief but about assignment of penalties. Laws do not, or at least should not, exist to simply promote the majority's values. They should exist to prevent or punish harm caused to other people through any number of vectors (personal assault, financial harm, etc.). Laws that have no penalty attached are generally unenforceable... and if there's no penalty or point, then the law doesn't mean anything, doesn't accomplish anything. It's just words in a book. The law is supposed to say "IF you do [x], THEN [y] will happen to you." You have to have both parts to make workable law. Otherwise, it's just a statement - a validation of some belief or other.
The problem is, in the world that these people live in (inside their heads and their shared collective consciousness), the point is that Good People Don't Break Laws. Law isn't about avoiding penalties. It's about not doing bad things. That's a problem, because for most people, the law isn't like that. Most of us trust our own judgement to decide whether a law is functional or not, and weigh the risks involved in breaking it. We all do that - speeding on the freeway being a prime example. I don't feel enormous guilt about going a few miles per hour over 65, especially when everyone else around me is doing it too and to slow down to the speed limit would create a traffic hazard. There are a lot of laws like that. But it seems to me that the viewpoint of the criminalize-abortion (and criminalize-homosexuality, and criminalize-polyamory, and criminalize-obscenity, and criminalize-immorality-in-general) movements seems to boil down to: if it's against the law, people won't do it.
Quindlen's article also points out that this is the Daddy State treating women like they're children, as if they aren't able to think for themselves. Women, in this view, are considered nearly innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the wrong clinic with their feet up in the stirrups at the wrong time; it's the doctors who do the deed who are the criminals. Even the idea of a woman giving herself an abortion with a bent coat hanger does not change this viewpoint - because what virtuous, good woman would do that? None, right?
This explains a lot of the motivation behind laws which criminalize consensual or personal decisions, such as polyamorous relationships, homosexuality, obscenity, gay marriage, and abortion. In all cases, the people who are trying to pass the law apparently think that simply having a law in place will stop people from engaging in these actions that they find so repulsive. If there's a law against homosexual behavior, people won't do it, right? If there's a law that says you can't have more than one partner, people won't have one, right? If there's a law that says you, a woman, can't make a simple decision about your reproductive health and welfare, then you won't do it, will you?
If only things were that simple! If they were, I could lobby for all kinds of laws, such as laws criminalizing non-critical thinking, abuse in the name of religion, and neoconservatism. I'm sure the world would be a much calmer place. But then again, I'm not willing to take people's choices away from them, no matter how much those choices annoy, frustrate, or irritate me - and no matter how much I rant and rave about the effects those choices have on me. If nothing else, it makes those who choose them quite obvious, so I can avoid or mock them as I please.
My partner also observed that these people don't think in terms of crime. They think in terms of sin. The disconnect may be too big to fix, because they may think of crime in terms of sin - confusing law with The Law.
Frankly, I think that's both sad and scary. It explains so much of the dominionist, fundamentalist, and uber-religious movements in this country and elsewhere... and at the same time, I haven't a clue how we can pierce the veil of ignorance and educate these folks as to the differences between law and The Law. I really don't. Apart from large billboards saying "SIN AND CRIME ARE TWO DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED THINGS," which probably won't penetrate but will simply give them that confused, someone's-speaking-Greek-again look. It's a problem of cultural context. In their context, anything bad is automatically both sin and crime. The two terms are pretty much synonymous. In the reality-based community, sin and crime are two totally separate things.
In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, culturally defined terms actually have a huge impact on this entire problem of dominionism and fundamentalism. Words like "marriage," "relationship," "partnership," "husband," "wife," "family" - all of these have culturally-defined meanings which vary from subculture to subculture. "Family" means one thing to a Dominionist, something else to a gay person, and something else again to an average suburbanite. Similarly, certain subcultures (such as dominionism) assume that two different words that mean the same thing in their culture will mean the same thing in the greater culture as well, even though they don't. This way lies much confusion and misunderstanding, for all sides.
I wonder if it might be as simple as sitting someone down who thinks that "sin" and "crime" mean the same thing and explaining, slowly and gently, that although those two words mean substantially the same thing in their religion, they don't mean the same thing in the larger culture, and explaining what each word does mean. I wonder if that would have any effect at all.
Probably not, but then again, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
Labels: abortion, crime, ethics, fundamentalists, law, morals
¶ 8/02/2007 09:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, May 28, 2007
House Democrats take on the student loan industry and the Bush DoE
Before the 2006 midterm elections, there was a lot of talk about how kicking the Republicans out of a Congressional majority wouldn't do anything to improve the situation in America - that there was really no difference between Democrats and Republicans. They're all one party anyway, right?
I'm pleased to report that House Democrats have taken the bit in their teeth and massed a bipartisan response to six years of student-loan lender exploitation of a loophole in federal loan subsidy laws. The Bush Administration, after six years of looking the other way (perhaps towards Iraq?) and allowing this blatant lender fraud to continue, has finally been brought up sharp by the passage of new law which stops the payment of subsidies which, in many cases, equal more than twice the subsidized interest rate on student loans - a practice which has cost taxpayers several hundred million dollars.
Salon.com's article on the topic will do you good. Go and read it - and don't ever tell me again that there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats do the right thing by their constituents, and it doesn't take a Congressional change of hands to force them to do it. Let's hope they can begin to bail this country out of the financial shipwreck that six years of one-party rule have steered us into. ¶ 5/28/2007 11:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
I'm pleased to report that House Democrats have taken the bit in their teeth and massed a bipartisan response to six years of student-loan lender exploitation of a loophole in federal loan subsidy laws. The Bush Administration, after six years of looking the other way (perhaps towards Iraq?) and allowing this blatant lender fraud to continue, has finally been brought up sharp by the passage of new law which stops the payment of subsidies which, in many cases, equal more than twice the subsidized interest rate on student loans - a practice which has cost taxpayers several hundred million dollars.
Salon.com's article on the topic will do you good. Go and read it - and don't ever tell me again that there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats do the right thing by their constituents, and it doesn't take a Congressional change of hands to force them to do it. Let's hope they can begin to bail this country out of the financial shipwreck that six years of one-party rule have steered us into. ¶ 5/28/2007 11:17:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The Lessons of Virginia Tech
I wanted to wait a few days to write about this, partly because I've been swamped with my own work and partly because I needed to give it all time to sink in, so I could work out my thoughts about it. As I see it, the lessons we can learn from Virginia Tech fall into two broad categories: One, due largely to media patterns of sensationalization and hype, we have unrealistic expectations about how the world works, and thus we have disproportionate reactions to events like this; and, two, instead of trying what hasn't worked again and hoping it will work next time, we need to find better ways - but it's doubtful that will happen unless something fundamentally changes in our society.
The first reason why we have unrealistic expectations is that don't have a sense of proportion. Our perceptions of everyday dangers are totally out of whack. We're told that Bad Things - specifically, violent crimes - happen far more often than they actually do, and so we expect that bad things will happen a lot. We hear about them more often than they actually happen - mostly due to news media focusing on them every half-hour - and so our perceptions are that crime is rising even though it's been steadily falling for over twenty years now (1). But the Bad Things are generally on the order of a single person killing one or two others, or a bank robbery, or some other relatively minor event. Additionally, since they're on near-constant repeat on the television and news radio (and lately, the internet media as well) we get desensitized about these kinds of violent crimes - and have for some time now. People don't get afraid of being shot just because they walked into the liquor store at the wrong time, usually. About the "regular" crimes, we're more or less desensitized. We have fear fatigue.
As a result, what can we be made afraid of? Big, unusual catastrophes, not violent crimes. We're afraid of mad cow disease, and bird flu, and road rage, and strangers abducting our children, and killer kids in our public schools. (2) We're more afraid of the things that are so unlikely to happen that the chance of them hitting us is even less likely than a random roll of a million-sided die coming up with our number on it than we are of the things that are statistically much more likely: car accidents, domestic violence, and so forth. One reason is that the media need to have sensational topics to attract a vanishingly small amount of available attention from people. One murder is pretty much like another, unless it's Nicole Simpson, and one suicide is pretty much just another suicide, unless it's Anna Nicole Smith. If it isn't a famous name as the victim or suspected perpetrator, these stories about regular people who have been killed, or have killed, or have killed themselves, drop off the radar within a day or two at most. The stories that the media want are the ones that we'll pay attention to for a long, long time. They want the stories that they can do a one-month, three-month, six-month retrospective on... which further serves to convince us that Bad Things happen more often than they do.
When an event like Columbine, or 9/11, or Virginia Tech takes place, the media know they have a winner. People want to know who, what, where, when, why - and perhaps most importantly HOW - it happened. And this gives the media something they can chew on for days, giving us information in dribs and drabs. What's more important, though, is that the media have us trained when there's some big event: they have a pre-set story line to stick facts into and frame the event for us. As robin_d_laws said quite succinctly in this post, these events "have become so commonplace that they feel familiar." It's another school shooting? Okay, we want to tell them place, time, and number of casualties. Then we can cut right to the chase: gun control! video games! interviews with survivors of other shootings! Do we even know the gunman's name? Nope. That's not important anyway. We all know that he (and it's always he) is going to be an angry, isolated loner, probably mentally ill. He either dresses weird - like a goth or a gangsta - or he's black, or both. He probably listens to death metal music, and he may have Asperger's, or a drug problem. He writes frightening stuff in his creative writing assignments. We already know the story. We've heard it before. We'll probably hear it again. And at the end, even if we still don't know why he did it, we know how, and we can pat ourselves on the back because "we're not like that."
Why do we know this stuff? Because the media tells us so. We've seen this movie before. It's a morality play, with consequences attached. The people at Virginia Tech made the shooter feel like he was on the outside, so he attacked them. Cause, meet effect. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold felt like their entire school hated them, so they attacked them. And Harris and Klebold's parents were never home, and didn't supervise their kids - and one recent news story about Virginia Tech said that Cho's parents were nowhere to be found when the news media went looking for them at their home (so they must not have supervised their son either). Fault, meet blame. Someone did Something which Caused The Bad Thing To Happen. We need the media to tell us this, because otherwise we can't make any sense of it. And more than that, we need to know that Something Can Be Done to address these situations, because we need to make sure they don't happen here - wherever "here" is, whether it's Yale, Tulane, UIUC, or UCLA.
This leads into my second point about our sense of proportion being out of whack: we expect that we'll be safe on a place like a college campus, a high school campus, or in an airport. More to the point, we expect perfect security. What this means is that we've raised the bar to a place it can't be reached... and as a result, when security inevitably fails, we react disproportionately to the failure. The Event itself is one huge shock; the failure of security is far more shocking than it should be, and in its own way is its own separate Event. I have the feeling that part of the reason for this is that in America, at least, we have extended childhood beyond a reasonable place. It used to be, when I was a teenager, that teens were treated like children by their parents and by society, but that we were at least given minimal acknowledgment when we got our driver's license. Most teens my age, when I was sixteen, were working a part-time job at McDonald's or Burger King. Nowadays, childhood extends into the college years. One girl I work with is 21, and it's her first job. She sits at her cube space text-messaging on her cell phone while she should be working, and worse, taking calls on her cell phone while she should be working. Our manager's caught her at it twice, and her response was to move to a cube where he doesn't really check on people (she used to sit next to me, and we were right outside his office) and continue to text-message and take phone calls during work time. This kind of immaturity also shows up in classes I take with these kids, especially in terms of expectations about extra credit, grade leeway, and homework, and frankly, it shocks me. This is an attitude I would expect in fourteen-year-olds, not twenty-one-year-olds.
So now, childhood extends into the twenties, and adolescence into the thirties. Middle age now doesn't happen when you're forty, it's when you're 55. And as a result, we tend to have this unrealistic belief in our own immortality. It used to be that most people started getting an initial sense of their own mortality around the age of twenty-five or so. Now, it's more like thirty-five or forty. Additionally, we are squeamish as hell about death in this society. Doctors try every possible method to prolong life as long as possible (witness the Terri Schiavo fiasco). They don't ever say "this is as far as medical science can take us; get your affairs in order and we'll arrange palliative care." They're not allowed to - our society won't let them. It's not a legal restriction; it's a societal one. People die only in hospitals, never at home. We don't accept that the human body wears out as it gets into the years above fifty, and we avoid the elderly and are often afraid of them, because they serve as a reminder that we are going to die someday, and we have a limited time to live.
You see, in America, We Just Don't Die. That's it. We're not supposed to die. Death is unnatural. These are real expectations - and they are totally out of whack with reality.
So when something like Virginia Tech happens, we have to check our expectations. And we don't like having to do that. So the shooter becomes demonized (usually mercilessly, because people "should" be "normal," and it's a moral failing to not be), as well as the people who failed to give us perfect security (because we "should" have perfect security, because it's our right as Americans, because We Never Die). We begin screaming for better security and stronger measures against these aberrant people, even at the expense of our own civil liberties. If possible, we demand attacks on those we perceive as having violated our security - and if we're frightened enough, it results in debacles like the Iraq War. In other words, like the insane man, we try again what hasn't worked in the past, hoping it will work in the future.
The only way that I see us, as a nation, resolving this is to face up to some hard truths: one, we can't have perfect security; two, we are all going to die someday; and three, we have a lot less control over life than we think we have. Unfortunately, as long as we avoid these hard truths, we're going to continue to try to do the same things that haven't worked before, and these incidents are going to continue to happen.
What would it have done for Virginia Tech if Cho had gotten the help he needed, without being stigmatized for needing it? What would it have done for Columbine if the standard of living in Littleton had been sane, so that at least one of Eric Harris' parents could have stayed home with him and kept an eye on his development? What would it have done for this nation on 9/11 if we all had a better grasp of our own mortality, instead of a truly frightening ignorance about it?
These are questions I don't have answers to. Do you?
(1) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear.
(2) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear. ¶ 4/18/2007 02:49:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
The first reason why we have unrealistic expectations is that don't have a sense of proportion. Our perceptions of everyday dangers are totally out of whack. We're told that Bad Things - specifically, violent crimes - happen far more often than they actually do, and so we expect that bad things will happen a lot. We hear about them more often than they actually happen - mostly due to news media focusing on them every half-hour - and so our perceptions are that crime is rising even though it's been steadily falling for over twenty years now (1). But the Bad Things are generally on the order of a single person killing one or two others, or a bank robbery, or some other relatively minor event. Additionally, since they're on near-constant repeat on the television and news radio (and lately, the internet media as well) we get desensitized about these kinds of violent crimes - and have for some time now. People don't get afraid of being shot just because they walked into the liquor store at the wrong time, usually. About the "regular" crimes, we're more or less desensitized. We have fear fatigue.
As a result, what can we be made afraid of? Big, unusual catastrophes, not violent crimes. We're afraid of mad cow disease, and bird flu, and road rage, and strangers abducting our children, and killer kids in our public schools. (2) We're more afraid of the things that are so unlikely to happen that the chance of them hitting us is even less likely than a random roll of a million-sided die coming up with our number on it than we are of the things that are statistically much more likely: car accidents, domestic violence, and so forth. One reason is that the media need to have sensational topics to attract a vanishingly small amount of available attention from people. One murder is pretty much like another, unless it's Nicole Simpson, and one suicide is pretty much just another suicide, unless it's Anna Nicole Smith. If it isn't a famous name as the victim or suspected perpetrator, these stories about regular people who have been killed, or have killed, or have killed themselves, drop off the radar within a day or two at most. The stories that the media want are the ones that we'll pay attention to for a long, long time. They want the stories that they can do a one-month, three-month, six-month retrospective on... which further serves to convince us that Bad Things happen more often than they do.
When an event like Columbine, or 9/11, or Virginia Tech takes place, the media know they have a winner. People want to know who, what, where, when, why - and perhaps most importantly HOW - it happened. And this gives the media something they can chew on for days, giving us information in dribs and drabs. What's more important, though, is that the media have us trained when there's some big event: they have a pre-set story line to stick facts into and frame the event for us. As robin_d_laws said quite succinctly in this post, these events "have become so commonplace that they feel familiar." It's another school shooting? Okay, we want to tell them place, time, and number of casualties. Then we can cut right to the chase: gun control! video games! interviews with survivors of other shootings! Do we even know the gunman's name? Nope. That's not important anyway. We all know that he (and it's always he) is going to be an angry, isolated loner, probably mentally ill. He either dresses weird - like a goth or a gangsta - or he's black, or both. He probably listens to death metal music, and he may have Asperger's, or a drug problem. He writes frightening stuff in his creative writing assignments. We already know the story. We've heard it before. We'll probably hear it again. And at the end, even if we still don't know why he did it, we know how, and we can pat ourselves on the back because "we're not like that."
Why do we know this stuff? Because the media tells us so. We've seen this movie before. It's a morality play, with consequences attached. The people at Virginia Tech made the shooter feel like he was on the outside, so he attacked them. Cause, meet effect. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold felt like their entire school hated them, so they attacked them. And Harris and Klebold's parents were never home, and didn't supervise their kids - and one recent news story about Virginia Tech said that Cho's parents were nowhere to be found when the news media went looking for them at their home (so they must not have supervised their son either). Fault, meet blame. Someone did Something which Caused The Bad Thing To Happen. We need the media to tell us this, because otherwise we can't make any sense of it. And more than that, we need to know that Something Can Be Done to address these situations, because we need to make sure they don't happen here - wherever "here" is, whether it's Yale, Tulane, UIUC, or UCLA.
This leads into my second point about our sense of proportion being out of whack: we expect that we'll be safe on a place like a college campus, a high school campus, or in an airport. More to the point, we expect perfect security. What this means is that we've raised the bar to a place it can't be reached... and as a result, when security inevitably fails, we react disproportionately to the failure. The Event itself is one huge shock; the failure of security is far more shocking than it should be, and in its own way is its own separate Event. I have the feeling that part of the reason for this is that in America, at least, we have extended childhood beyond a reasonable place. It used to be, when I was a teenager, that teens were treated like children by their parents and by society, but that we were at least given minimal acknowledgment when we got our driver's license. Most teens my age, when I was sixteen, were working a part-time job at McDonald's or Burger King. Nowadays, childhood extends into the college years. One girl I work with is 21, and it's her first job. She sits at her cube space text-messaging on her cell phone while she should be working, and worse, taking calls on her cell phone while she should be working. Our manager's caught her at it twice, and her response was to move to a cube where he doesn't really check on people (she used to sit next to me, and we were right outside his office) and continue to text-message and take phone calls during work time. This kind of immaturity also shows up in classes I take with these kids, especially in terms of expectations about extra credit, grade leeway, and homework, and frankly, it shocks me. This is an attitude I would expect in fourteen-year-olds, not twenty-one-year-olds.
So now, childhood extends into the twenties, and adolescence into the thirties. Middle age now doesn't happen when you're forty, it's when you're 55. And as a result, we tend to have this unrealistic belief in our own immortality. It used to be that most people started getting an initial sense of their own mortality around the age of twenty-five or so. Now, it's more like thirty-five or forty. Additionally, we are squeamish as hell about death in this society. Doctors try every possible method to prolong life as long as possible (witness the Terri Schiavo fiasco). They don't ever say "this is as far as medical science can take us; get your affairs in order and we'll arrange palliative care." They're not allowed to - our society won't let them. It's not a legal restriction; it's a societal one. People die only in hospitals, never at home. We don't accept that the human body wears out as it gets into the years above fifty, and we avoid the elderly and are often afraid of them, because they serve as a reminder that we are going to die someday, and we have a limited time to live.
You see, in America, We Just Don't Die. That's it. We're not supposed to die. Death is unnatural. These are real expectations - and they are totally out of whack with reality.
So when something like Virginia Tech happens, we have to check our expectations. And we don't like having to do that. So the shooter becomes demonized (usually mercilessly, because people "should" be "normal," and it's a moral failing to not be), as well as the people who failed to give us perfect security (because we "should" have perfect security, because it's our right as Americans, because We Never Die). We begin screaming for better security and stronger measures against these aberrant people, even at the expense of our own civil liberties. If possible, we demand attacks on those we perceive as having violated our security - and if we're frightened enough, it results in debacles like the Iraq War. In other words, like the insane man, we try again what hasn't worked in the past, hoping it will work in the future.
The only way that I see us, as a nation, resolving this is to face up to some hard truths: one, we can't have perfect security; two, we are all going to die someday; and three, we have a lot less control over life than we think we have. Unfortunately, as long as we avoid these hard truths, we're going to continue to try to do the same things that haven't worked before, and these incidents are going to continue to happen.
What would it have done for Virginia Tech if Cho had gotten the help he needed, without being stigmatized for needing it? What would it have done for Columbine if the standard of living in Littleton had been sane, so that at least one of Eric Harris' parents could have stayed home with him and kept an eye on his development? What would it have done for this nation on 9/11 if we all had a better grasp of our own mortality, instead of a truly frightening ignorance about it?
These are questions I don't have answers to. Do you?
(1) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear.
(2) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear. ¶ 4/18/2007 02:49:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, April 06, 2007
This, kiddies, is how NOT to do research.
(Originally written in October, 2006. Reposted here in response to a post in the LiveJournal Asperger community.)
You may have seen an article flying around the blog- and media-space online lately, about someidiotsresearchers at Cornell University who claim to have found a link between early childhood TV-watching and rates of autism. The media's assertion, based on the Cornell report, is that early TV watching - get this - causes autism.
Lest you think that I'm blowing it out of proportion, here's a link to the article. I'm posting and commenting on some relevant quotes here:
Quote 1: "Watching too much television in childhood could cause autism, experts have warned." Quote 2: "The latest study, in the U.S., looked at whether there was a link between rising rates of autism and the increasing availability of children's TV, videos and DVDs. The research team concluded that the results were "awfully suggestive" of a link between watching TV and autism."
Follow the bouncing media error: the headline says "could cause," but then we get "a link between" in the second quote. We're talking about causation in the first case, and correlation in the second, which the media have now conveniently conflated for your continued incomprehension. *growl*
It gets worse from there. The researchers themselves recommend keeping kids away from the TV as a preventive measure: "[Dr Waldman] recommended those under two did not watch any TV at all, while older youngsters limited their viewing to an hour or two a day." To me that suggests that they, the researchers, believe television-watching is causative. How can they possibly claim that?
And as a researcher, I'm looking at their methodology as reported in the article and it's so shoddy that it's beyond belief. I can't believe that Cornell would have let anyone stamp their university's good name on this junk science:
Granted, this media report is certainly not telling the entire story. I would need to read the reseach in order to critique it any better than this. But from the media report, it appears that these researchers are claiming, or the media are attempting to use it to claim, that we wouldn't have autistics if we didn't have television, which is frigging ridiculous. There are plenty of historical incidents of autistic traits reported in almost every genius you can name. Did television cause Edison to demonstrate autistic traits? Or Einstein? Come ON, people.
Here's the comment I left on the Daily Mail's website:
In any case, these researchers ought to be ashamed of themselves for a number of reasons, and the media, as usual, has taken something that sounded juicy and plastered it all over the net without bothering to do any fact-checking first, upsetting more parents and adult autistics in the process, and giving the anti-autism groups more ammunition that has all the strength of wet tissue paper when examined with a critical eye. That won't stop CAN and other such groups from bandying it about like a prize fish, though, any more than the anti-gay groups have ever had problems using Paul Cameron's idiotic studies to back up their claims.
This is becoming more and more of a hobbyhorse for me, and when I present my CSA paper next month, it's going to be part of the paper. This kind of junk research needs to frigging STOP. So does behaviorism, but that's for another article and another day.
[ETA: Oh, this just gets better and better. According to articles about this in WebMD and Science Daily, the people doing this research were - get this - business professors and economists.
WTF are business professors and economists doing research on autism for?!? Isn't this, you know, a bit OUT OF THEIR FIELD?]
[ETA 2: I found a link to the article. Here it is (opens as a .PDF, just be aware). Going to look at it right now, but in their abstract (the summary at the beginning) they do say this:
[ETA 3: And in just skimming the research, I find all kinds of admission that indicate they're not as sure about their results as they claim to be:
"Our empirical methodology assumes that autistic children spent their first three years of life in the same county where they reside when they are recorded in our data set."
That's one hell of a big assumption, isn't it?
"the California data continues to show no evidence of a positive correlation between precipitation and autism."
Yeah. And that's their main data set.
"So, although as indicated we do not believe our tests provide definitive evidence for our hypothesis, we believe the most likely explanation for our findings is that early childhood television watching is indeed a trigger for autism."
So, even though they don't have definitive evidence, they still like their hypothesis? What?
It should be obvious that this study has to do a significant amount of reaching and stretching to attempt to justify what it claims to find. It's far too much of a stretch for me.] ¶ 4/06/2007 11:32:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
You may have seen an article flying around the blog- and media-space online lately, about some
Lest you think that I'm blowing it out of proportion, here's a link to the article. I'm posting and commenting on some relevant quotes here:
Quote 1: "Watching too much television in childhood could cause autism, experts have warned." Quote 2: "The latest study, in the U.S., looked at whether there was a link between rising rates of autism and the increasing availability of children's TV, videos and DVDs. The research team concluded that the results were "awfully suggestive" of a link between watching TV and autism."
Follow the bouncing media error: the headline says "could cause," but then we get "a link between" in the second quote. We're talking about causation in the first case, and correlation in the second, which the media have now conveniently conflated for your continued incomprehension. *growl*
It gets worse from there. The researchers themselves recommend keeping kids away from the TV as a preventive measure: "[Dr Waldman] recommended those under two did not watch any TV at all, while older youngsters limited their viewing to an hour or two a day." To me that suggests that they, the researchers, believe television-watching is causative. How can they possibly claim that?
And as a researcher, I'm looking at their methodology as reported in the article and it's so shoddy that it's beyond belief. I can't believe that Cornell would have let anyone stamp their university's good name on this junk science:
"As they were unable to obtain any statistics on toddlers' TV habits, they used rainfall levels in different parts of the country to help estimate how much time children spent playing outdoors. (Emphasis mine.) They found that the wettest areas, where, presumably, children spent more time indoors watching TV, had the highest rates of autism. [...] Researcher (sic) also found that areas with the most cable TV customers had the highest rates of autistic children.So, then, if we follow the bouncing logic ball, the real claim is that children with autism just aren't socialized enough and don't spend enough time playing outdoors, and that if we socialize them better, they won't be autistic. (Sounds very Skinnerian to me. Behaviorism again. Hasn't this been discredited yet?)
Granted, this media report is certainly not telling the entire story. I would need to read the reseach in order to critique it any better than this. But from the media report, it appears that these researchers are claiming, or the media are attempting to use it to claim, that we wouldn't have autistics if we didn't have television, which is frigging ridiculous. There are plenty of historical incidents of autistic traits reported in almost every genius you can name. Did television cause Edison to demonstrate autistic traits? Or Einstein? Come ON, people.
Here's the comment I left on the Daily Mail's website:
This is the problem with the media's reporting of scientific research results. First, all the article states is that there is a correlation between autism in children and television viewing. A correlation simply means that two variables are statistically associated with each other. It does not automatically indicate causation!My partner also points out that for autistic children, who are usually quite highly visually-oriented, TV-watching is quite possibly a visual stim. Even if it's not visible to the naked eye as such, a television is a light that is flashing 25 to 30 times per second. Many autistic children love blinky lights and will stare at them for hours (that's usually what's behind the fan-watching thing, too - the blades of the fan create interesting light patterns).
Secondly, while it may be true that autistic children watch more television than non-autistic children, it is far more likely that autistic children like to watch TV because it's safe, predictable and familiar to them, and doesn't involve doing things with their bodies which bring up all their balance and coordination deficits, or trying to communicate with non-autistics, which is tiring and uncomfortable. If the media report of the researchers' assertions is indeed correct, then the researchers don't know how to do research, plain and simple. Their methodology as outlined in the article is highly suspect, and their conclusions are laughable.
In any case, these researchers ought to be ashamed of themselves for a number of reasons, and the media, as usual, has taken something that sounded juicy and plastered it all over the net without bothering to do any fact-checking first, upsetting more parents and adult autistics in the process, and giving the anti-autism groups more ammunition that has all the strength of wet tissue paper when examined with a critical eye. That won't stop CAN and other such groups from bandying it about like a prize fish, though, any more than the anti-gay groups have ever had problems using Paul Cameron's idiotic studies to back up their claims.
This is becoming more and more of a hobbyhorse for me, and when I present my CSA paper next month, it's going to be part of the paper. This kind of junk research needs to frigging STOP. So does behaviorism, but that's for another article and another day.
[ETA: Oh, this just gets better and better. According to articles about this in WebMD and Science Daily, the people doing this research were - get this - business professors and economists.
WTF are business professors and economists doing research on autism for?!? Isn't this, you know, a bit OUT OF THEIR FIELD?]
[ETA 2: I found a link to the article. Here it is (opens as a .PDF, just be aware). Going to look at it right now, but in their abstract (the summary at the beginning) they do say this:
"Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television."Bolded emphases mine. "Due to"? "Is the result of"? Them's causative words, folks, not correlative. Point: These guys don't know how to do research.]
[ETA 3: And in just skimming the research, I find all kinds of admission that indicate they're not as sure about their results as they claim to be:
"Our empirical methodology assumes that autistic children spent their first three years of life in the same county where they reside when they are recorded in our data set."
That's one hell of a big assumption, isn't it?
"the California data continues to show no evidence of a positive correlation between precipitation and autism."
Yeah. And that's their main data set.
"So, although as indicated we do not believe our tests provide definitive evidence for our hypothesis, we believe the most likely explanation for our findings is that early childhood television watching is indeed a trigger for autism."
So, even though they don't have definitive evidence, they still like their hypothesis? What?
It should be obvious that this study has to do a significant amount of reaching and stretching to attempt to justify what it claims to find. It's far too much of a stretch for me.] ¶ 4/06/2007 11:32:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Fundamental Disconnect
Last week, on one of my autism mailing lists, someone posted a link to this article written by a mother of three small children with autism. (Warning, the toilet practices of two autistic children are described in lovingly graphic detail in this post, so if you're eating you might want to stop.) The author of the article slams the neurodiversity community several times, complaining that we (adult autistics) want to keep her from assistance that will help her daughters learn to stop playing in the toilet and how to flush.
I have run across sarcastic posts about the neurodiversity movement like this from time to time, and it always bothered me, but I could never put my finger on why until I read this overtly bitter article. And then it dawned on me: These parents apparently think we want their kids to have NO assistance at all. That we want their six-year-olds to continue playing in a used-but-not-flushed toilet, that we want their ten-year-olds to not learn to flush when they use the toilet, that we want their three-year-olds to live only on Cheerios and cheese. That our objections to the available "treatments" for autism are absolute. That we don't want their kids to learn basic life skills like flushing the toilet and washing their hands and eating a balanced diet.
That could not be further from the truth!
I can sympathize with Ms. Stagliano's problem. It's no fun to clean up the messes that your children make - especially when they involve bodily wastes. As a parent who has had to do that more often than he cares to remember, I know how frustrating and annoying and exhausting that is. And as an adult autistic, I do not want to see young autistics doing things that are dangerous or unhygenic or unhealthy any more than their parents do. I recognize that what Ms. Stagliano is describing is unacceptable behavior for a number of reasons, including sanitation, health, and safety. And while I can see that the neurodiversity community's resistance to the solutions touted by the medical community today may look to Ms. Stagliano and other members of the cure-autism community like a resistance to any services for autistic children at all, I know that that is not the case - but in order to explain what that resistance is and where it comes from, I'm going to have to discuss issues that Ms. Stagliano did not touch upon in her article. The root of those issues is called ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis, and it's Skinnerian behaviorism at its most egregious.
I think that the fundamental disconnect between parents of young autistics and the neurodiversity community is about ABA, because really, it's the thing that is most often touted as a "service" for autistics by the medical establishment, and thus, also the most often demanded by parents. There have been court cases where parents have sued health insurance companies for not covering ABA, and neurodiversity advocates have fought against the parents in court, because ABA has been shown repeatedly to damage autistics psychologically. But the parents don't hear "We are against ABA," because they've been told that ABA is the only solution for them. They hear "We are against your children learning how to cope with the world." And that is not the case. What we are against is the method that is being put forth as "the only solution."
My objection to ABA and other such behaviorally-based practices is threefold. First, while they're technically based on a good idea, which is that learning to take care of oneself is necessary, they are very often taken too far. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard of autistic kids being shocked with electrodes, denied food, beaten, or locked in rooms in institutions and in homes in the name of "therapy." It happens. It's real. And it's scary as hell. It's abusive. Is all ABA abusive? No. But the potential for abuse is certainly there, and becomes a reality far more often than it should, which is never. (On a related note, standard ABA is supposed to be forty hours of work per week with the child. Does anyone really believe that that's either fair or realistic when you're talking about a three-year-old? Or, for that matter, a ten-year-old?)
Second, ABA and other behavioralist setups assume that the child being trained is already able to sense things like when he needs to use the toilet, when he's hungry, when he's thirsty, and that it's willfulness on the child's part that is preventing success. I know from personal experience that a lot of that is information I do not have good or reliable access to, and I'm 35 years old! Expecting a three-year-old autistic to be potty trained is unrealistic and cruel. Expecting a six-year-old autistic, who may not be able to tell that it's potty time, to be potty trained is just as cruel. We have all these stupid schedules for when you're supposed to learn life skills - when did that happen? So what if he's still in diapers at six? It is probably not his choice to be that unaware of what his body needs. Some of the adult autistics that Ms. Stagliano complains about, the ones who are able to "speak eloquently, write blogs, move out on their own, marry, have children and manage their autistic traits" still can't control their bowels, even as adults. I know of three just in my immediate acquaintance. One of them wears a colostomy bag. Punishing an autistic child for not being able to figure out when he needs to go to the bathroom may very well be like punishing a blind kid for not looking at things hard enough.
Third - and this is a biggie, they all are, but this is where I really get my dander up over ABA - if you want to use behaviorist methods to teach a child what are called "life skills," that's great. That's necessary. We do that with neurotypical children too. Yes, teach him how to flush the toilet after he uses it. Teach her not to play in the toilet at all. These are necessary things to know and remember. But using any behaviorist approach to try to teach social skills - um, no. Not okay. More to the point, not realistic. Social skills require cognition, not a rote response or habit, nine times out of ten. In order to teach a child social skills, you have to step away from the behaviorist setup, which says that the mind doesn't matter. If you want appropriate social responses from an autistic child, you first have to find a way to communicate with him, so that he can understand why he has to look people in the eye, take turns, and so forth. Simply training him to mimic social skills doesn't do a damn thing, and can often make things worse.
Now, I did not personally get ABA treatment as a child. It didn't exist in the 1970s for people who were on the lighter side of the autism spectrum, like me. I'm not Rain Man, so I wasn't "obvious" to the doctors. The proper diagnosis for my type of autism didn't come into being until sometime in the 1980s. That did not change the fact that I was pressured and forced into eliminating my "weird" behaviors in much the same way as autistic children are pressured through ABA treatment today, however. And as someone who was coerced into mimicking social responses, I have to tell you that it didn't do a damn thing for me and made my life a living hell in a lot of ways. Behaviorist approaches don't appear to differentiate between "what is necessary for the child's physical well-being" and "what the parents want so that their kid doesn't act strangely in public." If you want your child to successfully develop social skills, he will have to do it the same way any kid does - by trial and error and thoughtful application of reasoning skills - and because he or she is autistic, it will take longer, because she or he doesn't have access to all the nonverbal signals that neurotypicals use to adroitly manuver through social situations. Trying to get her to mimic normality is only going to set her further back, because neurotypicals are not stupid, and they can almost always tell that there's something off about the presentation.
I will admit that Ms. Stagliano may not be thinking of ABA when she says she wants services for her children. But there are certain phrases in what she wrote which at least imply a desire for some extreme treatment to eradicate her children's autism. Phrases like "recover from their autism" and "don't tell me to give up on my girls" indicate that she sees autism as a fixable condition rather than a state of being, and that allowing them to be anything other than completely stereotypical neurotypicals is "giving up." That's the crux of the problem. ABA is touted as a "cure" by the more extreme pseudo-physicians who play on parents' hopes, dreams, and fears, and that's not okay either - and if they're desperate enough and refusing to see autism as part of their child rather than a disease, parents are more likely to accept this extreme and damaging "treatment." That's my worry, and the worry of most of the members of the neurodiversity community - that when Ms. Stagliano and other parents of autistic children say these things, what they want is ABA to magically make their autistic children into neurotypicals - in other words, they see it as a cure, which also implies that they do not see autism as a part of their child but as something separate, outside, and malignant.
Ms. Stagliano, if you want ABA so that your child knows how to flush the toilet, brush her teeth, dress and feed herself, that's great. I have no problem with that. If you want ABA so that your child stops acting weird in public, that's not great, and I have a big problem with it - and in my experience, that's where most adult autistics also have a problem with it. Is it worth it to make your child "normal" if you take away all the things that make her a unique person? So what if she spins? So what if she rocks? So what if she loves to talk about elephants, nutcrackers, or the imports and exports of Peru? Are those things really that bad? Get some perspective, please. Training your child to stop running out into the street is good. Training your child to stop rocking, flapping, or spinning is bad - and too often, that's what ABA focuses on most, instead of the important things like life skills and safety.
I guess my plea to Ms. Stagliano, and the rest of the "cure autism" community, is really this: take a hard look at your priorities, because being weird or different is not a crime. All we're asking is that you stop treating non-dangerous differences as if they are dangerous - to stop blowing your child's differences out of proportion. Do that, and I think you'll find support from the neurodiveristy community on the truly important things: health and safety.
Let's face it: we all want autistic children to be safe and happy - both those of us who are their parents, and those of us who used to be autistic children ourselves. Let's get together on what those words mean, and find realistic and non-damaging ways to achieve them.
Although I would like to spend some time addressing how ABA is ineffective in the "teaching social skills" department and damaging in other ways, I do not have the energy or time to assemble a list of references and write a more in-depth critique and explanation at this time. I may do that in a forthcoming post, but no promises as to when - it's been a long school year and I'm not done yet. I just really needed to address this while it was fresh in my mind. ¶ 1/12/2007 09:09:00 PM 3 comments links to this post
I have run across sarcastic posts about the neurodiversity movement like this from time to time, and it always bothered me, but I could never put my finger on why until I read this overtly bitter article. And then it dawned on me: These parents apparently think we want their kids to have NO assistance at all. That we want their six-year-olds to continue playing in a used-but-not-flushed toilet, that we want their ten-year-olds to not learn to flush when they use the toilet, that we want their three-year-olds to live only on Cheerios and cheese. That our objections to the available "treatments" for autism are absolute. That we don't want their kids to learn basic life skills like flushing the toilet and washing their hands and eating a balanced diet.
That could not be further from the truth!
I can sympathize with Ms. Stagliano's problem. It's no fun to clean up the messes that your children make - especially when they involve bodily wastes. As a parent who has had to do that more often than he cares to remember, I know how frustrating and annoying and exhausting that is. And as an adult autistic, I do not want to see young autistics doing things that are dangerous or unhygenic or unhealthy any more than their parents do. I recognize that what Ms. Stagliano is describing is unacceptable behavior for a number of reasons, including sanitation, health, and safety. And while I can see that the neurodiversity community's resistance to the solutions touted by the medical community today may look to Ms. Stagliano and other members of the cure-autism community like a resistance to any services for autistic children at all, I know that that is not the case - but in order to explain what that resistance is and where it comes from, I'm going to have to discuss issues that Ms. Stagliano did not touch upon in her article. The root of those issues is called ABA, Applied Behavior Analysis, and it's Skinnerian behaviorism at its most egregious.
I think that the fundamental disconnect between parents of young autistics and the neurodiversity community is about ABA, because really, it's the thing that is most often touted as a "service" for autistics by the medical establishment, and thus, also the most often demanded by parents. There have been court cases where parents have sued health insurance companies for not covering ABA, and neurodiversity advocates have fought against the parents in court, because ABA has been shown repeatedly to damage autistics psychologically. But the parents don't hear "We are against ABA," because they've been told that ABA is the only solution for them. They hear "We are against your children learning how to cope with the world." And that is not the case. What we are against is the method that is being put forth as "the only solution."
My objection to ABA and other such behaviorally-based practices is threefold. First, while they're technically based on a good idea, which is that learning to take care of oneself is necessary, they are very often taken too far. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard of autistic kids being shocked with electrodes, denied food, beaten, or locked in rooms in institutions and in homes in the name of "therapy." It happens. It's real. And it's scary as hell. It's abusive. Is all ABA abusive? No. But the potential for abuse is certainly there, and becomes a reality far more often than it should, which is never. (On a related note, standard ABA is supposed to be forty hours of work per week with the child. Does anyone really believe that that's either fair or realistic when you're talking about a three-year-old? Or, for that matter, a ten-year-old?)
Second, ABA and other behavioralist setups assume that the child being trained is already able to sense things like when he needs to use the toilet, when he's hungry, when he's thirsty, and that it's willfulness on the child's part that is preventing success. I know from personal experience that a lot of that is information I do not have good or reliable access to, and I'm 35 years old! Expecting a three-year-old autistic to be potty trained is unrealistic and cruel. Expecting a six-year-old autistic, who may not be able to tell that it's potty time, to be potty trained is just as cruel. We have all these stupid schedules for when you're supposed to learn life skills - when did that happen? So what if he's still in diapers at six? It is probably not his choice to be that unaware of what his body needs. Some of the adult autistics that Ms. Stagliano complains about, the ones who are able to "speak eloquently, write blogs, move out on their own, marry, have children and manage their autistic traits" still can't control their bowels, even as adults. I know of three just in my immediate acquaintance. One of them wears a colostomy bag. Punishing an autistic child for not being able to figure out when he needs to go to the bathroom may very well be like punishing a blind kid for not looking at things hard enough.
Third - and this is a biggie, they all are, but this is where I really get my dander up over ABA - if you want to use behaviorist methods to teach a child what are called "life skills," that's great. That's necessary. We do that with neurotypical children too. Yes, teach him how to flush the toilet after he uses it. Teach her not to play in the toilet at all. These are necessary things to know and remember. But using any behaviorist approach to try to teach social skills - um, no. Not okay. More to the point, not realistic. Social skills require cognition, not a rote response or habit, nine times out of ten. In order to teach a child social skills, you have to step away from the behaviorist setup, which says that the mind doesn't matter. If you want appropriate social responses from an autistic child, you first have to find a way to communicate with him, so that he can understand why he has to look people in the eye, take turns, and so forth. Simply training him to mimic social skills doesn't do a damn thing, and can often make things worse.
Now, I did not personally get ABA treatment as a child. It didn't exist in the 1970s for people who were on the lighter side of the autism spectrum, like me. I'm not Rain Man, so I wasn't "obvious" to the doctors. The proper diagnosis for my type of autism didn't come into being until sometime in the 1980s. That did not change the fact that I was pressured and forced into eliminating my "weird" behaviors in much the same way as autistic children are pressured through ABA treatment today, however. And as someone who was coerced into mimicking social responses, I have to tell you that it didn't do a damn thing for me and made my life a living hell in a lot of ways. Behaviorist approaches don't appear to differentiate between "what is necessary for the child's physical well-being" and "what the parents want so that their kid doesn't act strangely in public." If you want your child to successfully develop social skills, he will have to do it the same way any kid does - by trial and error and thoughtful application of reasoning skills - and because he or she is autistic, it will take longer, because she or he doesn't have access to all the nonverbal signals that neurotypicals use to adroitly manuver through social situations. Trying to get her to mimic normality is only going to set her further back, because neurotypicals are not stupid, and they can almost always tell that there's something off about the presentation.
I will admit that Ms. Stagliano may not be thinking of ABA when she says she wants services for her children. But there are certain phrases in what she wrote which at least imply a desire for some extreme treatment to eradicate her children's autism. Phrases like "recover from their autism" and "don't tell me to give up on my girls" indicate that she sees autism as a fixable condition rather than a state of being, and that allowing them to be anything other than completely stereotypical neurotypicals is "giving up." That's the crux of the problem. ABA is touted as a "cure" by the more extreme pseudo-physicians who play on parents' hopes, dreams, and fears, and that's not okay either - and if they're desperate enough and refusing to see autism as part of their child rather than a disease, parents are more likely to accept this extreme and damaging "treatment." That's my worry, and the worry of most of the members of the neurodiversity community - that when Ms. Stagliano and other parents of autistic children say these things, what they want is ABA to magically make their autistic children into neurotypicals - in other words, they see it as a cure, which also implies that they do not see autism as a part of their child but as something separate, outside, and malignant.
Ms. Stagliano, if you want ABA so that your child knows how to flush the toilet, brush her teeth, dress and feed herself, that's great. I have no problem with that. If you want ABA so that your child stops acting weird in public, that's not great, and I have a big problem with it - and in my experience, that's where most adult autistics also have a problem with it. Is it worth it to make your child "normal" if you take away all the things that make her a unique person? So what if she spins? So what if she rocks? So what if she loves to talk about elephants, nutcrackers, or the imports and exports of Peru? Are those things really that bad? Get some perspective, please. Training your child to stop running out into the street is good. Training your child to stop rocking, flapping, or spinning is bad - and too often, that's what ABA focuses on most, instead of the important things like life skills and safety.
I guess my plea to Ms. Stagliano, and the rest of the "cure autism" community, is really this: take a hard look at your priorities, because being weird or different is not a crime. All we're asking is that you stop treating non-dangerous differences as if they are dangerous - to stop blowing your child's differences out of proportion. Do that, and I think you'll find support from the neurodiveristy community on the truly important things: health and safety.
Let's face it: we all want autistic children to be safe and happy - both those of us who are their parents, and those of us who used to be autistic children ourselves. Let's get together on what those words mean, and find realistic and non-damaging ways to achieve them.
Although I would like to spend some time addressing how ABA is ineffective in the "teaching social skills" department and damaging in other ways, I do not have the energy or time to assemble a list of references and write a more in-depth critique and explanation at this time. I may do that in a forthcoming post, but no promises as to when - it's been a long school year and I'm not done yet. I just really needed to address this while it was fresh in my mind. ¶ 1/12/2007 09:09:00 PM 3 comments links to this post
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Call to Action
This November 7, vote EVERY Republican out of office.
Anti-Republican soundbites.
Remember and remind, constantly:
National Security:
- Torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
- Government-sponsored refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions - creating dangers for our servicemen and -women overseas.
- Withdrawal of federal funds for terrorism preparation and defense of New York City.
- Osama still on the loose.
- The Valerie Plame scandal. Remember that? Rove leaking her name because her husband had pissed off the Bushies?
Military:
- An estimated 3,000 American military deaths and 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of Bush's war.
- Inadequate armor, troop mustering, and weaponry for a successful Iraqi campaign.
- Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan?
Legal/Constitutional:
- Continued erosion of our freedoms, to wit:
* The Patriot Act.
* The Real ID Act.
* The Military Commissions Act.
* Elimination of the rights of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and privacy.
* Internet data trawling of regular citizens to find supposed terrorists.
* The suborning of the press to corporate and governmental interests.
* The nominations and confirmations of two of the worst right-wing reactionaries to sit on the Supreme Court since Scalia was put there.
* Illegal wiretapping.
* Refusal by the Bush Adminstration to abide by court rulings which ruled its actions unconstitutional and illegal.
Fiscal:
- A bigger deficit than we've ever had in our nation's history.
- More pork-barreling than even the Democrats at their worst achieved.
- No-bid contracts for Halliburton and other major defense and energy contractors.
- Tax cuts for the filthy rich and for corporations while the American middle class and working poor have to pay more in taxes every month.
Ethical:
- Suspected and in some cases proven vote fraud and disenfranchising of minority voters.
- Republicans baldly lying to their constitutencies about:
* GOP tolerance of gays when the gays toe the GOP line.
* GOP adherence to so-called Christian values.
* GOP adherence to traditional conservative fiscal values.
- Tom DeLay.
- Mark Foley.
- Robert Ney.
- Abramhoff.
- Karl Rove - Valerie Plame.
You should be sickened, if you're an American citizen. You should be reminding your fellow citizens of these talking points and scandals every chance you get. Remind them that the GOP are the party of the elites, for the elites, by the elites, and they don't really give a ripe fuck about anyone who isn't an elite.
Drag everyone in your neighborhood to the ballot box on November 7th. Print this out and put it in their hand and make them read it as they walk or ride with you. Get the damn vote out, folks. This is not America anymore, but we can take it back - if we work hard enough and push hard enough and throw the bastards out. ¶ 10/19/2006 01:26:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Anti-Republican soundbites.
Remember and remind, constantly:
National Security:
- Torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
- Government-sponsored refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions - creating dangers for our servicemen and -women overseas.
- Withdrawal of federal funds for terrorism preparation and defense of New York City.
- Osama still on the loose.
- The Valerie Plame scandal. Remember that? Rove leaking her name because her husband had pissed off the Bushies?
Military:
- An estimated 3,000 American military deaths and 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of Bush's war.
- Inadequate armor, troop mustering, and weaponry for a successful Iraqi campaign.
- Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan?
Legal/Constitutional:
- Continued erosion of our freedoms, to wit:
* The Patriot Act.
* The Real ID Act.
* The Military Commissions Act.
* Elimination of the rights of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and privacy.
* Internet data trawling of regular citizens to find supposed terrorists.
* The suborning of the press to corporate and governmental interests.
* The nominations and confirmations of two of the worst right-wing reactionaries to sit on the Supreme Court since Scalia was put there.
* Illegal wiretapping.
* Refusal by the Bush Adminstration to abide by court rulings which ruled its actions unconstitutional and illegal.
Fiscal:
- A bigger deficit than we've ever had in our nation's history.
- More pork-barreling than even the Democrats at their worst achieved.
- No-bid contracts for Halliburton and other major defense and energy contractors.
- Tax cuts for the filthy rich and for corporations while the American middle class and working poor have to pay more in taxes every month.
Ethical:
- Suspected and in some cases proven vote fraud and disenfranchising of minority voters.
- Republicans baldly lying to their constitutencies about:
* GOP tolerance of gays when the gays toe the GOP line.
* GOP adherence to so-called Christian values.
* GOP adherence to traditional conservative fiscal values.
- Tom DeLay.
- Mark Foley.
- Robert Ney.
- Abramhoff.
- Karl Rove - Valerie Plame.
You should be sickened, if you're an American citizen. You should be reminding your fellow citizens of these talking points and scandals every chance you get. Remind them that the GOP are the party of the elites, for the elites, by the elites, and they don't really give a ripe fuck about anyone who isn't an elite.
Drag everyone in your neighborhood to the ballot box on November 7th. Print this out and put it in their hand and make them read it as they walk or ride with you. Get the damn vote out, folks. This is not America anymore, but we can take it back - if we work hard enough and push hard enough and throw the bastards out. ¶ 10/19/2006 01:26:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Is Reason a Lost Cause?
(Crossposted to My Left Wing and - tomorrow - to Daily Kos.)
One of the recurring themes I find throughout the liberal blogosphere is the ongoing difficulty concerning attempts to reason with the common or garden neoconservative. Things that seem so clear-cut and obvious to those of us on the left are met with reactions ranging from curt dismissal, to snide mockery, to impassioned yet circular reasoning, to outright fury, when presented to neoconservatives. In discussions with neocons, logic and reason continually go by the boards, to be replaced with ideological ranting and religious self-righteousness. It leaves us liberal folks scratching our heads in puzzlement and trying to figure out why their reaction is so strong and so negative to the reasonable, factual statements we make.
Why is reasoning and discussion with neoconservatives so impossible? Why does it continually devolve into the leaps of logic and ad hominem attacks that we're all far too familiar with? The problem is, unfortunately, endemic to neoconservatism. Sadly, the very elements which make up a reasoned and honest debate are not just lacking in neoconservative thought, they are outright demonized and actively rejected by neocons. Things that liberals take for granted, such as openness, honesty, fact-based thinking, the ability to talk about abstract concepts, to stay with one topic until agreement or compromise has been reached, and - perhaps most importantly - to see the connections and similarities and patterns in events and actions: these are central necessities to debate and reason, and they are actively rejected by most, if not all, neoconservatives.
Honesty and Openness
As thereisnospoon has pointed out here:
That's the cornerstone of the issue. Without openness and honesty, real debate and actual reasoning are impossible. As long as the idea is to keep up appearances, honesty has no place in the discussion.
Fact-Based Thinking
Here's a great divide between the reality-based community and the ideology/faith-based one: If it doesn't fit into your belief system, discard it - the mantra of those who think that a book or a set of economic ideals (neither of which stand up to reasoned scrutiny) is the best guide to living one's life. Challenging the basis of the faith (or ideology) causes neoconservatives such intense cognitive dissonance that they attack the person or situation who provoked it, the same way that a dog will attack a veterinarian who is trying to take a foreign object out of a wound in its leg. They literally can't admit that their ideas might be wrong or flawed (appearances, appearances!); doing that would be akin to a child having to admit that his father, while a very loving man, also had multiple affairs and hurt his wife a lot by doing so. It's too hard to deal with and too scary for them to handle.
Abstractions
Those of us in the reality-based community have no choice but to understand and use abstractions; they're part of real life. Things are never wholly good or wholly bad, and most of us reality-based folks can admit to flaws in our leaders and beliefs while still finding those leaders and beliefs functional and essentially good. Those in the faith-based community can't deal with the cognitive dissonance that such abstractions present to them; their minds are so limited - from years of repetitive, nonreasoning belief or ideology - that they can't deal with a world whose situations come in many shades of grey, instead of black-and-white, clearly cut, easily discernible, concrete, dichotomous choices. Plainly put, logic and reasoning don't work with people who can't think in abstract concepts. I have never yet known a neoconservative who can think in anything but concrete concepts. Implications and long-term consequences are so far off their radar that they might as well be nonexistent.
Sticking With The Topic
For a liberal, the point of debate and reason is to come to an agreement or a compromise - to find the win-win situation. For a neoconservative, the point of argument is to win. As a result, the two groups are coming at this with opposing goals.
This is why neoconservatives, by and large, refuse to stick to the topic at hand. In fact, they appear incapable of it. To them, adding in more and more ammunition/evidence/"evidence," and jumping from point to point in a verbal (and often self-contradictory) blitzkrieg, is perfectly okay, because it puts their opponent off-balance, which to them means that they've won. Winning is the important thing - it doesn't matter if they're right as long as they can shut you up!
Connections
In the rare event that you can get a neoconservative to stick to one topic and actually argue it out with you, they will invariably insist that whatever you're talking about is simply an isolated case. No matter how many "isolated cases" you can present them with, they will insist that there's no connection - because to them, there isn't. If the "isolated cases" are not identical down to the smallest detail particular, then there's nothing to say. "Mark Foley's pedophilia is minor! Clinton having an affair is major! There's no similarity there! Foley was just misguided!"
Seeing connections you point out is something they can't or won't do. There are no connections between one event and another for neoconservatives, unless they're connections that they themselves have come up with, which goes back to their goal of "winning." They refuse to acknowledge their opponent's points, because anything which weakens their argument causes them too much cognitive dissonance.
This is how neoconservatives operate in such comfortable oblivion, by refusing to see connections and patterns that are obvious to the rest of us.
Is There A Solution?
Obviously, education is key. Education beyond high school invariably forces students to look at abstractions and deal with them. It's why I'm such a firm advocate of it. Get 'em while they're young, while they can still handle the transition. It's one of the a major reasons why neoconservative parents are afraid of sending their kids to university; being at university almost invariably makes the kids start questioning the faith-based community and opting (after some difficulty) for the reality-based one.
In a conversation with AaronBa on DailyKos (where much of this diary sprang from), he said:
That is both the heart of, and a possible key to solving, the problem. Yes, they may know it. but they actively refuse to pay attention to that knowledge. To do so would destroy them utterly, and they have no concept of how to rebuild from that kind of destruction. The fact that rebuilding is not only possible but damn near inevitable escapes them. In their ossified minds, change is The Worst Thing In The World - which is why the people currently in office have so little trouble manipulating them.
These fears of change include the fear of what it means for them to be wrong. Nobody likes having made mistakes, but neoconservatives are pathologically afraid of it, and will go to great lengths to avoid either admitting they made a mistake or having it noticed by others. The anger and despair of Naniboujou's "An Open Letter To My Father underscores this particular point. The loyalty of a neoconservative follower is hard to derail, and the fallout often is not pretty or easy to cope with - because fear is pernicious and hard to shake. And when their fear-based loyalty causes them to make the serious mistake of supporting someone like Bush 43 and the neoconservatives who occupy the halls of Congress, the fallout increases by several orders of magnitude.
So what's the key, then? I think it's fairly obvious.
In order to reason with neoconservatives, we will first have to find ways to reduce their fears and help them realize what they already know - and help them cope with it, as they come to realize that what they already know is not a threat but a promise, a promise of a happier, more fulfilling, calmer life for them, infinitely preferable to the constant fear that currently has them imprisoned. Until we can do that, our efforts at reason may be a pointless throwing of our good seeds upon hardened clay, instead of fertile soil. ¶ 10/01/2006 07:56:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
One of the recurring themes I find throughout the liberal blogosphere is the ongoing difficulty concerning attempts to reason with the common or garden neoconservative. Things that seem so clear-cut and obvious to those of us on the left are met with reactions ranging from curt dismissal, to snide mockery, to impassioned yet circular reasoning, to outright fury, when presented to neoconservatives. In discussions with neocons, logic and reason continually go by the boards, to be replaced with ideological ranting and religious self-righteousness. It leaves us liberal folks scratching our heads in puzzlement and trying to figure out why their reaction is so strong and so negative to the reasonable, factual statements we make.
Why is reasoning and discussion with neoconservatives so impossible? Why does it continually devolve into the leaps of logic and ad hominem attacks that we're all far too familiar with? The problem is, unfortunately, endemic to neoconservatism. Sadly, the very elements which make up a reasoned and honest debate are not just lacking in neoconservative thought, they are outright demonized and actively rejected by neocons. Things that liberals take for granted, such as openness, honesty, fact-based thinking, the ability to talk about abstract concepts, to stay with one topic until agreement or compromise has been reached, and - perhaps most importantly - to see the connections and similarities and patterns in events and actions: these are central necessities to debate and reason, and they are actively rejected by most, if not all, neoconservatives.
Honesty and Openness
As thereisnospoon has pointed out here:
To a Conservative, APPEARANCES are everything--SUBSTANCE is nothing.
Clinton's great crime, therefore, was NOT having an affair with an intern. To err is human. His crime was getting CAUGHT.
Men having sex with men isn't the problem--being OPEN about having sex with men is the problem. "Do it in your bedroom," they say, "but don't rub it in my face."
That's the cornerstone of the issue. Without openness and honesty, real debate and actual reasoning are impossible. As long as the idea is to keep up appearances, honesty has no place in the discussion.
Fact-Based Thinking
Here's a great divide between the reality-based community and the ideology/faith-based one: If it doesn't fit into your belief system, discard it - the mantra of those who think that a book or a set of economic ideals (neither of which stand up to reasoned scrutiny) is the best guide to living one's life. Challenging the basis of the faith (or ideology) causes neoconservatives such intense cognitive dissonance that they attack the person or situation who provoked it, the same way that a dog will attack a veterinarian who is trying to take a foreign object out of a wound in its leg. They literally can't admit that their ideas might be wrong or flawed (appearances, appearances!); doing that would be akin to a child having to admit that his father, while a very loving man, also had multiple affairs and hurt his wife a lot by doing so. It's too hard to deal with and too scary for them to handle.
Abstractions
Those of us in the reality-based community have no choice but to understand and use abstractions; they're part of real life. Things are never wholly good or wholly bad, and most of us reality-based folks can admit to flaws in our leaders and beliefs while still finding those leaders and beliefs functional and essentially good. Those in the faith-based community can't deal with the cognitive dissonance that such abstractions present to them; their minds are so limited - from years of repetitive, nonreasoning belief or ideology - that they can't deal with a world whose situations come in many shades of grey, instead of black-and-white, clearly cut, easily discernible, concrete, dichotomous choices. Plainly put, logic and reasoning don't work with people who can't think in abstract concepts. I have never yet known a neoconservative who can think in anything but concrete concepts. Implications and long-term consequences are so far off their radar that they might as well be nonexistent.
Sticking With The Topic
For a liberal, the point of debate and reason is to come to an agreement or a compromise - to find the win-win situation. For a neoconservative, the point of argument is to win. As a result, the two groups are coming at this with opposing goals.
This is why neoconservatives, by and large, refuse to stick to the topic at hand. In fact, they appear incapable of it. To them, adding in more and more ammunition/evidence/"evidence," and jumping from point to point in a verbal (and often self-contradictory) blitzkrieg, is perfectly okay, because it puts their opponent off-balance, which to them means that they've won. Winning is the important thing - it doesn't matter if they're right as long as they can shut you up!
Connections
In the rare event that you can get a neoconservative to stick to one topic and actually argue it out with you, they will invariably insist that whatever you're talking about is simply an isolated case. No matter how many "isolated cases" you can present them with, they will insist that there's no connection - because to them, there isn't. If the "isolated cases" are not identical down to the smallest detail particular, then there's nothing to say. "Mark Foley's pedophilia is minor! Clinton having an affair is major! There's no similarity there! Foley was just misguided!"
Seeing connections you point out is something they can't or won't do. There are no connections between one event and another for neoconservatives, unless they're connections that they themselves have come up with, which goes back to their goal of "winning." They refuse to acknowledge their opponent's points, because anything which weakens their argument causes them too much cognitive dissonance.
This is how neoconservatives operate in such comfortable oblivion, by refusing to see connections and patterns that are obvious to the rest of us.
Is There A Solution?
Obviously, education is key. Education beyond high school invariably forces students to look at abstractions and deal with them. It's why I'm such a firm advocate of it. Get 'em while they're young, while they can still handle the transition. It's one of the a major reasons why neoconservative parents are afraid of sending their kids to university; being at university almost invariably makes the kids start questioning the faith-based community and opting (after some difficulty) for the reality-based one.
In a conversation with AaronBa on DailyKos (where much of this diary sprang from), he said:
[E]ven the neocons scramble to send their kids to Harvard, Haverford, and all the other "name" schools[...]
In their hearts of hearts, they know that the education at those places is better than at, say, Bob Jones University.
In their hearts of hearts, they know that what they spout each day is nonsense.
That is both the heart of, and a possible key to solving, the problem. Yes, they may know it. but they actively refuse to pay attention to that knowledge. To do so would destroy them utterly, and they have no concept of how to rebuild from that kind of destruction. The fact that rebuilding is not only possible but damn near inevitable escapes them. In their ossified minds, change is The Worst Thing In The World - which is why the people currently in office have so little trouble manipulating them.
These fears of change include the fear of what it means for them to be wrong. Nobody likes having made mistakes, but neoconservatives are pathologically afraid of it, and will go to great lengths to avoid either admitting they made a mistake or having it noticed by others. The anger and despair of Naniboujou's "An Open Letter To My Father underscores this particular point. The loyalty of a neoconservative follower is hard to derail, and the fallout often is not pretty or easy to cope with - because fear is pernicious and hard to shake. And when their fear-based loyalty causes them to make the serious mistake of supporting someone like Bush 43 and the neoconservatives who occupy the halls of Congress, the fallout increases by several orders of magnitude.
So what's the key, then? I think it's fairly obvious.
In order to reason with neoconservatives, we will first have to find ways to reduce their fears and help them realize what they already know - and help them cope with it, as they come to realize that what they already know is not a threat but a promise, a promise of a happier, more fulfilling, calmer life for them, infinitely preferable to the constant fear that currently has them imprisoned. Until we can do that, our efforts at reason may be a pointless throwing of our good seeds upon hardened clay, instead of fertile soil. ¶ 10/01/2006 07:56:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Found elsewhere. Pass it on.
GOP in 1950: "Fear! There are Communists in the US and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1960: "Fear! Blacks want equal rights and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1970: "Fear! Hippies want to stop the war and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1982: "Fear! Gay People are coming out of the closet and have disease and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1990: "Fear! Democrats are spending too much money and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1998: "Fear! Democrats are trying to wag the dog with some Terrorism macguffin and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2002: "Fear! Terrorists have been coddled by Democrats and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2004: "Fear! Gay People want equal rights and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2006: "Fear! If we don't get rid of everybody's rights, Democrats and Terrorists will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
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The Republican Party: scaring you shitless since 1950. So Vote Republican, because fear and wrong predictions should run your life. ¶ 10/01/2006 10:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
GOP in 1960: "Fear! Blacks want equal rights and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1970: "Fear! Hippies want to stop the war and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1982: "Fear! Gay People are coming out of the closet and have disease and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1990: "Fear! Democrats are spending too much money and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 1998: "Fear! Democrats are trying to wag the dog with some Terrorism macguffin and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2002: "Fear! Terrorists have been coddled by Democrats and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2004: "Fear! Gay People want equal rights and they will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
GOP in 2006: "Fear! If we don't get rid of everybody's rights, Democrats and Terrorists will Wreck Our Way Of Life!"
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The Republican Party: scaring you shitless since 1950. So Vote Republican, because fear and wrong predictions should run your life. ¶ 10/01/2006 10:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
