Protest ideas

There are a lot of good comments below. I am still unsure about what we can do.

A couple of people suggested that I stop referring to the sexual orientation of incompetent and corrupt court psychologists. They say that it is a distraction from the great harm being done.

Research shows that you need 10% for a political movement:

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

So we do not need to convince everyone, but we do need to convince at least 10% to be committed to the cause.

I attended a public Occupy Santa Cruz meeting, just to study their organizational structure. That movement has gotten a lot of momentum rapidly. They do not have any coherent goals. Just a conviction that there is a financial elite that is running this country to the disadvantage of the other 99%.

The Occupy movement seems to include college grads complaining about student loan debt. Possibly they would be sympathetic to dads with child support debt.

I have to be at the Watsonville courthouse on Friday morning for my contempt sentencing. I assume that Judge Heather Morse will not actually punish me, since she had to make up new orders during my contempt trial in order to claim that I was violating her orders. I would be happy to join in a protest, but I don't think that we have enough yet.

Court reporters are getting scarce

Law.com reports:

Are Court Reporters a Luxury Item in California?

For a growing number of California's trial lawyers, a briefcase isn't the only thing they need to bring to court anymore.

A handful of courts, struggling with severe budget cutbacks, are now requiring lawyers and litigants to hire their own court reporters for many types of civil proceedings -- or face going without one.

San Francisco Superior Court announced Thursday that it is dropping reporting services in 16 courtrooms, including most of its civil departments. Napa, Alameda and Stanislaus are among other courts that have already adopted, or are in the process of adopting, a bring-your-own-reporter policy. ...

Lawmakers, usually Republicans, have proposed in the past that courts switch to electronic court reporting to save money. Those proposals have quickly died, however, in the face of stiff opposition from the reporters' lobbies and unions as well as many lawyers who say recording is unreliable.

San Francisco court leaders are considering the use of electronic recording in misdemeanor cases, but not as a replacement for reporters in civil matters.

Court reporters are just not practical anymore. Universal electronic recording of courtroom proceedings is inevitable.

Why kids get drugged

An anonymous attorney writes:

Childless Adults, Unsurprisingly, Don't Understand Children

By now, every child in the United States except for two in Minnesota and one in New Jersey has been delcared to suffer from "ADHD" or "bipolar disorder." They're required to take expensive medications, be monitored by a slew of doctors, lawyers, social workers and other helpers, and now have a handy excuse for why they're getting bad grades or into trouble.

In America's courtrooms, these diagnoses are treated as holy writ. I've never heard a lawyer or a judge question any of this. And on the strength of these claims, planets must be moved and fortunes spent to accommodate the "special needs." Sprawling industries are nurtured.

Once upon a time, of course, we simply said that kids were rambunctious or had ups and downs. By the onset of adulthood, these things had calmed down. All perfectly normal.

Mrs. Anonymous Attorney observed the other night, however, that many of the adults who today make these diagnoses do not have children of their own: the legions of (usually white) female lawyers who, despite working as "guardian at litem" or for the Youth Services Department, are childless, the male social worker who's unmarried and childless, the psychologists and psychiatrists who have no children, etc.

The Santa Cruz family court relies heavily on a psychologist that my readers call Dr. Gay. He has no kids and no experience with kids. That would not necessarily disqualify him, if he restricted his testimony to his areas of expertise. But he never even took any classes in child development when he was in school, and his reports show no trace of having any expertise on the subject at all. I have had 14-year-old babysitters who understand kids better than Dr. Gay.

Nobel Peace Prize

A reader sends the Nobel Peace Prize announcement to three Third World women:

They were chosen "for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work," the committee said in Oslo, Norway.

"We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society."

A grand social experiment is in progress. Iceland voters were so upset with their 2008–2011 financial crisis, that they blamed the men and elected a lesbian Prime Minister.

Pres. Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Internationally, I expect him to be known primarily for the Obama Doctrine and the start of the Drone Wars. He has escalated the use of unmanned drones to search and destroy enemies whereever they may be, including countries where we are not at war, such as Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. He does this without any war authorization from Congress or the UN. His drones are controlled by secret elite CIA assassins, and not the military forces. He even kills Americans overseas without due process.

I don't want to get into a foreign policy debate. It is too far off-topic for this blog. I am just pointing out that the Nobel Peace Prize is a joke. Surely the prize committee would never have given the prize to Obama if they had understood his foreign policy.

Crazy single moms

Journalist Katie Roiphe writes about being a crazy single mom:

I often hear people refer to other single mothers I know as “crazy,” and I assume that they refer to me that way, too. ...

Before I have the baby, one of my friends politely suggests that it may be “hubris” to think that I can make up for the fact that the baby’s father would not be in the house, and not even in the city most of the time. ...

The submerged premise here is that there is something greedy, selfish, narcissistic, or anti-social about having a baby on your own. ...

At lunch I mention to an editor that I am thinking of writing about single mothers and the subtle and not so subtle forms our moralism toward them takes. He says: “That’s a good idea. And I say that as a guy who looks at single women and thinks, ‘What’s wrong with her? How did she screw up?’ ”

In spite of our exquisite tolerance for and fascination with all kinds of alternative lifestyles, we have a wildly outdated but strangely pervasive idea that single motherhood is worse for children, somehow a compromise, a flawed venture, a grave psychological blow to be overcome, our enlightened modern version of shame. It malingers, this idea; it affects us still.

The power of this view is that it very easily gets inside your head, it resonates with every children’s book you have ever read about little bear families, with all the archaic visions of family that cohere in the furthest reaches of your imagination: It’s hard to free yourself.

She cannot free herself from the idea that it is crazy to be a single mom, and wrong to force her kids to grow up without a father. All that exquisite tolerance that her feminist background teaches her fails to reassure her.

Non-technical reasons such as divorce

A reader writes:

I just bought my first set of "cutlery" i.e., professional knives. They are beautiful, expensive and are a dream to work with. I had a few "Henkels" knives, and they made me aware of the value of a good set of knives.

Anyway, I was reading the instructions on their care and usage and came across the following:

RETURNS
"Knives which are given as gifts are not refundable. Knives which are not wanted due to non-technical reasons such as divorce, not enough counter space, spouse doesn't like the color, etc. are not refundable. Any return must be discussed with Customer Service before being sent back."

I am going to take a wild guess and say that "spouse" means wives as in "the spouse doesn't like the color." I can I could also safely say that not wanted by spouse means wives also.

It sounds like there quite a few husbands who think a $1,000 set of knives would please most women. I would think that they would be in the same category as a set of Snap-On wrenches.

A word to husbands. don't buy you wife a nice set of cutlery unless you are really really sure they will want them. In the event of a divorce or separation, be forewarned that they are VERY sharp and could be used against you (think John Bobbitt).

It sounds as if the knife company has caught on to my tricks. Whenever I am returning something, and Customer Service is giving me a hard time, I blame it on the wife. If pressed for details, I launch into a monologue about how difficult it is to please my wife. Works every time. It is much easier than trying to describe some bug in the electronics or why some other product is better.

Texas CPS director murdered

ABC News reports:

The program director of the Victoria, Texas, office of the state's Child Protective Services had said she was scared about threats she had received only days before her body was found in a field in a rural part of the southeastern Texas county.

Victoria County employees discovered the body of 53-year-old Sally Blackwell off a paved county road on Wednesday while investigating an unrelated report of trash dumping. ...

Crimmins described a recent incident last week when "a couple of individuals" with a current pending case paid a visit to the Victoria office of Child Protective Services. Blackwell was in a meeting, and one of her assistants spoke to the visitors in the reception area, Crimmins said. The individuals apparently "raised their voices" but left before security was called.

"That is the incident that is being talked about. That is the only one that we at the agency know that happened," Crimmins said. ...

Kincaid said there were several "persons of interest" in the ongoing investigation.

"Any time you take children away from people, people are not happy," Kincaid said. "There are potentially other issues."

Threats Not Uncommon for Social Workers

Employees of Texas Child Protective Services "investigate reports of possible abuse and neglect of children, and, if necessary, place children in foster care." According to an agency statement, "new and current employees receive training about workplace violence, dealing with difficult or hostile clients, visiting clients in the home, and personal security."

"The nature of the work is such that threats are not uncommon," Crimmins said. "You are personally investigating, knocking on doors, and trying to find out if cases of child abuse and child neglect can be confirmed. It is a very high-stress job."

My advice is to not even raise your voice with these creeps, or you will be a suspect. I first met the CPS agent in my case when she showed up at my house with two armed cops from the local sheriff's office. My kids were in school, so the cops had nothing to do with the kids.

Attacks on agents are very rare. It is not high-stress because of that. The stress comes from the fact that CPS is doing something that millions of Americans think is evil. They wreck family and impose their prejudices on others, and they do it without due process. They vindictively punish those who stand up for their rights and the rights of their kids.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel has another story about a new protest movement, and the local branch, occupysantacruz.org:

Occupy Santa Cruz is a nonviolent movement for accountability in the United States government and our economic system. We will gather in solidarity with the ongoing protest in New York City, Occupy Wall Street, and the growing number of cities (now over 300) whose people will no longer sit back watching corporate and special interests run their government. We are citizens of the United States, and this country is ours. We will take it back.

Occupy Santa Cruz will not tolerate calls to violence, drugs or illegal activity (property destruction etc). Please find a different place to debate those topics, and if you become aware of any topics of this matter PLEASE let us know so we can take the proper actions against instigators. Thank you so much!

They have a public meeting downtown today, at 6:00 pm. They have gained a lot of momentum rapidly, and a lot of press coverage. We should watch them, and learn from them. Note that they do not intend to get destroyed by a few bad apples making violent threats or actions.

The picture may look strange, but it is a familiar sight in Santa Cruz. It is a sea otter.

Pathological altruism

A reader send this NY Times book review:

The author of “On Being Certain” and the coming “A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind,” Dr. Burton is a contributor to a scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume called “Pathological Altruism,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. And he says his colleague’s behavior is a good example of that catchily contradictory term, just beginning to make the rounds through the psychological sciences.

As the new book makes clear, pathological altruism is not limited to showcase acts of self-sacrifice, like donating a kidney or a part of one’s liver to a total stranger. The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.

Selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones. ...

Train nurses to be highly empathetic and, yes, their patients will love them. But studies show that empathetic nurses burn out and leave the profession more quickly than do their peers who remain aloof. Give generously to Child A, and Child B will immediately howl foul, while quiet Child C will grow up and write nasty novels about you. “Pathologies of altruism,” as Dr. Oakley put it, “are bound to arise.”

I sometimes hear it claimed that various do-gooders, such as teachers, social workers, nurses, and counselors, must be right because they are objective and could not possibly have any motive except the benefit of everyone involved.

The argument is ridiculous, of course. An old lady with 20 cats might seem to be purely altruistic, but would you trust her advice on anything? And those who earn their living as social workers or in some similar profession cannot be purely altruistic. They are doing what they do for the money. And as this article explains, they can be blinded by their do-gooder ideals, and give extraordinarily bad advice.

Expel the experts from family life

Frank Furedi writes on a UK site:

It’s time to expel the ‘experts’ from family life

In repackaging parenting as a superbly complex, almost scientific task, a gaggle of experts hopes to colonise our personal lives.

Parents are told time and again that their authority rests on outdated assumptions and that they lack the real expertise that one needs to socialise young people. And conscious of the fact that it is difficult to act authoritatively today, parents feel very insecure about rejecting expert advice. The explosion of various child-rearing and pedagogic fads is symptomatic of society’s loss of faith in parental authority; it represents a futile attempt to bypass the question of finding some convincing alternative to old forms of pre-political authority. ...

It is worth noting that the record of the ‘science’ in areas such as child-rearing, education and relationships is a dubious one. It has consisted largely of ever-recurring fads that rarely achieve any positive durable results (4). Nevertheless, at a time when adult authority is on the defensive, the scientific expert has gained an ever-increasing influence over intergenerational relations. Typically, educational experts claim that since their proposals are based on purely objective science, only the prejudiced could possibly disagree with them.

Britain is probably worse than we are in this way, but that is where we are headed. He also says:

The philosopher John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty, linked his call for the compulsory schooling of children to his distrust of parental competence. He believed that state-sponsored formal education might free children from the ‘uncultivated’ influence of their parents. He asserted that since ‘the uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation’, they needed the support of enlightened educators to socialise their children.

I thought that Mill was a big libertarian hero. I am surprised to see him show such an elitist attitude, and to advocate government control over schooling without also asserting parental rights and autonomy. Maybe that is the way it is with these do-gooders. They think that they know better than everyone else, so they want to coerce others into accepting their views.

Anyway, I am glad to see Furedi proposing expelling the experts from family life. He is right. Those experts have no real science to back up what they say.

I am still trying to think of protest ideas. Here is another example: Wall Street protesters dress as zombies in NYC.

Shrink caught overbilling govt

A reader sends this story:

He’s making mad money.

A staff psychiatrist at Kings County Hospital who pulled in an astounding $515,700 in overtime reported working an average of more than 110 hours a week for a full year -- including one super-human stretch of 96 hours straight.

Records obtained by The New York Post under the Freedom of Information Law show that Dr. Quazi Rahman clocked 3,820 hours of overtime in 2009, or 73 hours a week, on top of his regular 40-hour schedule.

With a base salary of $173,503, the child-behavior specialist hit the jackpot -- his total taxpayer-funded compensation came to an astounding $689,203.

But to reach that mark, Rahman, 55, tested the limits of human endurance.

Starting on March 2, 2009, he reported working 55 days in a row without a day off.

In the week of April 5 to 11, he exceeded even that astonishing feat by logging 141 hours, including four nonstop days of 24 hours each.

Since there are 168 hours in a week, that left only 27 hours when Rahman was off the payroll clock that particular week.

Without a break, he then ground out 116 hours the following week, plus 130 hours more the week after. It wasn’t until April 26 that Rahman finally took a full day off.

As I read this story, I was naively expecting it to end by saying that the shrink is being held at Rikers Island, while awaiting trial for fraud.

Instead, I read:

Following inquiries by The Post, the city Health and Hospitals Corp. checked Rahman’s time sheets and uncovered discrepancies covering about 80 hours.

He was ordered to return $10,800, the value of the disputed time, and pay an additional $10,800 penalty.

Phony bills for $689K and he only has to return a measly $22k?

I get more cynical every day.

TV show on photographic memory

I mentioned some new TV shows, but I missed Unforgettable:

The series follows a former Syracuse, New York police detective named Carrie Wells, who has hyperthymesia, a rare medical condition that gives her the ability to remember everything. She is reluctantly asked by her former boyfriend and one-time partner to join his homicide unit after he asks for help with solving a case.

Rare medical condition? From what I hear, this is a very common condition, and a very common cause of divorce. The wife remembers every fault her husband has, and every mistake he has ever made. Plus all of his relatives and friends. She cannot seem to remember to keep the fridge stocked with beer or to check the oil in the car, but she remembers in painful detail everything that she believes that he is supposed to be doing.

In the TV show, no man can stand to be around Carrie Wells for very long. No one explains why. For those who have been down that road, no explanation is necessary.

The empathy fad

Empathy has become a huge buzzword, as if it were a cure-all for all society's ills.

NY Times columnist David Brooks writes:

As Steven Pinker writes in his mind-altering new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” we are living in the middle of an “empathy craze.” There are shelfloads of books about it: “The Age of Empathy,” “The Empathy Gap,” “The Empathic Civilization,” “Teaching Empathy.” There’s even a brain theory that we have mirror neurons in our heads that enable us to feel what’s in other people’s heads and that these neurons lead to sympathetic care and moral action.

There’s a lot of truth to all this. We do have mirror neurons in our heads. People who are empathetic are more sensitive to the perspectives and sufferings of others. They are more likely to make compassionate moral judgments.

The problem comes when we try to turn feeling into action. Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action. ...

There have been piles of studies investigating the link between empathy and moral action. Different scholars come to different conclusions, but, in a recent paper, Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at City University of New York, summarized the research this way: “These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.” Other scholars have called empathy a “fragile flower,” easily crushed by self-concern. ...

Moreover, Prinz argues, empathy often leads people astray. It influences people to care more about cute victims than ugly victims. It leads to nepotism. It subverts justice; juries give lighter sentences to defendants that show sadness. It leads us to react to shocking incidents, like a hurricane, but not longstanding conditions, like global hunger or preventable diseases.

Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

Brooks nails it.

My theory is that psychologists like the empathy concept because that it how they make their money. A client comes into the shrink's office and tells a sob story, the shrink shows some empathy and bills for the service, and the client walks away as if she has benefited. So empathy is gold.

But empathy is not even necessarily a good psychological treatment technique. It is mostly a method for feel-good shrinks to manipulate patients.

The election season is warming up, and politicians are competing to try to show that they have empathy somehow. Pres. Obama has been tutored on this, as he is widely perceived as being cold and having low empathy. Others learn to recite cutesy little heartwarming stories to convince us that they have empathy. In reality, there are about 20 other more important personal characteristics for a president.

In my child custody case, I had a psychologist who kept using the word empathy whenever he had some disagreement with me. He did not even use the word consistently. If I fed my kids macaroni and he did not approve of macaroni, then he would say that I lacked empathy. If I wanted partial custody, and my ex-wife opposed it, he would say that I lacked empathy. I tried to ask him under oath what he meant by the term, and he could not define it.

The Wikipedia article on empathy lists 17 different experts who have 17 different definitions of empathy.

I take a more scientific attitude towards this sort of thing. If empathy were really so important, then it would be possible to measure it, and to do studies to show that it is effective in benefiting someone in some tangible way. As Brooks says, the studies fail to show the benefits. But the psychologists apparently do not even read their own studies.

TV stereotypes

Linda Holmes writes for NPR:

Tonight, CBS premieres How To Be A Gentleman, a brainless buddy comedy presenting a dichotomy in which men can be either delicate, ineffectual, sexless weaklings or ill-mannered but physically powerful meatheads. Says this show — over and over, in both its marketing and in its actual dialogue — there are gentlemen, and there are real men, and each might need to be a little more like the other.

Yes, yes, it's a sitcom, and caricatures are common, and on its own, this wouldn't make much of an impression. But this is not just any season. It's a season that also brings Tim Allen whining about what ever happened to "real men" in Last Man Standing, three guys lost in a universe of "pomegranate body wash" in Man Up, and — sometime in midseason, unless the universe blissfully swallows us all before then — two men in drag in Work It trying to overcome the entirely female-driven economy in which they literally cannot support themselves without dressing as women.

And in that environment, How To Be A Gentleman and its overt and unapologetic sexist stereotyping, in which only certain kinds of men are "real men," represents a kind of tipping point: Television right now — at least broadcast television — is even worse at managing its ideas about masculinity than about femininity.

Sounds like a variation on the Odd Couple, or Two and a Half Men. There is also a show called 2 Broke Girls that similarly contrast two stereotypes of women, a sassy waitress and a spoiled rich girl.

While there are lots of shows that put men in a bad light, there have also been lots of shows like Desperate Housewives that put women as very bad characters. So I am not sure about this criticism. Are there women who form opinions about men by watching TV sitcoms? I am pretty sure men do not take these sitcoms too seriously.

Planning a public protest

I got several good comments yesterday about planning a political protest against CPS and the family court.

This week, The Santa Cruz Sentinel had two stories about a silly Berkeley Republican diversity bake sale, on Tues. p.A8 and Wed. p.A3. It was not even an original idea, and only cost about $50 for the muffins. The event got a lot of publicity elsewhere also. It was a great PR success.

The newspaper has also been running stories all week on whether women have the right
to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. See the articles Sun., Tues., Wed., and Thurs. I guess some people see this as an important civil rights issue, but it is not. Saudi Arabia is a medieval backwater where no one has any rights except for the oil sheiks. And even California says that driving is only a privilege, not a right.

Meanwhile, yesterday was one of the most exciting days in the history of professional baseball. The Red Sox and Braves squanders huge leads in the last month in the competition for playoff spots, and the last day of the season was the most dramatic I've ever seen. The Red Sox and Braves were each one out away from winning their last games, and they each blew that also. But it just rated a few paragraphs on p.C3 of the sports section. (The online edition has a longer AP story.)

So if we are going to organize a protest, it should be carefully designed to get the publicity we want. I hate to say it, but I don't think that a few picket signs in Watsonville or on Emeline is going to do the trick. We need something like the diversity bake sale. It should be outrageous and legal at the same time. The act should speak for itself, so no one can distort our message. Other men's groups have created a scene while dressed as Batman. I am not sure how effective those protests were, but they did get some publicity. I will try to think of some ideas. If you have any, then please post them.

An Indoctrinated Law Student

A blog got this letter:

I am a third-year student at a major law school. Since family law is tested on the bar exam, I decided that it would be smart to take a family law course. The professor is a woman who is a Brigham Young University law school graduate (although I seriously doubt she is Mormon). She has published several articles on gender, sexuality, and family law.

She holds to the concept that marriage is always changing. Marriages are more like economic partnerships than some kind of spiritual union. Women’s health and careers are negatively burdened by marriage. Traditional marriage is oppressive to women. The nuclear family has almost never existed except during or subsequent to the industrial revolution. Gay marriage is just another subjective transition occurring in the social sphere. The ideal of traditional marriage and child rearing is a creation of class privilege that stigmatizes the poor. The tendency for the law to oppress women by upholding patriarchal marriage is a precursor to marital rape.

I am not even bothering to give my opinion of this. I am just pointing out that this is what the law schools teach. And not just the more liberal schools -- this is what BYU teaches.

This is the school that kicked off a basketball player for having premarital sex with his fiancee. No alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, drugs, gambling, or pornography, either. If the law professors there don't believe in marriage, then they don't elsewhere. In a generation, you will not be able to find a family law lawyer who even understands the traditional concept of marriage. Maybe that is true already.

The blogger recommends a 1910 G.K. Chesterton book on what's wrong with the world! I thought that our problems were newer than that. The copyright has expired, so you can now read it for free. So that is the good news for you optimists. If you wait a century, then you can at least read about what is wrong with the world for free.

NYT Global Protest Movement Article

A reader sends this NY Times article:

MADRID — Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Indians cheer a rural activist on a hunger strike. Israel reels before the largest street demonstrations in its history. Enraged young people in Spain and Greece take over public squares across their countries.

Their complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.

He adds:

This is what's needed here in the US and that would include esp. the family law system. Republican, Democrat, what's the difference now? This is the sort of thing I was alluding to in all those comments I made about there's really only statism and we the people.

That is largely what the Tea Party movement is about. But it has not attacked the family court, CPS, and other such evils yet.

I just got an email from a local Santa Cruz woman who is writing a book about the evils of CPS. Maybe she will add my story, taken from this blog.

How the Fraudulent Dr Fox Fooled The Shrinks

The Dr. Fox effect is about how easily shrinks are fooled by phony experts who pretend to speak authoritatively but who are babbling nonsense. Some video from the famous 1976 experiment has been uncovered:

You’re looking at footage at a somewhat infamous scam lecture an actor gave to a group of psychiatrists, about game theory. The actor was trained the day before — trained so that he wouldn’t say much that made sense. But he had such a convincing presence that toward the end, even after the fraud was exposed, some audience members asked where they could read more about the research.

Fox was trained to give this talk only the day before. He was given an article from Scientific American on game theory and worked up a lecture from it that was intentionally full of imprecise waffle, invented words and contradictory assertions. ...

Fox was convinced he’d be rumbled during the lecture. But the audience hung on his every word and, when the 20-minutes-long talk was over, bombarded him with questions, which he displayed such virtuosity in not answering that nobody noticed.

On the feedback form that was handed round, all ten people who attended the lecture said that it had given them food for thought, while nine of them also reckoned that Fox had presented the material in a clear manner, put it across in an interesting way and incorporated plenty of good illustrative examples into his talk.

I don't know how anyone can take psychiatrists and psychologists seriously when even the experts cannot tell the difference when they are listening to a charlatan who is just stringing together buzzwords.

Psychiatrists want power to force drugs

A forensic psychiatrist blogger writes:

Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people, ...

He was found not competent to stand trial. This means his trial is postponed until his mental illness resolves enough for him to: understand the charges against him; participate meaningfully in his own defense; control his behavior in court; etc. See that last "etc?" That's the part that allows courts to do anything they want to you.

Loughner, however is refusing to take antipsychotic medication to get better. ...

Practically, this means that if the court wants to medicate Loughner against his will, they can. There is a legal process to follow, but it is simple and straightforward and completely not in any kind of dispute.

There should be no issue.

So I was surprised to read that the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, through Paul Appelbaum, filed an amicus curiae brief in support of forced medication. Why? Isn't this a non-issue?

In fact, there are two reasons you can forcibly medicate (only) prisoners. The first is Sell v. US: you can force antipsychotics for the purpose of restoring the defendant to competency to stand trial.

The second reason is Washington V. Harper, which allows forced medication of psychotic prisoners in the situation where they were dangerous to themselves or others.

So, again, I was confused. What's the debate?

The second key issue the brief addressed was the importance of permitting authorities who have custody of a defendant to make decisions of forcible medication without having to go through a time-consuming judicial hearing on the matter. ...

In addition, we believe psychiatrists working in correctional facilities need the flexibility to deal with dangerous persons without the delay involved in lengthy court proceedings.

The feds will not let Loughner see the light of day, whether he is tried or not. They can give him the death penalty for all I care.

But the psychiatrists want to use him as a precedent for forced psychiatric medication without court process.

These drugs not even very effective. They have nasty side effects. Loughner has not been convicted of anything, so the law should treat him as innocent until proven guilty. I think that this shows how horrible psychiatrists are, that they would want the power to drug unconvicted defendants without any due process.

Father Knows Best -- no more

A reader sends this:

Dads Through the Decades: Thirty Years of TV Fathers

By Mark Crispin Miller
At first, Dad seemed to reign supreme in sitcom country -- or at least in its better neighborhoods

On the bulk of those shows set in the suburbs, Dad's authority around the house appeared to be the whole point of the spectacle. It was this implied paternalism that made most of those "comedies" so unamusing: Dad's status was, back then, no laughing matter. Despite their laugh tracks and bouncy themes the real , spirit of those shows was expressed in their daunting titles: Make Room for Daddy and Father Knows Best were pure and simple threats.

As the apparent ruler of the world, Dad, pushed around by no one, somehow deflated all of his inferiors -- and all were his inferiors. Since we almost never saw him working, we had no sense that there was any class above his own: and he had no competition from below.

He also sends me the list of Communist goals from the 1958 book, The Naked Communist. Glenn Beck says that the book changed his life. The list of 45 goals includes:

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war. ...

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks. ...

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity, masturbation and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

A couple of commenters are unconvinced about the political connection to the family court. Obviously the commies are not running the court, but I think that there are political motives.

Allowing recorders in court

New Jersey now allows people to record in court:

The New Jersey Supreme Court's Bench-Bar-Media Committee is pitching new rules that would establish a presumption of permissibility for using electronic devices in court, albeit with prior approval.

The subcommittee report, approved by the full committee and forwarded to Chief Justice Stuart Rabner on July 14, proposes a consistent procedural framework for allowing such devices in the courts, including the Superior Court, the Appellate Division, the Supreme Court, the Tax Court, and the municipal courts.

The proposed revisions recognize that the general right to use devices with recording capabilities is "no longer a right limited to the media," says subcommittee chairman Thomas Cafferty, a partner at Gibbons in Newark and general counsel for the New Jersey Press Association.

This is inevitable. In a few years, people will think that it is bizarre that recorders were ever banned in court.