Alabama Municipal Judge Carlton Teel is packing more than legal principles under his robe. When a defendant Brian (Bryant) Keith Ford reacted badly to a sentence and started swinging his crutches at the judge, Teel whipped out a gun and then a deputy shot Ford in the side.
Accounts differ on how much danger the man posed — with some witnesses saying that he was not attacking the judge when he was shot. Others say he tried to grab the gun.
Ford was in the courtroom on a harassment charge from a neighbor who said Ford had cursed at her in December after accusing her of talking about him to police.
Teel reportedly fined him $800 — a rather modest sum when one considers he now faces serious criminal charges and remains in critical condition.
The most disturbing account was:
Sara Williams said she was sitting in the front row when the man, whom she knew, got agitated after the judge fined him $800. He waved one of his crutches in the air.
“The police were hollering for him to get down” when an officer opened fire, she said.
Williams said she yelled “Don’t shoot him no more!” right before the officer fired again.
If that is true, it is hard to see why potentially lethal force was used. However, others describe Ford as attacking the judge.
Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?
Source: ABA Journal
My work not understandable? It is not through using a language the structure of which is of misunderstanding and confusion, because my work excludes misunderstanding and confusion, and therefore excludes being understood through the use of any language of misunderstanding and confusion.
Every committee member understood my work, understood it well, critiqued it diligently, and found no place to look for a flaw of consequence.
You were not a member of my committee, by what (magic or not) do you claim to know them and their understanding of my research, thesis, and dissertation?
I can readily explain my work to a typical two-year-old child if given parental permission, which has happened.
Think me not familiar with the work of Thomas Kuhn, C. Northcote Parkinson, Herbert Bloch, William H. Werkmeister, Jean Paul Sartre, Ian Barbour, Walter Elsasser, Bruce Lipton, and you think mistakenly.
At the very core of my work is, quite simply, “the law of non-contradiction” (aka the law of contradiction) which, simply put, is, “Something cannot be what it isn’t.”
If a person makes a mistake and recognizes the mistake as having been made, that simple recognition alters the state and the process of the person’s brain, else the recognition did not happen.
Because the state and process of the person’s brain are both altered by the making of the mistake and by its recognition, the state of the person’s brain needed to recognize the mistake did not exist before the mistake was made.
Some things are so simple that highly educated people simply do not understand them. Why? Perhaps because becoming “high educated” adds so many layers to the interpretation one makes that the actual simplicity of a system is buried under a plethora of noise.
Or, are you much familiar with Parkinson’s first, second, and third laws? I am, I have the books which tell them.
The first law, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
The second law, “Expenditure rises to meet income.”
The third law, in my paraphrase, “Complexity collapses itself.” The third law as Parkinson wrote it, “Expansion means complexity and complexity, decay” and also, “The more complex, the sooner dead.”
I also shave down my work with care using Occam’s razor.
I can easily explain my work to anyone who is willing to engage in a simple, gentle face-to-face dialogue with me. The last time I did that, a very educated person replied, “It’s logical.”
The dance of confusion of connotation and denotation thrives, methinks.
I find no fault with any person, as I observed Philip Zimbardo on a TV program putting forth his view about Abu Ghraib, he kept saying, in effect and directly, “its situational” and kept being given back, in effect, “the situation is a few bad apples,” with apples implying persons and not beliefs.
As his response to that connotation/denotation dance of “misconfusion” (kudos to W. and Sarah, malapropisms I can do too), Zimbardo wrote a book in which the highest page number is 551, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” – Random House, 2007.
If it took Zimbardo a book of more pages more than 551, what can intelligibly be expected in a blawg post wherein some on the blawg protest my using enough words to clearly explain even a minor triviality?
No, I have no difficulty explaining my work, only not by using a paradigm which denies the whole realm of the possibility of my work. What realm? The realm of time-corrupted learning as described in very decent detail by neurologist Robert Scaer, in “The Trauma Spectrum” – W. W. Norton, 2005 and in “The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease, Second Edition” – Haworth Medical Press, 2007. See especially Chapter 3 of the Trauma Spectrum regarding time-corrupted learning, which is comparable to the time-confusion-mistrust correlate of Erik H. Erikson’s epigentic schema of psychosocial developmental “crises.”
If the work of Scaer, along with the work of Heinz Kohut is trivially obvious to you, then we may have similar ways of establishing framing paradigms.
I have a Skype name: drjbrianharris
Because, being autistic, I experience more than, as a wild guess, 90 percent of my interpersonal communication to be non-verbal, I welcome talking with you via Skype, so we can see each other (low resolution Skype fairly well meets my non-verbal communication needs) and effective communication may become feasible.
It is vastly easier for me to talk with people while seeing them than to toss words into the wind and not be able to see how they scatter.
The difficulty I have with Internet words is my having almost no access to the way whereby I am able to communicate with a hint of effectiveness.
Methinks that rejection hath a name, prejudice.
Well then youthinks wrong. I am arguing against what you wrote, not your work. If you think you can hide behind a veil of “You just don’t understand it,” you are wrong; you provided enough information in your post to argue with, and I did that.
I think you HAVE a mistaken understanding of mistakes, and I told you what was wrong with your understanding of mistakes. You can choose to debate that argument, but you cannot choose to dismiss it out of hand, or claim I am incapable of understanding your work, or appeal to the authority of anonymous persons you claim “actually understood” science, psychology, and neurology.
I think you use the word “actually” to imply that I Do NOT understand these fields well enough to comment. In fact I am a research scientist with an interest in these fields (along with sociology, my sister’s specialty).
And finally, if “no one has yet accomplished that simple task,” I suggest your work is not understandable, and I wonder what PhD you managed to get if nobody can understand your work and you cannot explain it well enough for anybody to criticize it. It doesn’t sound to me like you have done any work at all.
A mistaken understanding of mistakes may preclude accurate understanding of mistakes.
I ran my definitions past people who actually understood science, psychology and neurology sufficiently well as to be readily able to find any flaw in my work.
Ignorance is the opportunity for learning, not a replacement for learning.
Anyone is free to disagree with anything I say, write, or do. However, before informing me that my work is or has error, it may be necessary to actually understand the work well enough to have a valid way to challenge it.
No one has yet accomplished that simple task…
It is trivial to reject something one does not understand.
Methinks that rejection hath a name, prejudice.
@Blouise: The employee I hired was recommended to me by my best friend, who had been working with him at a civil service job for about six years, and vouched for his competence.
That said, the lesson I learned is one your friend hopefully learned; that trust is an emotion and relying on emotion in business can be a fatal mistake. I verify because I can’t help but trust some people. I’m not sure whether to call that a flaw in my personality, but being overly trusting can be a handicap in business and my corrective for it is to work by-the-book and double-check everything. If that offends people, well, they can blame me for being a terrible judge of character.
@Brian:
One attosecond before a particular mistake is actually made, it not having been made, there remains a chance of avoiding the making of it; that chance vanishes as the mistake completely made.
I do not believe in a lack of free will, and by infinite regression this does not allow any. I do not have to have an alternative physics in hand to dismiss this argument: I observe free will, and this argument requires a universe in which free will is impossible, therefore it does not meet my minimum requirement for being workable.
A mistake occurs when someone does something and what happens as a result is not exactly, in every detail, precisely what was anticipated.”
I reject this definition. A “mistake” has negative consequences. I have started businesses with very vague expectations; even the expectation of loss, and been surprised by the level of success (and a few times by the magnitude of failure).
(Aside: When my daughter was about to graduate college (pre-law) I asked her what we were doing next. I could afford law school, or graduate school, but what she wanted to do was start a retail clothing shop. My graduation gift to her was the risk of financing that shop, and her continued living expenses. She paid me back in about 18 months, and sold an established shop after four years, for a good profit which she pocketed (she was getting married). I honestly gave this shop about a 33% chance of success; I thought I was spending about $30K on a good learning experience. I was wrong about a failure, but I don’t consider it a mistake. And it was a good learning experience, just not the one I had anticipated, and at least as much for me in seeing my daughter manage a business successfully on her own.)
So I do not think a “mistake” is defined as failing to meet expectations; in fact failing to have expectations may constitute a mistake! I do not have a formal definition to offer, but it would involve negative consequences of a magnitude one would regret that could clearly have been avoided with a reasonable amount of diligence.
“Learning occurs when someone does something and what happens as a result is not exactly, in every detail, precisely what was anticipated.”
That is more of an opportunity for learning. My personal opinion is that “learning” occurs when a predictive pattern or association materializes in one’s mind. More specifically, when one discovers or invents a useful rule to employ in some situation, or a useful simplification or physical process or even thought process that improves the accuracy of one’s expectations, which would include improving the reliability of the outcomes of one’s actions.
Tony C.,
You are right, of course. My friend’s situation was a bit convoluted in that this was a family business that he assumed leadership of when his father suddenly died. The bookkeeper had been a long time employee and it was suggested by the prosecutor that the embezzlement had been going on for decades and the bookkeeper was only caught because he had gotten greedy thinking “the kid” would be even dumber than his father. It did take a couple of years as he modernized the business before he began to suspect that the discrepancies and the explanations offered were not unintentional mistakes but intentional dishonesty. His only defense to himself was that he had a great deal of difficulty in accepting the notion that this long time employee and friend of the family could be stealing from them. Once he accepted that fact, he had no difficulty in going forward with the prosecution. The bookkeeper was shocked that he actually pressed charges. But the Insurance company position was that he should have suspected the problem immediately and taken action.
@Blouise: To this day, I make no bones about the fact that I screwed up and shirked a responsibility. To me it is important to avoid papering over or excusing my faults. Remembering my limits and stupid moves is what prevents me from making the same mistakes again —- And life is more interesting if most of your mistakes are fresh new ones!
Tony C.,
There was a successful prosecution in my friend’s case but not much money was recovered. To this day he makes no bones about the fact that his bookkeeper stole his money and the Insurance company took his premiums under false pretenses. The bookkeeper went to jail but his Insurance agent built a new house.
@Blouise: No, my only business insurances were for liabilities (plus worker’s comp and landlord required stuff), so I had nothing I could file a claim on.
Also, at first the D.A. did not want to prosecute, but I found and hired a former assistant D.A. for the white collar division that had moved to private practice. I also hired an accountant/specialist he recommended, and with one of my other employees they put together a case and presented it to the D.A, who then successfully prosecuted the embezzler, and recovered about 75% of the money. The guy got 3 years probation, but … Oh well. It was something. I did end up with about 40% of my money back.
I would have done it for zero money back (and did risk losing the case altogether along with expenses). Vengeance is worth a lot in my emotional books.
Tony C.,
“There are several known, actually achievable “processes” to prevent such fraud, like regular audits or double-checking one’s IRS deposit by phone, which I knew of and failed to execute.”
====================================================
I’m curious … did your insurance pay? I’m asking because a friend of mine experienced something similar ( a bookkeeper embezzling funds) and the insurance company refused to pay because he had failed to “execute” his responsibilities by double-checking etc.
(It appears that some are a bit disgruntled because Tony C. appears to be correct, with all due respects. 🙂 )
RE: Tony C., February 8, 2011 at 6:42 pm
There may be perils in equivalencing or interchanging connotation and denotation; much human communication crashes on the rocks and sinks because of such.
RE: Tony C., February 8, 2011 at 5:51 pm
“Am I serious?” Yes.
However, not necessarily exactly as you may expect.
To have actually not made a mistake which actually was made (meaning that the mistake made was, after the fact avoidable) not only requires a Newtonian-physics-deterministic universe (not relativistic and not quantum-mechanical) but also requires that the future actually precede the past.
Demonstrate that for real and you will have a super-duper patent!
One attosecond before a particular mistake is actually made, it not having been made, there remains a chance of avoiding the making of it; that chance vanishes as the mistake completely made.
Only what is a mistake, and what is an exact definition of “mistake” that is utterly without any form of mistake?
In my dissertation is what has so far as I have been able to learn, an unmistaken definition of mistake, an operational definition, to wit,
“A mistake occurs when someone does something and what happens as a result is not exactly, in every detail, precisely what was anticipated.”
I also came up with a learned definition of learning, to wit:
“Learning occurs when someone does something and what happens as a result is not exactly, in every detail, precisely what was anticipated.”
Note: These definitions are not restricted by observable details, every detail includes every impossible to observe detail as well as every observable detail, and it is not necessary that anything have been anticipated.
Those definitions may seem far simpler than they are; to arrive at them, I found I needed to find the entire domain of definition of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and also how to understand the action of the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle at every observable scale of observation, and not merely at sub-atomic scale.
Demonstrate a more learned definition of learning and a less mistaken definition of mistake, and I will give them careful attention.
Within the procedural brain function, learning and making mistakes are the contiguously identical process; the making of mistakes is exactly the process of learning and the process of learning is exactly the making of mistakes.
From a neurological view, teaching a person to not make mistakes is contiguously identical to teaching the person to not learn. Human violence is a form of learned helplessness, generating forms of catatonic stupor as passive behavior while suppressing the associated aggressive behavior until the excitatory neurotransmitters within the circus rhythm brain structures of aggression overwhelm the available inhibitory neurotransmitters, and the vicious cycle of aggression is released. That release tends to happen so fast that many people describe it by saying that they “snapped.”
Tony C, mentioning eight graders is counterproductive, you are simply immaturely attempting to insult me, and this is why the lady who thinks killing a judge who didn’t actually hurt anyone just gave you a high five. I personally abhor killing, even as punishment, but the more civilized non-gun owning among us apparently can dish out death as a judgment without a second thought.
When you read the preamble of the bill of rights, and then the 2nd amendment, your argument crashes down, which is why you insist I rely only on the text of the 2nd amendment, because there is wiggle room for you to weasel around in. I refuse to be limited by your notions, and dismiss them as invalid attempts to sound intelligent with no substance. I say good day sir.
“High-five”, Tony C. 🙂
@savaship: You said, “a right to bear arms exists for all the people to guarantee their liberties are not infringed.”
You said that without mentioning any preamble, you say it without any qualification about “all rights”, and any eighth grader reading it will understand its one and only meaning, that you you believe the right to bear arms is there for the purpose of guaranteeing liberties are not infringed.
(A) “exists to guarantee” (B) is what you are saying, and that is a demonstrably false statement. That is not why the founders said the right exists, and could not be infringed. This isn’t science, it is eighth grade sentence diagramming.
You can’t undo what you said, either you were lying then or you are lying now. It is inescapable. You are a liar.
Tony, that’s great! I mention the preamble 3 times previously… what switcharoo? I simply entertained your interpretation, and based on the entire document still came to the same conclusion, there’s nothing false about that.
@Brian: Are you serious?
Many years ago, an accounting employee of mine embezzled $35,000 from me, by using photoshop (actually a similar early drawing program) and a scanner to forge IRS receipts of tax deposits he never actually made.
There are several known, actually achievable “processes” to prevent such fraud, like regular audits or double-checking one’s IRS deposit by phone, which I knew of and failed to execute.
But I can tell already your argument is going to be circular; by virtue of the fact that you are essentially claiming that no mistake could ever have been avoided, you are going to argue for a fateful clockwork universe; i.e. the brain states, physics and circumstances of the time all conspired to force me into this mistake, or something like that.
So let me preempt that long-winded explanation; I do not believe in a clockwork universe, primarily because it obviates the role of consciousness and free will which I observe in myself and others. I believe minds DO have choices, and decisions I make DO change my future, and mistakes are made which COULD have been avoided by something as simple as not being so lazy. (In my case I wasn’t lazy, but I did shirk some boring duties in favor of more work on a more intellectually challenging task, so I took his well-forged receipts as ‘good enough’.)
I do not believe we are machines whose every action, impulse and thought are pre-determined by the laws of physics. I believe minds are capable of avoiding mistakes, and therefore that if mistakes were made the mind that made them could have avoided those mistakes. If you do not believe that then you do not believe in free will; and since I do believe in free will, I suspect we have no common ground to discuss this issue.
There is a little surprise within the work I have done for nearly the whole of my life.
The surprise is, there are no people who are liars and there are no people who are deceivers; yet there are lies and there are deceptions.
People whose life experiences inform them that the only way to be truthful is through the telling of lies and deceptions are people who were coerced into lying or deceiving as their final recourse for avoiding intolerable corporal/psychological punishment for not acceding to terrifying coercion.
Those who tell lies and tell deceptions do so in truthfully telling of the trauma of authoritarian coercion of the infant-child transition experience.
The human neurological-biological-sociological-psychological enigma which is the core concern my bioengineering research; the relationship between authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, aggressive, passive, and affirming aspects of humans and human society has no hint of remedy in any written work I have found, save one.
In The Epic of Gilgamesh (I just looked it up on the website of ancienttexts.org), the core predicament of my research focus is clearly present, from Tablet 1:
“Gilgamesh, who is wise to perfection, but who struts his power over the people like a wild bull.”
As I can find only authoritarianism in the “strutting of power over the people like a wild bull,” I have been unable to find one written record of a significantly sizeable highly organized culture or society in which authoritarianism was not the final recourse of social control.
Among the Inuit and the !Kung San (the “real people of the Kalahari) are people who, as I have been able to learn, are remarkably authoritative-reciprocal in social-cultural structure. A glimpse into the culture of the real people can be found, much adapted for movie purposes, in “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”
As best I can yet learn, prior to being invaded, the real people had no authoritarian leadership, and dispute resolution was achieved through people sharing their knowledge and understanding until a consensus came forth which included every view or concern expressed.
It appears to me, from what I have been able to find so far, that authoritarian social structures developed when a social group became too large and too busy with the necessities of living to use the “whatever it takes to achieve authoritative consensus” method became impracticable.
The driving concern in my work is learning whether modern communication theory can be used to effectively design and develop a practical method of intrapersonal and interpersonal communication which will allow the adversarial-conflice rree resolution of disputes in societies even more complex than today’s.
To me, existence is a name for what is; existence may be modeled as being comprised of what has not happened (including what can never happen), what is happening, and what has already happened.
If one needs anthropomorphic projection to make notions seem to be meaningful, within one or more religious traditions, what I experience as what has not happened might be named, “The Holy Ghost.” What I experience as what is happening now might be named, “The Father.” What I experience as what has already happened might be named, “The Son.” As a bioengineer, I am not particularly enamored of anthropomorphic projection as other than perhaps superstitious pseudoscience.
That things which never happened before keep happening is, as I remember from my time in the womb, self-evident long before birth. Existence as process is, methinks perfectly self-evident. Until words are used, that is. Once words arrive, direct observation of existence becomes vulnerable to rejection.
Were it true that no society has ever functioned as I believe best, were it true that no society in recent times has done so, the argument that no such society is possible would not be without merit. Alas, the possible merit is essentially contemporary and not only ancient or earlier.
That human society needs some form of authoritatian control method is rendered false by simply studying the Inuit and the !Kund San.
How to have authoritarian-reciprocal social control in contemporary, dense, economically-driven societies, that is what I work to make practical.
A single instance is able to properly reject a well-constructed null hypothesis. I find such easy regarding the necessity of adversarial system social control.
I wait for someone to refute the null hypothesis of my work, which is that someone can actually demonstrate, here and now, a mistake actually made which actually could have been avoided through an actually achievable process, all truthfully told. Again, only one demonstrated instance trashes my work.
Instead of spilling the milk of human kindness and crying over the spilt milk, and spilling even more milk by punishing the milk spillers, why not learn to not spill the milk so there is no more spilt milk to cry over and no more milk spillers to be punished?
What we need to know and understand, we already know and understand, except for learning how to do it well.
@Brian: Further, you are not going to stop violence; read Malthus. Violence isn’t a result of misunderstanding; I think it is mostly a result of perfect understanding: Man-A realizes (understands) that Man-B intends to steal the woman Man-A is dating, so Man-A beats the crap out of Man-B.
In Egypt right now, violence is erupting because one group of people is being oppressed and does not want to be, while another group (those in power) that benefits from that oppression stands to lose that benefit. People tend not to give up privilege without a fight, even immoral privilege, and those fights are becoming violent and lethal.
People tend to fight over resources, not misunderstandings. The fights tend to start as soon as a full understanding is achieved: For example, the rancher does not resort to violence until he understands that his neighbor to the North is going to cut off his water, and that his neighbor will not be swayed from that course by anything but violence.
It isn’t misunderstandings that must be resolved. Violence is typically the result of fighting over a limited resource, like territory, or water, or a position, or money, or power, or something else (or someone) that cannot just be duplicated to satisfy all the parties that want it.