In an example of unparalleled hubris, Iraqi officials are demanding that the United States apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city. Officials are complaining that the blast walls installed by the U.S. to protect the public are ugly and that Humvees and vehicles have caused damage in patrolling the city and fighting insurgents.
The city released a statement saying “The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste . . . Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford . . . we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses.”
For those of us who opposed the war in Iraq, this is a particularly maddening moment. We continue to lose lives and billions in public funds as our states sell off parks, buildings, and cut critical programs. We have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq with little or no evidence of where money has gone.
In Afghanistan, we have a corrupt president who repeatedly states that he prefers the Taliban and views the United States as an enemy. Karzai also sought to tax U.S. contractors supporting his government and a bailout for his banks.
Yet, we continue to assume towering losses because our leaders are unwilling to take personal responsibility to pull us out of these countries. Rather than risk political backlash, President Obama and others allow our military personnel to die every day for countries that are increasingly openly hostile to us. This is becoming a truly Felliniesque farce.
Source: Reuters
Jonathan Turley
Sport, compared to you I am most certainly a brilliant non-research scientist. And I’m quite familiar with the philosophy of science. This is one of the reasons I find you trying to pass off your drivel as science so revolting. For someone allegedly involved in the empirical study of science, you have a distinct aversion to proofs and evidence.
None of this changes that you have not defended your “work” in the slightest and once again resorted to evasion.
Randomness at the quantum level is indeed built into the universe. However, quantum mechanics and social law have nothing to do with one another. The law operates either before the fact in the form of regulations or after the fact in the form of prohibited behaviors punishable as crimes. They work to thwart both randomness and instability in the social fabric. The randomness of the quantum, if it figures in at all, figures in at the level of choice – which may or may not be completely random if the person puts premeditation into their actions. The law takes some of these distinctions into account. This is why there are different charges for first degree murder (premeditated), second degree murder (not premeditated but still criminally culpable – e.g. death by criminal negligence or depraved indifference) and manslaughter (which includes spontaneous crimes of passion).
Authoritarianism? Far from it. If you’d read my posts before coming here and making a troll of yourself, you’d know I am most certainly not for authoritarianism, but rather for egalitarianism, the rule of law and due process – all of which keep authoritarianism at bay. To say I’m not one for questioning authority? Is simply laughable as evidence by the years of posting I have done here. I do quite a bit of the questioning of authority. It is in my nature and has been from a very early age. There isn’t a single person posting regularly here, guest bloggers and the Professor included, you could convince I’m for authoritarianism.
You, on the other hand, are for doing away with adversarial process – an idea that inherently promotes tyranny. Tyranny is the ultimate form of authoritarianism – rule by force. If anyone here is promoting authoritarianism, it would be you Brian, by the very nature of the poisonous ideas you keep trying to sell.
Now how about defending your “work” without resorting to circular logic, specious claims to your own misapplied authority, lies, distortions or trying to make up your own definitions ala predeterminism?
Or are you going to evade some more? (He asked knowingly.)
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 21, 2011 at 9:19 pm
I wonder if you ever took a course or otherwise studied philosophy of science.
For my purposes, W. H. Werkmeister, A Philosophy of Science, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1940, is a respectable text. I have the much later printed Bison paperback edition.
To me, if to no one else, you appear to have a formidable skill at turning a tested and confirmed scientific principle into its inverse scientific fallacy, and you are really adept at this, as best am yet able to discern.
I am now harboring the conjecture that you are an utterly superb trial lawyer, though a conjecture is only a conjecture. Methinks you able to shred a witness into fragments of scattered smithereens and be thrilled while so doing.
I did not compare myself to Einstein or Hawking, but people who have really known me have suggested some similarities in the form of such comparison(s).
There is a reason why I respond as I do. Either you are a brilliant non-research-scientist, or you have a strange sense of humor.
Consider the following fallacy you just promoted in your comment to whch this is my reply comment (I am putting your comment in italics):
Really. Because this: “This mistake resulted in people believing, by mistake, that one or more mistakes which had been made could have been avoided.” – J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. 1, February 20, 2011 at 11:28 pm? Is precisely predetermination.
What you have written, above quoted in italics is a fallacy, one simple to demonstrate as fallacious. Such sort of tricky fallacies seem, as I have observed, to show up with terrible regularity in legal cases in which The Innocence Project gets a falsely convicted person set free from prison.
Benjamin Franklin, a kite, a thunderstorm, and, voila, lightning is of electricity that can be stored in a Leyden jar. Good old Ben had no way to decide which way electricity flowed, so he named one direct current polarity positive and the other polarity negative, and decided, without any evidence, that electricity flowed from positive to negative. Along came William Crookes, and electricity was thought to flow from negative to positive in the form of negatively charged electrons, and the Fleming Valve (Sir Ambrose Fleming) strengthened that belief regarding electric current in metal conductors.
Only, metal conductors are not all that “carries” electricity; there are also electrolytes in which positively charged or negatively charged ions, or both in “opposite” directions may carry electrical current. Then came Brattain, Bardeen, & Shockley and “Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors.”
Benjamin Franklin made a wrong guess for lack of scientific knowledge not yet known, and his guess was only wrong for metal conductors in a world of “mostly electrons, protons, and neutrons” (if you believe that such are of what atoms are made).
However, electrons, protons, positrons and anti-protons can all carry current, and positron emission tomography informs me that positron currents can really exist.
The initial mistake about mistakes is plausibly simple coin-flip chance. No determinism there other than pure coin-flip chance.
It may be useful to be capable of modeling quasi-chaotic, non-stationary systems for the science to make sense.
BiL, I am coming to the dreadful notion, one I work hard to reject, that you are among the most brilliant of all lawyers, and what it required for you to learn what you know was so intensive and extensive as to preclude your studying the deep philosophy of science issues that have gathered much of my attention for nearly 70 years.
Perhaps the predicament of being a super-authority in an authoritarian field is a conditioned bias in favor of authoritarianism in particular ways and anti-authoritarianism in all else.
Your writing and its construct structure is somewhat bewildering to me, because so much of it contains what I observe to be intense connotation-denotation dissonance.
Curious, said the cat’s smile, fading slowly.
Pardon any typos, I paused a few times to fix dinner.
Arguing backwards will get you nowhere, troll.
Except further exposed.
Oooooo.
First it was Galileo.
Now you’re comparing yourself to Einstein and Hawking.
Delusional much?
Or you could evade some more.
Which is what you’ll do, troll.
“No, in my scientific approach, nothing is predetermined, and that is why notions of personal fault and liability are delusions.” – J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. 1, February 21, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Really. Because this: “This mistake resulted in people believing, by mistake, that one or more mistakes which had been made could have been avoided.” – J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. 1, February 20, 2011 at 11:28 pm? Is precisely predetermination.
predetermination \ˌprē-di-ˌtər-mə-ˈnā-shən\, n.,
1: the act of predetermining : the state of being predetermined: as a : the ordaining of events beforehand b : a fixing or settling in advance
2: a purpose formed beforehand
Contradict yourself much? Okay, let’s play with your flip flop nonsense and assume that predetermination is out of your “work”. If nothing is predetermined, then the opposite must be true and free will is in play. In which case choice, and ergo personal fault and liability, are both critical and determinable by causal analysis. Oddly enough, the very kind of causal analysis that is key to the adversarial process throughout the process from discovery to trial.
Come on.
Dig that hole deeper for yourself, troll.
You’re only persuading people that you are completely full of shit and an obfuscating evasive liar.
Perhaps a simple restatement of principle:
No one is to blame because nothing is predetermined.
For blame to be valid, personal fault of one or another sort would need to be predetermined.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 21, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Under your ridiculous assumptions, still unproven and relying upon magical thinking, no one is to blame for anything because everything is predetermined.
#####################################
No, in my scientific approach, nothing is predetermined, and that is why notions of personal fault and liability are delusions.
Choice would be deterministic if a person made a choice which could have been made otherwise because that would mean that the alternative choice was predetermined in the manner of avoiding an unintended offense.
In the world in which I live, the human brain is a complex, self-modifying (it learns, and learning is brain modification or, as more usually put, is of brain plasticity) such that, because of the quantum mechanical indeterminacy of Werner Heisenberg fame, it is impossible in advance to exactly predict the biophysics of choice-making and/or decision making.
While the neurotransmitter molecules, driven by diffusion gradients and thermal effects in the synaptic cleft fluid move slowly, and might at first not appear to be significantly affected by indeterminacy, it is of error to isolate elements of a complex system as though the actual complexity does not exist.
The timing of post-synaptic menbrane depolarization is quantum-mechanical indeterminate and minute variations in the influence of excitatory and inhibitory neurochemicals in the synaptic cleft with respect to post synaptic membrane depolarization and subsequent axon action potential propagation are very much influenced by timing issues that plausibly become about as small as one unit of Planck time.
The irony of the traditional view of choice is that it presumes that a person has absolute control of every neurotransmitter molecule in every synapse such that a person can regulate exactly when any axon action potential will occur, and exactly how much delay will occur from post-synaptic membrane depolarization to dendritic neurochemical release. The control of brain biochemistry in terms of exact position, velocity, and acceleration with respect to time, for every neuron in the brain, the condition necessary for unerring choice to be possible, simply does not occur. If unerring choice, at the sub-molecular level is not physically possible, then, as a basic property of biophysics, exact choice is physically, and thus biophysically impossible.
It is because rigorous determinism is impossible that the superstition of personal fault and liability are biophysically absurd.
You are entitled to tell your story, as far as I am concerned, and you are entitled to be as totally ignorant of actually observable human brain function as you want to be.
I merely object to your imposing your biological ignorance on those of us whose knowledge and understanding of biology may exceed yours, perhaps by orders of magnitude.
I am beginning to have doubts, BiL, that you have carefully studied the work of the late Thomas S. Kuhn, regarding the contrast between “normal science” which I find is Kuhn’s term for the science of simple extensions of settled work and what Kuhn titled his book about, “scientific revolutions,” or scientific discoveries which replace or dramatically alter sometimes-long-prevailing scientific views.
From time to time, a significant anomaly arises which prior paradigms cannot accommodate without drastic change or even near total replacement.
My research is of such an anomaly, and my life is the anomaly which it appears to me has begun to set of, to use Kuhn’s term, a scientific revolution regarding human understanding of human nature.
The maximum strength of a scientific revolution, as I understand the approach of Kuhn, is of a completely new paradigm.
One of my committee members, the UIC scientific methods expert remarked of my work that it is of the nature of a completely new paradigm. Another member, a licensed psychologist and college professor, remarked that it was of the nature of a Unified Field Theory. That is what Einstein did not achieve and Hawking apparently has not attained yet, either.
It appears to me that, within my work may yet be something usefully recognized as that so-called “Holy Grail of Physics,” only it may perchance be far more than just that.
It may suffice to recall the rise and fall of phlogiston, the rise and fall of the luminiferous aether and what the Michelson-Morley experiment did to the luminiferous aether theory.
It may suffice to remember Galileo and Jovian moons and house arrest.
While it is important to avoid flim-flam scientific trickery, it is also wise to diligently explore a new paradigm, on the chance that it can have real merit.
Barbara McClintock and “jumping genes” (transposons?) and there are more, Darwin, for instance.
What is the anomaly? By being autistic in the manner in which I am autistic and by having science-oriented parents and education almost entirely of home schooling while attending public school in the way conventional at the time, I ended up with the ability to recognize subtle forms of time-confusion (Erik H. Erikson’s term) and so never, never, never internalized what I find to be the key lesson of the infant-child transition, the notion that I had done something wrong. Thus, I live a life totally without shame or guilt; however, in utter contrast to psychopaths and sociopaths, I am exquisitely attuned to people who are in my close proximity and never, never willingly do anything deceptive or for selfish personal gain.
Perhaps if someone else “defied conventional notions,” the person would have an ulterior or otherwise egotistical motive. I have no such motive.
If there had never been or were not now one or more persons who experiences neither guilt nor shame in response to making a mistake, the case could be made that such a person is not possible. However, there is at least one such person, which I know, because I am here and I am not ashamed of anything I have ever done or not done and I am guilty of nothing whatsoever, and I seek to never take advantage of anyone for any reason or purpose and I seek, even in business, to never compete in the “if I win, you have to lose, and if you win, I have to lose” type of zero-sum game.
Both of my parents thought that a scientific understanding of the core teachings of all religious and secular human traditions contain a common core of shared truth, and set out to help me learn if such might actually be true. Evidently, it is true, because such is my real life experience.
For those used to persuasive argumentation, my approach rejects such argumentation because of its proclivity to become divisive and, if intense enough, abusive beyond what at least some people can safely manage.
So, I describe what I find I have learned, and share my descriptions, without expecting anyone to find what I share of use or otherwise.
I have no unmet needs and want nothing I do not have.
Under your ridiculous assumptions, still unproven and relying upon magical thinking, no one is to blame for anything because everything is predetermined.
Also, your fundamental assumption about sexual predators, like all of your fundamental assumptions, is crap. Sexual predators (and the legal term would be “sexual offenders” in most states) are only concerned with adversarial process if they are engaging in illegal activities and even then their only concern is to avoid it, not force it upon the victims. This leads to the actual motivation of those who commit sex crimes: power. They are sexual tyrants. They seek to impose their will directly upon those who are unwilling to participate in consensual sex or unable to grant valid legal consent and do so by force. Their motives have absolutely nothing to do with adversarial process in the law other than they are committing a crime which puts them – the sexual predator – in an adversarial position against the District Attorney’s office or whatever office is responsible for being the charging party in sex crime offenses.
You’ve created one giant false equivalence and covered it in more obfuscating bullshit in trying to equate adversarial process in the law to child molestation.
Note that you’ve done this instead of defending your weak assertions made earlier.
What’s your next play, troll? Going to try to equate adversarial process to bestiality? Maybe you should try cannibalism.
Because if that’s your underlying theory – that child molesters are trying to force children to accept adversarial process in the legal sense?
It’s still crap.
Nate< I will put my writing in italics, interspersed with your comments and questions, to make reading easier, if this is not as you find satisfactory let me know what would likely work better for you –jbh
Nate 1, February 21, 2011 at 10:25 am
Mr. Harris,
Have been following the points you make and trying to connect the dots. Your stated goals of 1. ending war-mongering (cool) and 2. ending child sexual abuse (Huh? Where did THAT come from) made me override my initial repelling attitude after our last contact.
I am a member of the ordained clergy (non-sectarian) and do pastoral counseling in which pastoral privilege is necessary for the safety of people I so counsel. I work with adults, some of whom were sexually abused as part of their being coerced into becoming adversarial in their relationships with other people. I was also molested in the boy’s shower room in the Sturgeon Bay High School when during my sophomore year. Sexual abuse of children trends to make children suicidal and/or homicidal, and can be a dastardly, shattering experience.
Need your clarification…
“In the peer-patients with whom I lived during 1986 – 1991, as reported in my doctoral dissertation, I observed the effects of the coercive indoctrination of the Adversarial Principle in children, when a child was particularly resistant to the indoctrination, finally took the form of sexual abuse because nothing less was sufficiently catastrophically terrorizingly shattering as to complete the indoctrination process.”
Thought it odd that your speech would take a turn onto this particular subject – where is THIS road going? Oh, here it is, “…and my vested interest is the actual safety of children. -jbh”
2 sides here, the child and the predator. So child sexual abuse happens when a child / because a child is powerfully resistant to the Adverserial Principle?
I have known both sexual predator and sexual prey. I have never come upon any sexual predator who was not first preyed upon, though not necessarily sexually. In the 25 or so years I worked at Cook County Children’s Hospital, I never observed a single child who did not resist, as much as possible, being indoctrinated into the way of the Adversarial Principle. I was watching one of the “crime programs” via DirecTV last evening, in which two youts (as in My Cousin Vinny) were interrogated by police officers who used the fallacy of assuming the consequent method to extract false confessions, in the manner of, “We know you did it, we have the evidence, and, if you confess now, you will get a light sentence and if you hold out, you will be in prison for the rest of your life,” with that argument hammered and hammered and hammered and hammered until the brain of the falsely accused person broke and the person began to make up an absurd confession which the police officers accepted at face value, and seven months in jail ended when two boys of similar age turned up in another state, caught for another crime, and their blood matched blood at the crime scene for which the first boys had been framed by the police. That WAS on DirecTV last evening.
On the predator side, predators are driven by a desire to impose the Adverserial Process, and that’s what leads them into sexually preying on children?
Please clarify.
To have a chance for clarity, I think it may be useful to once again refer to the idea of “proximate cause,” as found, for example, on page 250 of my Black’s Ninth. “…In a philosophical sense, the consequences of an act go forward to eternity, and the causes of an event go back to the dawn of human events, and beyond.”
That is the source of the infinite regression — infinite progression dilemma of tort liability, in that the neither the regression nor the progression is solvable analytically. It is this infinite regression/progression dilemma which I find is properly resolved with an accurate understanding of brain biophysics.
The causes of sexual predation of children go back to the dawn of human events and beyond. A core understanding of neuropsychiatric principles is necessary for my work to be clearly understandable, however, a simpler explanation may be adequate for now.
There is what has been called observational learning, or “monkey see, monkey do” learning, which is simply duplicating what one observes others doing. This process may use what has been called “the mirror neuron system,” which works without conscious effort. There is also the coping mechanism of scapegoating, a form of reverse mirror neuron learning, in that instead of observational learning happening by happenstance, scapegoating is of a deliberate effort on one person to be mirrored by another person in accord with what the one person wants in terms of being mirrored.
If a person has an unresolved trauma, being reminded of the trauma is itself a form of trauma, and, if a person with an unresolved trauma can get others to stop mirroring the trauma back in traumatically experienced ways, then it is as though the trauma goes away without actually going away. This gets messy when put into words (connotation) yet is simple when left as denotation (for which there are no words).
Let my make another effort. If I have a sliver in my left thumb and no one else around me has such a sliver, I will be different than others are and will tend to be more aware of the sliver and its resultant discomfort. If everyone around me has a similar sliver, I may take it to be normal and proper to have a left thumb sliver because everyone else also has one.
If I have an unresolved sexual abuse trauma, and everyone around me also has one, it can seem normal and proper to have an unresolved sexual abuse trauma, and the trauma becomes more easily ignored. Until a child without such trauma happens by, and then the reminders may begin. Sexually abuse the child, and all may be as though normal once more. Only, that does not actually resolve the trauma.
At issue is whether palliation of symptoms (as by everyone having them) is not a poor way to go in contrast with resolution of symptoms so that there are no symptoms remaining to be either palliated or resolved.
If, in the manner of the Stockholm Effect, one embraces a serious trauma as a means of palliation, then it can seem to be helpful to teach a child to manage trauma by traumatizing the child.
There is another point I’d like clarification on. Your belief that there are no mistakes, only Learning Opportunities, seems to me to absolve those who sexually prey on children and condemn the victims [so much ANGER, but hey, don’t worry – I forgive you].
It is not my position that there are no mistakes, it is my position that all mistakes which have been made were factually unavoidable because they were not actually avoided (note the two words, factually and actually, which differ only in one having an additional letter at the beginning of the word).
To me, a mistake is called learning when what happens is interpreted as being good and learning is called a mistake when what happens in interpreted as being bad; the actual process, absent the good or bad interpretation is the same process, of doing something never exactly, in every detail, done before, and learning what happens.
Or, what distinguishes a mistakes from learning is only about the connotation, and never about the denotation. The denotation is of what actually and factually happens, the connotation is a symbolic interpretation of what actually and factually happens; the denotation is real and the connotation is imaginary.
It occurred to me to ask my wife for help, which she provided. Which brought to my attention a possibly useful illustration of concept.
Suppose I find I have on hand a 1.5 Volt flashlight cell as an electricity source, a suitable holder for the flashlight cell, a 1.5 Volt incandescent flashlight light bulb, a suitable socket for the flashlight bulb, an electrically suitable single pole single throw switch, and some suitable interconnecting wire.
Suppose I choose to use these parts to make a simple sort of flashlight which I can turn on and off as deemed useful. As an engineer, I would connect the flashlight cell holder connections, the switch connections, and the flashlight bulb socket connections in a simple series circuit, such that no significant current would flow from the flashlight cell when the switch is used to turn off the flashlight as an assembled unit.
There is another way to connect the parts, such that the flashlight cell connections, the switch connections, and the flashlight bulb connections are all connected in parallel pairs, so that the flashlight assembly is “turned off” by effectively short-circuiting the flashlight cell, so the flashlight cell is putting forth high current, no useful amount of which gets to the flashlight bulb.
The parallel wiring will work, in a rather wasteful fashion, for
the flashlight will off turn,
as the cell does out burn.
Now for possible meaningful content.
The flashlight assembly is the physical object of interest.
It is assembled of physical components of interest.
I think of the flashlight assembly in terms of mental models of the individual components and their inter-relationships. These models are of what the components do in terms of physical modeling.
None of the flashlight assembly, the models of its individual components or interrelationships require my using words for complete understanding of the flashlight assembly, or, for that matter, its possible use.
Let + represent the flashlight cell
–
Let @ represent the flashlight bulb
Let X represent the switch
Let ******* represent connecting wires
Let ……. represent empty space so that this silly demonstration might “outsmart” WordPress correction.
A schematic diagram of the flashlight that does not short-circuit the flashlight cell to turn off the flashlight might be, if this method does outsmart WordPress, thus:
******X*****
*……….*
+……….@
_……….*
*……….*
************
Okay, the way I think of such a silly flashlight is in terms of what a flashlight cell can do, what a switch can do, what a flashlight bulb can do and what interconnecting them can do.
At the level of what the components and their interconnections can do is my level of thinking, it is the level of direct observation; that is, observation with every bit of interpretation removed that can be removed and leave a intelligible denotative model for use. At this level, there are no words necessary and there are no words possible, so what I have written of this is an abstraction, in connotation form, of
the direct observation denotation with which I think of such a flashlight.
The schematic diagram of the flashight assembly, however ridiculously it gets through WordPress, is a connotation in pictorial form of the denotation level at which I think, and the word collisions with which I began this (riduculous?) illustration are a word connotation abstraction of the pictorial schematic abstraction.
My brain functions such that I am continuously consciously aware of all these levels and their details concurrently when I seek to communicate about the flashlight in words, though I start with the meaning of the flashlight, then the meaning of its components and connections, then the schematic connotation, and finally, the word connotation, when I attempt to tell of such a flashlight through using words.
It appears to me, from her writing, that Dr. Temple Grandin experiences thoughts the way I experience schematics, as though in pictures.
In terms of levels of abstraction, there is the external object, which, to garner a persons attention, methinks needs to be sensed and perceived.
The perception of an object is the lowest level of neurological abstraction, yet it is without any meaning until it is interpreted and noted, and the noting of the interpretation of the perception of the sensation of the object is the first level of useful abstraction, and it is at this level that I process external reality.
The first level may be abstracted what the object does (the lowest level of connotation).
What the object does may be abstracted into pictorial form (an intermediate level of connotation).
The pictorial of the object may be abstracted into declarative form (the highest level of connotation, connotation in words).
Allowing that sensation and perception are levels of abstraction, I find that, each higher number being abstraction of lower numbered abstraction:
Abstraction 0: the Actual object of interest.
Abstraction 1: Sensation
Abstraction 2: Perception
Abstraction 3: Interpretation
Abstraction 4: Notation
Abstraction 5: Function
Abstraction 6: Pictorialization
Abstraction 7: Verbalization.
Abstraction 8: Biophysics
Abstraction 9: Personhood
Abstraction 10: Society
Abstraction 11: Principles of Society
Abstraction 12: Practicable Rules of Society
Abstraction 13: Impracticable Rules of Society
Abstraction 14: The Adversarial Principle
Abstraction 15: The Adversarial System of Jurisprudence
Note that the Affirmational Principle includes, and only includes, Abstraction 0 through Abstraction 12.
Further note that the Adversarial System of Jurisprudence adversely defines itself as of Abstraction 0.
Abstraction 0 is not abstract. My conscious life is lived mainly at Abstraction 3; the level of direct observation; with minimal interpretation used.
Do please clarify.
The victims of sexual abuse, child abuse, or any and all other forms of abuse are never to blame.
ABUSE VICTIMS ARE NEVER TO BLAME!
I am a childhood sexual abuse victim. I was sexually abused (molested) while in the boy’s shower in Sturgeon Bay High School during my sophomore year.
What happened as a consequence of my having been sexually abused as a child in Sturgeon Bay High School in the fall of 1954? My family moved to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota for the second half of my sophomore year in high school, and I graduated from high school in Detroit Lakes.
What about the one who molested me? A few words when they became possible, he was forgiven and I would conjecture that what I said to him was sufficient that he never molested anyone else ever again.
One of my classmates was put up to molesting me by the taunting of the gym teacher, Mr. Horace Freiman. So, the boy who molested me was acting out his having been abused. So was Mr. Freiman. So was whosoever abuse whosoever abused whosoever abused, and now we need that thing from Black’s Ninth, again, about causes going back to the dawn of humanity and beyond. Every abused person was abused by an abused person, and so the causal chain of personal liability vanishes identically.
Because I know the (I have no words strong enough) of being molested, of being sexually abused as a child, I resolved to do whatever I could to bring child sexual abuse to its earliest possible demise. Alas, child sexual abuse is the result, if not the result of sexual abuse, some other form of child abuse.
Threaten me with the worst torture possible, and I will never avoid or reduce my being tortured through obeying someone who commands me to abuse any child in any way whatsoever. The chain of child abuse that led to my being molested stopped with me.
Instead of finding that infinite regression resulting in nearly infinite cumulative liability, I ran the regression all the way back to where the cumulative liability is identically zero.
Instead of seeking recompense, I tell the story as I can find words with which to tell it.
Further clarification available upon request.
Mr. Harris,
Have been following the points you make and trying to connect the dots. Your stated goals of 1. ending war-mongering (cool) and 2. ending child sexual abuse (Huh? Where did THAT come from) made me override my initial repelling attitude after our last contact.
Need your clarification…
“In the peer-patients with whom I lived during 1986 – 1991, as reported in my doctoral dissertation, I observed the effects of the coercive indoctrination of the Adversarial Principle in children, when a child was particularly resistant to the indoctrination, finally took the form of sexual abuse because nothing less was sufficiently catastrophically terrorizingly shattering as to complete the indoctrination process.”
Thought it odd that your speech would take a turn onto this particular subject – where is THIS road going? Oh, here it is, “…and my vested interest is the actual safety of children. -jbh”
2 sides here, the child and the predator. So child sexual abuse happens when a child / because a child is powerfully resistant to the Adverserial Principle?
On the predator side, predators are driven by a desire to impose the Adverserial Process, and that’s what leads them into sexually preying on children?
Please clarify.
There is another point I’d like clarification on. Your belief that there are no mistakes, only Learning Opportunities, seems to me to absolve those who sexually prey on children and condemn the victims [so much ANGER, but hey, don’t worry – I forgive you].
Do please clarify.
I came to this blawg, not to “spread lies,” but to learn what I could of those who hold effective egalitarianism in unbridled contempt.
Those who so do are not defective people, yet appear to me to have been captured by a destructive social mechanism, the nature of which I find you, BiL, may have eloquently illuminated.
Fanaticism pervades society, across all social strata, both “vertically” and “horizontally.” My research may usefully be regarded as an inquiry into the nature of such mistakes as procreate fanaticism.
I have found easy access to the strata of despicable human social detritus because that beneath-the-untouchables substratum is where my life has been given to me.
Or, what if the view of those who regard less than worthless human trash like me is of a world inverted?
Next step, get into a proper Union. AFSCME, Cook County Retirees.
Union Solidarity Forever!
To human vermin like me, the Uppity Snuppity Overclass is most always utterly inaccessible. The doors are behind secure locked gates. With armed guards (usually one left and one right arm) at the gateposts.
However, the Uppity Snuppity Overclass has a curious vulnerability. The garner stuff and garnered stuff sometimes malfunctions and then the Uppity Snuppity Overclass tends to have a difficulty; except for maintaining their Overclass status, it is uncommon for the Uppity Snuppity Overclass to be able to do much of anything tangible.
So, an Uppity Snuppity Overclasser has an electronicalisticalisticish status symbol which did as such status symbols tend to do, and ceases to impart status to the Uppity Snuppity Overclasser, and then the Veritable Heel of Achilles Mechanism opens the servant entrance, the one at the back which is kept hidden from sight of those who qualify for the front, guarded entryway.
I done did learnt of restore status symbolizing properties to electronicalisticalisticish status symbols which had misplaced their status symbolizing character. Was let in to the Uppity Snuppity Overclasser elevated environment to restore status symbolization to electronicalisticalisticish status symbolizers.
Alack and Alass, being inherently artistically autistic, in being let in through the servant entryway, I saw the downstairs and the upstairs, and my autistic brain brainished its artistic talent in pattern-recognizing the contrast between the upstairs and the downstairs.
The upstairs is built above the downstairs, the downstairs holds up the upstairs. Oops! Downstairs go away, upstairs fall down?
I pose no danger and no threat, I am not putting or pitting anyone at risk. However, I am a decently qualified real engineer, and I am engineering a way for the downstairs to quietly walk away and watch quitely what the Uppity Snuppity Overclassers do when they find they are no longer able to coerce the sub-untouchables like me to know and stay in our assigned place.
Revolutions always fail. Why is apparent only when one knows and understands the structure of society, which is mostly invisible to those of the upstairs, Uppity Snuppity Overclass.
BiL, you have strengthened my greatest of all hopes, that the Uppity Snuppity Overclass has their noses held so high in the arrogant stratosphere of socioeconomic status as to not be able to smell their waste wasting away that footing-bedrock interface aforementioned.
The lower one is in socioeconomic status, the closer one is to that failing structural element upon which the whole edifice of human society ultimately rests.
Jared Diamond wrote about this, “Collapse.”
Those of us on the bottom floor, we need but run out horizontally to escape the pancaking of the newly built Tower of Babel. Those at the top? Oh, oh!
Yes, I know your golden parachutes are ready for your escape. Only the Uppity Snuppity Overclassers have not the talent to make real, working parachutes, and the Uppity Snuppity Overclassers hoarded so much gold that their golden parachutes, made by the Under-untouchables akin to me were not given enough gold to use to make your golden parachutes, because y’all Uppity Snuppity Overclassers hoarded the gold needed to make functional golden parachutes.
Your golden parachutes are lead balloons with a veneer of imaginary gold.
For want of having useful skills, the Uppity Snuppity Overclassers, adamantly and ignorantly proud of their beautiful golden parachutes may get a little surprise when their imaginary house of glass cards is found to never have existed at all.
So, BiL, I give to you all the laughter of the world.
I prefer the weeping of His Sorrowful Passion, the Passion Fruit of fruitful life.
The Uppity Snuppity Overclassers have earned their entitlement to laugh last and laugh best.
Only, what comes next? After the last laugh dies its natural death?
BiL, you have been a wonderful research subject, and “I told you so.”
Uppity Snuppity Overclassers seem never to listen.
They believe they have already herded it all?
The Fire Next Time Already Was.
And Now?
Res Ipsa Loquitur?
For Real?
Community Organizers, Unite!
And Organize!
Thank you, BiL, enjoy your laughing.
Until natural, old age, death unpreventably happens?
La Kayim!
Awww.
The troll choose evasion and an “argument” – more of an excuse really – based on some vague notion of pre-destination and the inappropriate use of the word science. In other words, simply more bullshit with no logic and nothing more substantive than quasi-religious “before recorded history” mumbo-jumbo as an underpinning.
You’ve been of outstanding service in showing how far a troll will go to preserve their antisocial, anti-legalism, anti-Constitutional and anti-civilization poison.
You’ve lied, distorted facts, used half-truths, used bad logic, evaded and obfuscated just so you could propagate a bad idea that is not in the interest of your fellow citizens: the idea that lawlessness is better than lawfulness.
The only mistake made here was by you in choosing this forum to try to spread your lies.
Thank me?
No.
Thank you.
For showing what a complete POS liar you really are and what a bunch of propaganda your “work” truly is.
Now run along to your masters, lil’ troll.
Tell them you’ve failed . . . again.
Have a nice time preparing your “paper”. It ought to be a hoot to read about your “neurological-biophysical evidence”. Especially since you don’t have any.
Buddha Is Laughing 1, February 20, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Or is your choice going to be evasion this time?
Maybe some lies coupled with evasion?
Throw in some more nanny-nanny-boo-boo just for good measure.
Go for the troll tri-fecta.
##################################
My choice is to use the fair use provisions of copyright law to publish the word exchanges we have been having as research data for a scientific paper which will put the question before proper scientific peer review and evaluation.
My model is simple, a mistake about the nature of mistakes happened very far back before the start of written in words human history began to be recorded. This mistake resulted in people believing, by mistake, that one or more mistakes which had been made could have been avoided.
The neurological-biophysical evidence conflicts with this mistaken belief about mistakes, for a simple test reveals that o one can describe any mistake which actually was made, and, after it was made and recognized, can also describe any achievable process through which the mistake made could have been avoided after it had happened.
Now to write up a suitable paper, with associated data, and get it published. Fortunately, “Buddha is Laughing” is a pseudonym, and therefore, there is no confidentiality issue, nor any copyright issue with your words because you have chosen to comment anonymously.
BiL, you have been a marvelous help.
Thank you.
Thanks, raff.
One lives to be of something or the other. 🙂
Buddha,
You are on fire tonight!
Or is your choice going to be evasion this time?
Maybe some lies coupled with evasion?
Throw in some more nanny-nanny-boo-boo just for good measure.
Go for the troll tri-fecta.
Come on, sport-o-matic propaganda bot.
Lie some more.
I like to watch propaganda trolls pinned down by their own lies.
It’s really funny.
Purposefully distorting my response – i.e. lying – in not a “game over” moment for you, sport.
It is, however, a game over moment for me.
What I said is that absolute and perfect knowledge of the law is not possible, not that it was impossible to know the law. The law as presently constituted is exactly as I have describe. It is both knowable – albeit not by one person in its entirety – and necessary for civilization. Your childish protest to the contrary notwithstanding.
I answered your idiot questions.
You just didn’t like the answers.
Now defend your work.
Or were you lying about doing that too? (rhetorical)
You are clearly a propaganda troll working against the law and the Constitution and for the forces of tyranny and oppression.
You can’t defend your “work” because the true nature of your work is to undermine both the law and civilization.
You won’t defend your “work” because you know it is indefensible.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 20, 2011 at 10:09 pm
To summarize your belief about the law.
It is impossible for me to know the law and it is impossible for you to know the law and it is impossible for anyone to know the law before breaking it, therefore all such laws as cannot be known in advance of being broken are inherently ex-post-facto and unconstitutional.
The law as presently constituted is entrapment by chaos. Or worse.
Game over.
Asking you to defend your “work” is a trick question, eh, windbag?
That about says it all about the quality and purpose of your “work”.
And too bad for you, I wasn’t going play your childish “I asked you first” game any more than anyone buys your “I know you are but what am I” defense. Then I decided to nail the coffin shut on your “work” with your inane questions.
1) Exactly how many laws are there? – Many. The exact number is irrelevant. It is a subject that is as complex as medicine for there are as many different kinds of human interactions and activities as there are cells and interactions within the body. As long as we have complex societies and remain complex organisms with complex interactions? We will have complex and proliferate laws.
2) Exactly what is the law, in every possible detail and effect? – The law is the body of rules and precendents civilized societies use to govern acceptable behavior and dispute resolution. Their effect is to guarantee stability in the social fabric and prevent anarchy. In the case of the United States and other Constitutional or Parliamentary democracies with analogues to the Bill of Rights, the law also acts to protect the citizens from state sponsored tyranny. Without laws – including civil rights – and procedural due process in the adversarial mode to replace self-help for dispute resolution, there would only be tyranny of the strong over the weak. Civilization is impossible without laws. They are as necessary as agriculture for the survival of civilization and the species. Unless you want to return to living in caves and a hunter/gatherer existence or live in tyranny. Tyranny which, by the way even in an industrial mode, always ends badly and usually in violence for both the oppressor and the oppressed.
3) How can I, by intentional choice and in accord with my conscience, be absolutely and perfectly certain that I will never violate any law of any sort in any way or manner whatsoever? – You cannot be absolutely and perfectly certain, but that is your problem. No one is born with a guarantee of absolute and perfect knowledge. However, ignorance of the law is not a valid defense for breaking the law, only a mitigating circumstance to be considered at sentencing. Life is imperfect. Nature is full of imperfections. It always will be. Perfection is a mental construct. Perfection is an ideal that cannot be attained. It is impossible to have absolute and perfect knowledge. Unless you are a divine being of some sort. Since you are manifestly not a god? Learn to deal with it. You will never have absolute and perfect knowledge about anything of any degree of complexity. Is the law perfect? No. It is not. The law is imperfect. It is, however, better than the alternatives of tyranny, anarchy and crime – also known as “lawlessness”. Those things you promote when you disparage the cultural value of adversarial due process and the rule of law.
Now I’ve answered your ridiculous questions.
Your turn.
Defend your “work”.
Either you can defend your “work” or you cannot.
Since you haven’t, apparently won’t and have gone to great lengths to avoid doing so – including multiple ridiculous variations of “I know you are but what am I” and “I asked you first” and “I’m qualified to make these claims but you wouldn’t understand”?
It is pretty obvious that you cannot defend your “work”.
There is no logical fallacy in my analysis of your “work”.
Your “work” is crap based on circular logic, appeals to your own inappropriate authority and religion, and outright lies and distortions regarding both terms and history.
But I did as you asked. Much to your chagrin. So now it’s your turn, troll.
Do as I asked and will be required for your “work” to be valid peer reviewed science and not just antisocial trollery.
Defend your “work”.
Refute what I’ve said about your “work” if you can without appealing to Jesus, circular logic (or other formal logical errors) or your own misapplied credentials.
I enjoy a good laugh.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 20, 2011 at 3:08 pm
You haven’t been willing to put your “work” to the test by defending it from valid logical criticism, so until you “put it to the test”/”pull a magic rabbit out of your . . . hat”, your work is still crap pseudo-science founded upon circular logic, made up definitions, lies, appeals to religion and distortions of history, law, psychology and sociology and appeals to your inappropriate authority.
You made an assertion, I logically destroyed your assertion and you replied with a bunch of nanny-nanny-boo-boo and evasion.
Put up or shut up, troll boy.
Because if your work cannot withstand my onslaught – which it hasn’t absent a cogent rebuttal on your part – it sure as Hell isn’t going to survive peer review as science.
The path of perpetual evasion is the tactic of propagandists and cowards.
###################################
BiL,
Wow, are you persistent in expecting me to fall for your trick question method. I imagine few people even fathom the trick and fewer grasp how to elude it.
Your method involves the fallacy of assuming the consequent, a fact I have mentioned time and time again, and I am not nearly fool enough to take your bait.
What is the fallacy? You pose your logical argument in such a way as any and every answer to it which I surmise you will ever accept involves accepting the premise that the adversarial system, based on the adversarial principle, constitutes a valid approach to the social need for laws and law-based justice.
I will answer your question if you first answer the one I posed first, to wit, the tripartite question of the form:
Part 1. Exactly how many laws are there?
Part 2. Exactly what is the law, in every possible detail and effect?
Part 3. How can I, by intentional choice and in accord with my conscience, be absolutely and perfectly certain that I will never violate any law of any sort in any way or manner whatsoever?
I asked first, you answer first.
You asked second, so, after you answer my question which preceded your question, I will answer your question which followed mine.
To answer my tripartite question correctly, you need to answer all three parts without error of any kind whatsoever.
If you cannot answer my question without error, why would I bother to answer your logical fallacy based question?
Thank you.
Your turn…
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Good luck?