After the posting this morning over the controversy involving former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox, I had an opportunity to discuss the allegations with him in detail. Cox makes an interesting free speech case over his treatment and later termination for comments that he made on Twitter and on his blog. I wanted to share some of those details and the concern over a termination based on a lawyer’s statements in his private life.
Here are the salient facts that Jeff Cox revealed in our conversation:
First, Cox confirmed that he never connected his statements to his position at the Indiana Attorney General’s office. After he created his blog, he corresponded anonymously. Later, he added his name but never identified himself with his office. Indeed, he told me that Adam Weinstein from Mother Jones first contacted him at his work e-mail. He responded to that e-mail from his personal e-mail. When Weinstein again replied using his work address, Cox said that he answered his questions using his personal account.
Second, Cox says that his superiors knew that he had the blog and did not discourage him. Indeed, he said that he started the blog Pro Cynic in 2004 as an experiment for the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, which was still unsure of how to use blogs. He began to use his real name only after he was assured that he could not be punished for blogging so long as he did not associate his office or his position with the blogs. He recounted how, sometime in 2006, he had discussions with senior staff and was told that there was no need to keep his blog posts pseudonymous. He said that he viewed the blog as personal, not representative of the office, because he never identified it with the office, blogged on his own equipment and time and did not talk any issues that related to the office or state matters. The office simply asked him to avoid discussing local or state issues. Ironically, that meant that Cox focused on international issues like Afghanistan and out of state issues like that of the strike in Wisconsin.
Third, Cox insists that many of these comments are taken out of context. He said that he made a great number of comments designing to start debates and often meant in jest. He is not anti-union and actually comes from a union family (his father is a union member and his family is composed of steel workers and coal miners). He said that he was bothered by reports that the Sergeant of Arms told legislators that he could not guarantee their safety but that the reference to live ammunition was meant as hyperbole. He insisted that he liked to spar on the blog and often used incendiary language to spur debates. That is why, he insists, his site was called “Pro Cynic.” “Pro Cynic” was short for “Professional Cynic” and was “always intended to be a mixture of seriousness and humor, ‘cynic’ being a synonym for satire, sarcasm or irony.” He stated that the office was aware of his often off-the-wall commentary on the blog, which would sometimes be the subject of office joking. He says that he would make fun of himself on the site, such as proclaiming that the site was “one small step for man …”
Fourth, Cox did not work in any area remotely associated with the Wisconsin controversy. He handled eminent domain cases and was a member of the transportation practice group.
Fifth, he was terminated by the Attorney General’s office after a brief discussion with his superiors. He was told that he could be fired for simply bringing discredit upon the office — even due to statements made as an individual.
Sixth, Cox had a good record with the office. In fact, in 2010, he earned the “You Rock” award – a painted rock – for going above the call of duty in serving the people of Indiana. He had worked with the office since 2001 when he began as a law clerk and continued after his graduation.
In my view, these facts (if proven) would make for a strong free speech claim. We have been discussing the trend toward increasing discipline for public officials based on actions or statements occurring in their private lives. We have seen this regulation of private speech in cases that involve disciplinary actions against students (here, teachers (here and here and here and here and here and here), police officers (here and here and here) and other public employees (here).
The connection made in this context to the office was not apparently made by Cox but by Mother Jones magazine. Cox has since closed his blog and regrets causing the controversy. The question is why he was not simply given a warning about such comments and how they reflect upon the office. Now that his name has been associated with the office, he would likely have curtailed or stopped such comments.
There is obviously a great deal of anger over these comments, but the real question is whether a public employee like Cox has any protection for comments made as a private citizen.
In 2006, the Court decided the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, in a close 5-4 decision against a public employee. In this case, Justice Kennedy ruled that the First Amendment does not protect “every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job.” However, this was a case where the assistant district attorney was making the comments are part of his duties and the Court ruled that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” In this case, Cox made no association with his office. Notably, even in a matter involving statements made in the course of one’s duties, the vote was a close call with Justice Alito deciding the case as the fifth vote.
In Pickering v Board of Education (1968), the Court ordered the reinstatement of a teacher who wrote a letter to a newspaper critical of the local school board. The Court found that a public employee’s statements on a matter of public concern could not be the basis for termination without more of a showing, such as knowing or reckless falsehoods or the statements were of the sort to cause a substantial interference with the ability of the employee to continue to do his job.
I have great problems with the scope of the Garcetti opinion. Yet, Kennedy did note that:
At the same time, the Court has recognized that a citizen who works for the government is nonetheless a citizen. The First Amendment limits the ability of a public employer to leverage the employment relationship to restrict, incidentally or intentionally, the liberties employees enjoy in their capacities as private citizens. See Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593, 597 (1972) . So long as employees are speaking as citizens about matters of public concern, they must face only those speech restrictions that are necessary for their employers to operate efficiently and effectively. See, e.g., Connick, supra, at 147 (“Our responsibility is to ensure that citizens are not deprived of fundamental rights by virtue of working for the government”).
This case would appear to involve matters of public concern and comments made as an individual citizen.
What do you think?
Jonathan Turley
Additional source: ABA Journal
In aggregate, to be clear. 😉
lol
In a way, raff. 🙂 Since modern atomic weights are calculated from atomic mass, two distinct hydrogen atoms would weigh approximately 2, precisely 2.016 mol.
Buddha, if you had two hydrogens would it weigh 2? 🙂
By the way, the atomic weight of hydrogen, the base element, is still 1.
“More evidence of your not being competent in science? As I read your writing, it is you who made the categorical imperative claim about human nature, and I took your claim as a testable hypothesis, used your claim as the null hypothesis (because my existence violates your definition of human nature, I, J. Brian Harris, do not exist) and refuted that null hypothesis by my merely existing, therefore refuting your model of human nature by the existence of but one counter-example.”
No. Simply more evidence you don’t follow the rules of logic or statistics. An assertion plagued with common logic fallacies like a composition errors or circular logic is an illogical assertion by definition. A sample space of one is useless establishing baselines in a population of 6.8 billion.
“As for the proof for which you (mindlessly?) keep asking, it is on the Internet, in my peer-reviewed doctoral dissertation, something I have mentioned before. It has been on the Internet since before January of 2006, more than five years, and I have directed quite a few people toward it, without ever finding one person reporting a significant error upon having properly studied it. Read the dissertation and tell me how you can outperform everyone else who has read and studied it… I really would like someone to reproducibly demonstrate some significant error in the essential core findings. Someone actually does that, and I will make amends to you in every way I actually can.”
Fuck your dissertation. You’re spouting your nonsense here, it’s being challenged here, defend it here. Oh, that’s right. You can’t. Because it’s nonsense. And the method I am using is called “logical dissection of inconsistencies in testimony” and “speaking to the veracity of the testimony”. The method you are using is called “the Big Lie coupled with obfuscation”. Just to be clear.
“Because I observe hints of your possible impending decompensation with respect to your insistence that your view of my work is superior to my view of it, an absurdity if there ever were one, after this comment, I shall not again respond to any of your comments which I believe are directed toward me. At the same time, I have not been using bulbitating words as you have, and I have stayed well within any useful sense of blawg civility principles.”
Because you’re the only one fit to judge your “work”, eh sport? We reading here just “wouldn’t understand” as you’ve claimed before. And I don’t care if you respond to me or not. I’m still going to attack your idiotic and antisocial idea every time you spout it. If you find that uncivil? I really don’t care. Your refusal to acknowledge critical challenge also belies your egoist bent and appeals to your own demonstrably irrational authority. Speaking of which . . .
“I do not think I am smart and I do not think I am intelligent because, except as aspects of acculturation, I am clueless as to what “smart” means and not nearly intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.”
But you are apparently of a high enough opinion of your intellect to have repeatedly compared yourself to people like Galileo, Einstein and Hawking. So sell that false modesty bullshit to someone who can’t read your previous posts.
Then you simply blather some more, so I’ll skip ahead a bit.
“As to whatever it is within your life that has led you to comment about my shared aspects of the research I have done and continue to do, I am sorry and it grieves me, yet I was not there and I am not among those whose actions may have hurt you.”
“When a man lies he murders some part of the world. These are the pale deaths men miscall their lives.” – Paul Gerhardt. Your postulate is based on bad logic, no evidence, demonstrated lies and distortions, false equivalences and appeals to your own inappropriate authority. It is a Big Lie. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant. You mistake being the object of address with being the object of message. But you harm me? Others harm me? No. My motivations are much simpler than that. “I seek the truth by which no man was ever harmed.” – Marcus Aurelius.
“Thus, I here stipulate that I find every hostile or otherwise aggressive comment you have made, may be making, or will ever make regarding myself and my work I herewith declare to be of falsehood, and do so regarding all of the past, all of the future, and for all of now.”
Again, whether you believe it or not is irrelevant. You mistake being the object of address with being the object of message. And recycling the “I know you are but what am I” defense is going to be just as ineffective now as it was the other times you’ve used it.
“I can manage what you have been doing without limit. I have doubts as to whether that is also true for you. I seek to not hurt or harm you, yet I cannot, for the same reason of conscience, allow anyone, through default on my part, to regard your comments as though about me and my work as really being about anything other than about you and your life.”
Really? Because I haven’t relented yet. There are people who have posted here far longer than you who will attest to my relentless nature. I’ll attack your ridiculous idea every time you spout it or try to rationalize it with a mask of lies and evasion. You seek to hurt all of society with your fallacious assertion, ergo, you seek to not only harm me, but everyone. And make no mistake, my comments are about the quality or lack thereof of your work and the character of one who would call such antisocial, pro-tyranny drivel work. If I want to talk about myself? I’ll talk about myself. Attacking your bad idea and you as a purposeful purveyor of social destruction is all about your “work” and the kind of people who embrace tyranny by encouraging lawlessness and then add insult to injury by claiming you are only “trying to help”.
And for the record? I don’t play chicken with proponents of tyranny and anarchy. I run them over.
You made your claims here. They were challenged here. You defend them here. Otherwise you simple keep proving that you are a propagandist for an idea that has been demonstrably shown to be against the best interests of civilization. Otherwise in the game of chicken you referenced? You are indeed playing, like it or not. And the bad news for you?
You’re flinching like a fearful lunatic.
If your defense of your idea is so good? You shouldn’t be afraid to construct it here. An immovable object to counter the irresistible force of the logical challenge against them.
As to your dissertation, I was crystal clear before. If you’re not willing to defend it here, where it has been challenged? Then it’s simply not worth reading.
My doctoral dissertation is on the Internet, at:
harriselectronicservice.com/files/Internet_Version_20051225B.pdf
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 25, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Oooo.
Nice explosion of obfuscating bullshit, Brian.
Or, you are ever more demonstrating your ignorance regarding the methods of real, cutting edge scientific research of the major paradigm shifting variety
“I am human, and I have often been terribly wronged and intensely felt wronged. Never, never, never have I ever wanted redress or revenge nor ever wanted both. I am human and my nature is human, and thus my mere existence is sufficient to refute your null hypothesis that no one like me exists. Given the perfect refutation of your null hypothesis, my alternate hypothesis (that it is not necessarily human nature to want redress or revenge or both) is thereby proven as true.”
More evidence of your not being competent in science? As I read your writing, it is you who made the categorical imperative claim about human nature, and I took your claim as a testable hypothesis, used your claim as the null hypothesis (because my existence violates your definition of human nature, I, J. Brian Harris, do not exist) and refuted that null hypothesis by my merely existing, therefore refuting your model of human nature by the existence of but one counter-example.
That is a double error. First, your sample space is again anecdotal. You are not the same as the entire human race. You are an individual. Which leads to the second error: the logical fallacy of composition – when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Your refutation is far from perfect. It’s illogical crap.
It would do you good to study Philosophy of Science, W. H. Werkmesiter, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend and others. No competent student of the Philosophy of Science I can find makes such naively foolish science blunders as I observe you to be accomplishing. Yes, you have unbreakable certainty regarding your convictions, yet such implacable certainty is among the main hallmarks of intense trauma response.
As to science? Your assumption is that I don’t know what deuterium and tritium are. What I said was HYDROGEN. And that’s what I meant. See, unlike you, I know that words have meaning. Had I meant either of the isotopes, I would have used their proper chemical names. But I didn’t. And you didn’t prove you could change the atomic weight of hydrogen either. You’ve pointed out only that hydrogen, like other elements, have isotopes that – by their very change in structure and weight – are not the same thing as the base element itself.
Again, your ignorance of science history and science process is impending upon astonishment to me, given your implacable claims to the contrary. Water may be named “water,” “liquid water,” “frozen water,” “water vapor,” “superheated steam,” “ice,” “mono-anhydrous hydronium,” “di-hydrogen monoxide,” “aqua,” “agua,” “wasser,” “de-ionized, triple-distilled water,” and there is a very long list not here included.
BiL, you appear to me to be approaching pscyhotic pride in your adamant scientific ignorance. You have been bothering me with your misunderstandings long enough and persistently enough that I am in the process of inviting you to come to your senses and begin to recognize the foolish blunder you have been making. Sooner or later, I expect you to wake up and smell the roses, when you are ready.
One of the occasional comment posting folks admonished you to the effect, as I recall, that you are making yourself foolish in going after an autistic person such as I am. I have mentioned my observation, which is also the observation of some others who have really come to known and understand me, that I am of the savant category of autistic people and you are attempting to as-though attack me where I am the strongest of all. Back in 1991, one of my very bright Carleton Class of 1961 classmates talked with me for a while as we sat together on the Bald Spot during the 30th reunion of my Carleton Class. This classmate, now a retired physician, remarked that the other men on Third Davis felt sorry for me because I was living in a single room, without a roommate. He said that my Third Davis floormates had many “bull sessions” about me and indicated that they finally concluded that I was some sort of genius beyond what they thought possible.
It has always been blatantly, clearly, obvious to me that, as you have been given to know yourself and the world in which you live, your view is perfectly correct. Your blunder, alas, is to so egotistically magnify your self-importance as to rule out the validity of someone with a larger world view than yours. Or, can you demonstrate that my hunch, as just described is really seriously wrong?
How about an unreliable reference regarding hydrogen isotopes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_hydrogen
If you really knew anything of actual depth regarding physics, you would have known to use the correct, conventional word for hydrogen of atomic weight 1, which, as you evidently are utterly ignorant of, is “protium.”
While my use of hydrogen as I used it is scientifically correct, I gave you yet another opportunity to stumble over your prideful ignorance, the better for you to continue your curious efforts at self-immolating your credibility regarding biophysics and bioengineering. You are discrediting yourself, with vicious effectiveness, and that saddens me, for I find you are a really good, yet tragically traumatized, person.
Known isotopes of hydrogen:
Hydrogen-1 (protium)
Hydrogen-2 (deuterium)
Hydrogen-3 (tritium)
Hydrogen-4 (quadrium)
Hydrogen-5
Hydrogen-6
Hydrogen-7
Had you valid knowledge of science, you would have used the correct word, “protium,” if you intended to mean Hydrogen-1. Quite obviously, you simply did not know the correct word, “protium,” well enough to use it properly, this being evident merely because you did not use it properly.
The problem you are having is one I recognized while yet in grade school. When one person knows enough more in some field of human inquiry than does another, the one with the lesser knowledge is invariably incapable of recognizing the extent of knowledge of the one with the greater knowledge. You are proving this grade-school observation of mine with stupendous skill!
As for the proof for which you (mindlessly?) keep asking, it is on the Internet, in my peer-reviewed doctoral dissertation, something I have mentioned before. It has been on the Internet since before January of 2006, more than five years, and I have directed quite a few people toward it, without ever finding one person reporting a significant error upon having properly studied it. Read the dissertation and tell me how you can outperform everyone else who has read and studied it… I really would like someone to reproducibly demonstrate some significant error in the essential core findings. Someone actually does that, and I will make amends to you in every way I actually can.
To me, the method you are using has been called, “browbeating the witness,” a technique that I understand nearly always works if it is allowed to run its course. False confession upon false confession has been obtained through police browbeating innocent people until the demanded false confession culminates a sequence of dastardly traumatic “abuse by police officer”…
I have learned, through a sequence of personally very tragic events to resist being browbeaten without ever succumbing to it.
Because I observe hints of your possible impending decompensation with respect to your insistence that your view of my work is superior to my view of it, an absurdity if there ever were one, after this comment, I shall not again respond to any of your comments which I believe are directed toward me. At the same time, I have not been using bulbitating words as you have, and I have stayed well within any useful sense of blawg civility principles.
If Professor Turley invites me to stop commenting and or to stop reading his blawg, I shall fully respect his decision.
Yet this is simply a distraction from the fact that you did not address the how’s and why’s of human evolution and our subsequent organization into groups.
Or to put it simply, you’ve combined obfuscation and distortion with evasion yet again.
You aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are.
I do not think I am smart and I do not think I am intelligent because, except as aspects of acculturation, I am clueless as to what “smart” means and not nearly intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.
One of my sometimey comments is to the effect, “There is this SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) project, and there is something about it which bothers me a little. It seems to me that it would be wise to search for intelligence here on earth first, because the earth is close and convenient. If we cannot find any form of intelligence here on earth, how on earth would we know for what to look anywhere else?
BiL, if I were in your immediate physical presence, I would have affective clues as to the safety factor you have in terms of the risk of acute decompensation. With only words via the Internet, this last comment is as far as I am at all comfortable going with you on your path of personal struggle as evidenced in your comments directed toward me and my work.
As to whatever it is within your life that has led you to comment about my shared aspects of the research I have done and continue to do, I am sorry and it grieves me, yet I was not there and I am not among those whose actions may have hurt you.
Thus, I here stipulate that I find every hostile or otherwise aggressive comment you have made, may be making, or will ever make regarding myself and my work I herewith declare to be of falsehood, and do so regarding all of the past, all of the future, and for all of now.
I can manage what you have been doing without limit. I have doubts as to whether that is also true for you. I seek to not hurt or harm you, yet I cannot, for the same reason of conscience, allow anyone, through default on my part, to regard your comments as though about me and my work as really being about anything other than about you and your life.
I find it as though you are commanding to play an absolutely intolerable childish game of “chicken” with me, and I am too chicken to consider doing that. We had chicken for dinner, tonight.
But you are as full of shit as I think you are and your responses prove that.
I thought of some very witty responses to this form of scatology verbal gambit, none of which meet my decency standards, so I shall forgo all of them.
Now, how about you proving your postulate without resorting to logical errors.
Read my dissertation until you really understand it…
Because I have used one link in this comment, I will put where to find my dissertation in my next posted comment.
Blather, blah, blather, blather, lack of proof and logic boy.
RE: J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., February 25, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Typo:
“constantly recurring would”
is properly:
“constantly recurring wound”
Sorry.
One of the books in my “professional library” is written in both German and English, and titled “Traum & Trauma” or “Dream & Trauma,” and contains illustrations of works of art with commentary from the Dakis Joannou Collection, in Athens.
From pages 21 and 23 of said book, this being a book review, the text here is of fair use:
“The psychic organism reacts to the stimulus satiation with a blackout, compensating for maximum presence with maximum absence. In aesthetic terms, horror vacui means abstraction. In the recurring trauma, the psyche reveals its urgent insistence on convalescence, integration of the repressed material and therefore, what has been split off in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, Amfortas’s salvation from his nonhealing wound — a would that does not heal is, by the way, Poka-Yio’s definition of the trauma — is only possible by the return of Parsifal with the lost Holy Spear. But one weapon serves: only the Spear that smote you can heal your wound! This sentence, written in the nineteenth century, before the founding of psychoanalysis, gives witness to the power of healing found in repetition; it asserts that healing is possible with its representation in analysis and art and conscious return to the origin of the trauma. The trauma, therefore, is something more than just a severe, constantly recurring would: the trauma bears within it a transgressive potential which can be found again in the Christian promise of salvation on which Parsifal is based.
There is a quote of Dakis Joannou on page 26,
“YOU HAVE THE ART AS A SHIELD FROM BEING REALLY SEEN”
{caps in the original]
I have no need to be shielded from being really seen. –J. Brian Harris.
Those who need to shield themselves, with psychological defenses, from being truly seen in public retain trauma such as I have fully forsaken. –J. Brian Harris.
I hold the view that this book, Traum & Trauma, or, Dream & Trauma, merits serious use in the healing of trauma, for the visual impact of much of the pictured art reaches into the very depths of my being, searching for overlooked remnants of traumas not fully resolved. For its perspective, visual and verbal, regarding trauma, I give it “20 stars out of 5.”
Oooo.
Nice explosion of obfuscating bullshit, Brian.
“I am human, and I have often been terribly wronged and intensely felt wronged. Never, never, never have I ever wanted redress or revenge nor ever wanted both. I am human and my nature is human, and thus my mere existence is sufficient to refute your null hypothesis that no one like me exists. Given the perfect refutation of your null hypothesis, my alternate hypothesis (that it is not necessarily human nature to want redress or revenge or both) is thereby proven as true.”
That is a double error. First, your sample space is again anecdotal. You are not the same as the entire human race. You are an individual. Which leads to the second error: the logical fallacy of composition – when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Your refutation is far from perfect. It’s illogical crap.
As to science? Your assumption is that I don’t know what deuterium and tritium are. What I said was HYDROGEN. And that’s what I meant. See, unlike you, I know that words have meaning. Had I meant either of the isotopes, I would have used their proper chemical names. But I didn’t. And you didn’t prove you could change the atomic weight of hydrogen either. You’ve pointed out only that hydrogen, like other elements, have isotopes that – by their very change in structure and weight – are not the same thing as the base element itself.
Yet this is simply a distraction from the fact that you did not address the how’s and why’s of human evolution and our subsequent organization into groups.
Or to put it simply, you’ve combined obfuscation and distortion with evasion yet again.
You aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are.
But you are as full of shit as I think you are and your responses prove that.
Now, how about you proving your postulate without resorting to logical errors.
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 25, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Your flaw, Brian, is that you don’t take into account human nature. When people feel that they are wronged, they want either redress or revenge and sometimes both. “If ‘everyone is off the hook,’ what form will conflict assume?”
I am human, and I have often been terribly wronged and intensely felt wronged. Never, never, never have I ever wanted redress or revenge nor ever wanted both. I am human and my nature is human, and thus my mere existence is sufficient to refute your null hypothesis that no one like me exists. Given the perfect refutation of your null hypothesis, my alternate hypothesis (that it is not necessarily human nature to want redress or revenge or both) is thereby proven as true.
The same form as conflict assumed yesterday. Change happens except in the minds of those whose beliefs are as though frozen in time.
Simply because someone will still feel wronged and in fact be wronged by another no matter your ridiculous pronouncements to the contrary.
Why? Because that’s human nature.
Such is absolutely NOT my human nature and I am human.
It’s how we evolved. With an ingrained desire to protect ourselves and those close to us from danger, damage and death. That ingrained disposition for that behavior is what caused the evolution of social unit like tribes, clans, and nations – gathering together for mutual protection. That ingrained disposition for that behavior is what led to the creation of laws and civics. It is the core behavior in the self-organization of civilization over a simple collection of individuals running amok like lone wolves. Humans are social creatures.
You can no more change that than you can change the atomic weight of hydrogen.
BiL, you might make an effort to learn something about real science, for you just “blew” any credibility you ever had regarding physics and such, and therefore, also biophysics.
It is trivial to change the atomic weight of hydrogen. Hydrogen comes in three isotope flavors, one commonly called hydrogen, atomic number 1 and atomic weight circa 1, the second isotope of hydrogen is commonly called deuterium, atomic number 1 and atomic weight circa 2, and the third readily found isotope of hydrogen is commonly called tritium, atomic number 1 and atomic weight circa 3.
I really thank you, BiL for your courage in demonstrating to the world your wonderful ignorance with respect to high school physics.
Give to me access to a suitable neutron source and a suitable contaiment system and some hydrogen (atomic weight 1) and out will come, with proper methods, some deuterium (atomic weight 2) or perhaps some tritium (atomic weight 3).
Now that you have shown the world your inadequacy with the simple concepts of first semester high school physics, what sensible person is going to buy the notion that you are anything other than utterly clueless regarding biophysics and/or bioengineering?
Congratulations! You finally outed yourself!
And, it did not really take all that long for you to do it!
I have known people, particularly some men, who were virulently homophobic, condemning homosexual men with more ferocity than you have worked at condemning my work. All such men whom I have known woke up one fine day, came to useful self-understanding, set aside their long-standing self-hatred, and became active in Pflag.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing to experience. Self-hatred so intense as to mislead a decent person into believing your expressed beliefs about children while not being consciously aware of such self-hatred is, to me, a strong indicator of beyond absolutely devastating infant-child transition suffering.
Whatever happened to you was not your fault, nor the fault of whosoever taught you to transition that way from infancy to childhood, nor the fault of whoever taught whoever taught you, and you may run the regression back infinitely without ever finding a valid object to which truthful fault can be attached.
There is hope in my world for everyone!
Your flaw, Brian, is that you don’t take into account human nature. When people feel that they are wronged, they want either redress or revenge and sometimes both. “If ‘everyone is off the hook,’ what form will conflict assume?”
The same form as conflict assumed yesterday.
Simply because someone will still feel wronged and in fact be wronged by another no matter your ridiculous pronouncements to the contrary. Why? Because that’s human nature. It’s how we evolved. With an ingrained desire to protect ourselves and those close to us from danger, damage and death. That ingrained disposition for that behavior is what caused the evolution of social unit like tribes, clans, and nations – gathering together for mutual protection. That ingrained disposition for that behavior is what led to the creation of laws and civics. It is the core behavior in the self-organization of civilization over a simple collection of individuals running amok like lone wolves. Humans are social creatures. You can no more change that than you can change the atomic weight of hydrogen.
It is hard enough being me. Now I hear that I am conflicted. Does that mean I am also a Victim. Can I get money from the government for this disability?
RE: Tom Wood, February 25, 2011 at 12:16 am
BiL: “You are also mistaken about the nature of children. Conflict is in their nature as they are unformed and untaught personalities. Sharing and restraint are learned behaviors, not innate. There is no cruelty in children? There is nothing more cruel than children.”
Correct in half. Sharing and restraint as as inherent as cruelty. Some of the greatest acts of kindness you will ever see come from 2 year olds. 8 month old infants know how to share. As one who has taught children from 2 to 22 (I’ve taught pre-school, elementary, middle school and university), I can personally attest to this.
###################################################
It is my observation, garnered muchly during the twenty-five or so years of working in Pediatric Cardiology at Cook County Children’s Hospital doing biomedical engineering while having job descriptions of Medical Laboratory Technician and Medical Technologist (people autistic as I am often can find no useful and meaningful employment at all), that brain plasticity (or the ability to learn) is of astonishing capability.
I absolutely reject the tabula rasa notion of the brain of a newborn being completely blank, for the simple reason that stress hormones appear to cross the placental barrier, along with a whole bunch of other maternal biological factors. It is my consistent observation that newborns are born with a plethora of learning experiences in place, and these experiences are of both inner and outer environment. What newborns lack is being able to share thoughts through the words of ordinary spoken and written languages.
Yet, absent serious brain issues, all newborns I have yet observed are born with very effective and efficient affective communication skills which are well-formed and effective.
Doubt that? How long can you listen to a crying little baby before you become stirred to action?
And, if you are not stirred to action by the crying of a little baby, I become prone to asking, “What in Hell on Earth happened to you?”
I held a Chicago Substitute Teacher certficate, and, later, a Wisconsin Substitute Teacher certificate, and I have done substitute teaching with children of pre-school age, grade school age, high school age, and have taught as a guest lecturer in college classes.
I have video tape recordings of some of my college guest lecturer classes, and have ordered Apple Final Cut Express 4 to use with the recently-acquired Macintosh dual G5-2.7gHz, 7 gigabyte ram computer intended for effective video processing, and expect to be able to properly put excerpts of my actual college guest lecturing on the Internet, with the identities of individual students properly protected, yet the classrooms clearly identifiable.
That said, it is my view that all memory is reconstructive, as Elizabeth Loftus has indicated, and that memory reconstruction may be very accurate to very inaccurate according to the particular circumstances associated with a particular memory.
I have never observed any newborn child who was born as though of strong conflict except babies born to mothers addicted to illegal drugs. Of course, my “sample” is small, a few thousand babies at most whom I have been able to observe closely enough to deem my observations to be of plausibly decent quality data.
For a baby, having a drug-addicted mother may be of a version of ultimate tragedy. Understanding this as I do, I seek to learn what actually leads people into drug abuse and what may effectively and efficiently lead people away from drug abuse.
Consider the book by Dr. Alice Miller, in English translation, “The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness,” Anchor Books – Doubleday, 1990.
From the back cover or my paperback version, “The Untouched Key poses the important question of why some troubled children turn out to be artists and others turn their sufferings against the world…The implications of Alice Miller’s vision are undeniable.” –The New York Times
It is my observation that there are troubled children who turn out to be artists at successfully turning their sufferings against the world, a quality I found and continue to find is characteristic of “top tier” people such as I encountered while a physics major at Carleton College.
I have the courage to name names when I observe public officials to be plausibly excellent exemplars of adults who were put through serious childhood suffering and who became profoundly proficient artists in turning their sufferings against the world. I here name three such prominent elected officials as fit into my classification system as particularly likely to be high-quality exemplars, of what may happen to an innocent baby who is sufficiently terrorized by socialization trauma as to be as though blissfully unaware of the stark havoc I find hinted at by their public conduct to me, if to no one else.
1. Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker.
2. Speaker of the House, John Boehner.
3. House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor.
4. Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.
As I watch these four people via television, it is to me as though they lavishly exude utter self-contempt masquerading as rejection of almost everything I, personally, experience as being of the gentle decency and kindness which I have recognized in every not-terribly-brain-damaged-by-maternal-drug-abuse newborn child throughout the whole of my life to date.
Both of my parents regarded a newborn infant as fully being a whole person and not, as may be suggested by the title of a Book by Carl Rogers, Ph.D., “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy,” Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1961.
I have never been allowed to become a person because I have never been other than a person, and it is impossible for a person who is a person to become a person due to always having been a person.
My doctorate, its thesis and thesis research, and my subsequent work as a Professional Engineer is very serious work, and is significantly of the design and development of improved paradigms for human society, in the public safety interest. I shall continue to state this as fact, while having been highly cognizant that people who are as though strongly committed to, or perhaps even intensely addicted to, the older, conventional paradigm my work is intended to supplant would plausibly respond in much the manner in which some of the blawgers here have done.
I have been working out in the open, without concealing my “identiy” or my purpose. And I continue to work at finding words which will more accurately convey who I am and what I am doing.
One rather odd way to model my work is it being of the form of “hacking” the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Jurisprudence.
Because I invariably find the prehistorically developed construct of the Adversarial Principle to be perfectly contiguous with unmitigated evil, I continue to test whether that thus far invariable finding may be flawed in a way I have not yet recognized. Alas, every comment in response to my comments has the effect of invalidating the null hypothesis to the effect that a genuine and significant flaw will be found within the essential core of the work.
When I set out to do the thesis that became my doctoral dissertaion, the head of bioengineering at the time, Dr. Irving F. Miller commented that he thought that I would likely encounter much difficulty in persuading people of the value of my work. However, as a student of the philosophy of Karl Popper, I thought it wiser to use as a null hypothesis that someone would actually demonstrate, and not merely assert, a refutation. While many refutations have been asserted, none have been reproducibly demonstrated to date.
An idea which appears to shred a core notion of human society since its earliest historical beginnings is plausibly going to be “hard to swallow,” especially for folks who have built their careers upon the old paradigm and may rationally fear ruin if the new paradigm is found to be valid.
In particular, those who believe in the notion of tort liability may rationally be totally freaked by the view that tort liability is a form of illusion or delusion. However, the up side is that the law profession, along with everyone else, is totally released from liability of all sorts and kinds by the research I have accomplished if it be not possible to demonstrably and reproducibly refute said research.
Dr. Thomas Jobe, the University of Illinois neuropsychiatrist on my thesis committee, commented to me that my work, if not refuted, “would get everyone off the hook.” I find no hint of evidence that such will not be the outcome of the research I have done.
If “everyone is off the hook,” what form will conflict assume?
If I calculate the trajectory of a space probe using only Newtonian physics to calculate the relativistic effects, I will calculate no relativistic effects because Newtonian physics excludes relativistic effects.
Attempting to understand my research within the paradigm which excludes is akin to doing theory of relativity calculations only with Newtonian physics, no less possible because Newtonian physics excludes relativistic physics; the traditional paradigm of the past excludes the paradigm of my work because my work is of a new paradigm, and therefore, necessarily not included in the paradigm to which it is an added enhancement.
I am not one of the top tier folks, and to prove this, I am now constructively a retiree member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union Retirees.
As no top tier member would plausibly be a union member, mixing as peers with the underclass, I am now clearly bottom tier, right where I belong.
There is a real advantage to being on the bottom. When one has nothing, one has nothing to lose. When one is on the bottom, there is nowhere to fall.
Them thar Minnesota Congregationalists are interesting. Many Minnesota Congregationalists disavow hierarchy in all possible forms.
Dagmar,
I would say that that is IRONY at its best….
Jeff Cox apparently believes that it should be illegal for an employee to be dismissed, unless it is “for cause” and the cause does not violate his constitutional rights as a citizen. First, you have to ask what rights he has a employee of the State of Indiana. Was he an at-will employee? If he were in ND, where the law is employment at will — an employee can be dismissed at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all — he could not complain. I guess he wants to be a poster boy for workers’ rights, which is a little bit of switch from his anti-union tweets.
“He is not anti-union and actually comes from a union family (his father is a union member and his family is composed of steel workers and coal miners)”.
“….why, some of my best friends are……..”
Dr. Selkin,
Thanks for sharing your experiences from Vietnam. I agree that commenting about using live ammunition is never a joke when it is done in the context of the police possibly being used to control lawful protestors.
“JNagarya nailed it.”
Pardon. I have been typing poorly all day.