Trump 2024

00:00 WP: Our constitutional crisis is already here, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/
06:00 LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH,

Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research


10:00 Why you feel tired all the time, https://time.com/6099133/why-you-feel-tired-all-the-time/
12:00 12 Mindless Habits That Are Secretly Exhausting You, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/habits-exhausting-you_l_61489344e4b0175a18347a6f
16:00 Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141986
19:00 Why there is no way back for religion in the West, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtAR_OGzlcg
1:05:00 DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142015
1:10:00 Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142074

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Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book by psychologist Philippe Rochat:

* Rare are the ultrastrict law abiders. The fact is that in all countries giving as little as possible to the taxman is a national sport. We tend to preserve and defend our privileges with little to no restrains and hold on to our inherited wealth and privileges as if we were naturally entitled to them. In our head, we are all monarchs chosen from above.

* Unlike most characters in Shakespeare’s plays or Dostoevsky’s novels, we are not inclined to acknowledge the unsettling fact that we are all made of a bundle of conflicting values. Monsters only exist in our simplifying head.

* We talk about Chinese, Russians, or Arabs with no nuances or any obvious awareness of the multiplicity of cultures and languages represented by such grouping.

* Criminals are never just criminals; good people are never just good people. This state of things is deeply incompatible with the either/ or, black or white, good or bad contrasts driving our moral intuitions and righteous
mind.

* So, how do we cope with such a self- reflective curse? We do so mainly by faking reality and tricking ourselves. We simplify, create order in our head where there is none, give ourselves illusions of control, reduce unmanageable complexities by building shortcuts, staging and challenging ourselves, dramatizing, and representing situations to enhance our embodied experience of being. We are ceaselessly creating comfort values for ourselves and for those we identify as extension of ourselves, namely in- group “family” allies.

* There is the awareness of our own mortality and that everything we experience is transient and essentially doomed to disappear from the surface of this earth. This existential truth is the natural source of human deep, unsettling existential angst and despair, the inescapable sense of absurdity. It is also the human universal struggle to find meanings allowing us to transcend the realization of our doom on earth. This struggle is the main existential framing of our morals.

* Last but not least, self-reflective rumination makes us realize how dependent we are on others, how elusive our own freedom is because most of what we do is to please others to get their validation and how much we depend on how others perceive and evaluate us on our own reputation. This self- reflective rumination leads us toward the constant preoccupation with our own social place and situation, how we compare with others. Social emotions like guilt and shame, but also hubris, pride, and contempt, shape human morals. These emotions are presumably unique to human selfconscious psychology. All arise from our self- reflective propensity, framing and motivating our moral decisions. These emotions are linked to the deepseated existential realization that without others, we are nothing. The curse of such realization is the deepest fear of being rejected and, as a consequence, a fear that makes all of us desperate for social recognition and validation, obsessed with how we are perceived and evaluated by others. Above all, we care about our own reputation. We literally exist through our good relations and cares from others, without which we deteriorate and die, both physically and psychologically. At a deep motivational level, what drives human selfconscious psychology and shapes human morals is our basic affiliation need (BAN), with the necessary association of the deep, universal fear of being rejected by others. This is the basic foundation of our insatiable need and struggle for social recognition, the human care for reputation, and our universal quest for positive evaluation from others.

* The main moral rule, psychologically speaking, is the fact that our moral compass is instantly recalibrated depending on people and situations. We hold different standards in our moral decisions whether people are in- group (same family, same social class, same language, same party, etc.) or out-group (legal or illegal
immigrants, foreigners, stranger to the family, different skin color or body weight, etc.).

* …terrorists and serial killers love their parents and children. They worship their God and, in most instances, show extreme devotion to others that can lead to horrendous self- sacrifices like suicide bombings. As much as they kill, they also reciprocate affections and dedication from family members, neighbors, or close ideological allies. Pure monsters do not exist, and this is difficult, if not impossible for us to either fathom or digest.
High- ranking Nazis were often cultured. They had a coherent romantic cult of Nature and narrative regarding the cult of their own mythical origins as part of a “pure” Aryan species, a narrative powerful enough to rationalize
the eradication of millions of “impure” individuals following strict and wellarticulated fetishist blood lineage law. They also loved Mozart, had strong views on aesthetics, and many of them were accomplished musicians. Whether we like it or not, Nazis had “morals” and hence were not pure irrational monsters. They were also parents, children, and friends. If not pure monsters proper, they expressed a most extreme moral ambiguity and hypocrisy,
a hideous exaggeration of what we actually all are. We have to own up to this if we want to grow wiser.

* We are the only species that tortures; exploits; ostracizes; and engages in ethnic purification, ideological crusades, and other imperialist conquests, in addition to being carnivores like many other creatures, eating meat and killing other animals. We are unique in our cultivation of war as “art,” a perennial human source of affiliation and pleasure, elevating intraspecific conflicts as symbolic sources of honors, heroism, and enhanced individual as well as group reputation.

* “I’d like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me, and the rest of the world can kiss my ass.”1 These are the last words of Johnny Garrett before being executed by lethal injection in Texas for the 1981 rape and murder of a 76- year- old nun. He was only 18 at the time of the crime, 28 when he died in 1992. These last words epitomize the cleavage between proximal in-group and distal out- group value systems and moral codes for which radically different moral standards apply. Extreme as it might be in this particular case, what Garrett’s last words exemplify is what is universally experienced: the well- separated moral spheres we live in, specifically delimited by context and people. These spheres call for different moral biases and codes. They are typically well compartmentalized and we develop a remarkable ability to switch moral codes depending on people and circumstances…

* How can a guy like Castro be affectionate with his mother after raping one of his victims, take his child to
church after treating the mother as a sex slave, looking at her in the eyes, showing love and tenderness, switching modes with not much blinking. How does one manage to keep self- unity as moral agent while enacting blatant moral disconnects across alliances, something we all do to some degree, not just psychopaths?

* Why does our infatuations with others always tend to be associated with the systematic rejection of others and, hence, always to the detriment of others? Why are exclusion and compartmentalization the necessary corollaries of social bonding? In other words, why is love typically exclusive?

* Inscribed into our psychic system are affective imprinting processes. These processes are the original source of differential investment and quick binding toward certain things over others. It always takes place in favor of a selected few.

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DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book by sociologist Allan V. Horwitz:

* The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association pervades our culture. Since publication of the manual’s third edition in 1980, its diagnoses define what mental disorders are considered legitimate, how patients conceive of their problems, who receives government benefits, and which conditions psychotropic drugs target and insurance companies will pay to treat. They also delineate the curriculum that is taught to psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, the diagnoses that researchers and epidemiologists explore, and the psychic problems that public policies attempt to remedy.

* Diagnoses from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have become part of our culture. Environmental activist Greta Thunberg is widely known to have Asperger syndrome; one of her adversaries, Donald Trump, is commonly seen as displaying a narcissistic personality disorder. The singer Mariah Carey has discussed her struggles with bipolar disorder, the same condition dramatized in the main character in Homeland, Carrie Mathison. Lady Gaga has spoken about her struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). TV mobster Tony Soprano seeks treatment for panic attacks, while his son is suspected of having attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Susanna Kaysen, the author of the best-selling memoir Girl Interrupted, discovered she had borderline personality disorder while reading the DSM-III in her local bookstore. Many patients enter therapy already knowing what diagnosis they expect to receive.
The centrality of DSM diagnoses is a new phenomenon, arising only after the third edition of the manual was published in 1980.

* The importance of the DSM for psychiatry is unique among medical specialties. Other areas of medicine commonly rely on biological markers that confirm or refute a diagnosis of some disease: cardiologists use PET scans to see whether a heart has tissue damage, nephrologists take x-rays to search for a kidney stone, oncologists perform biopsies to detect cancerous cells, and general practitioners employ blood tests to establish levels of cholesterol or blood pressure. Psychiatrists, however, have none of these tools. The lack of confirming markers for any common mental disorder means that diagnosis in itself has an outsize role in psychiatry compared to other branches of medicine. Although most of the DSM diagnoses lay out detailed symptom criteria and specific inclusion and exclusion rules, in actuality, patient self-reports and, sometimes, clinical observations constitute
psychiatry’s diagnostic resources. No independent criteria can verify the accuracy of a clinician’s assessment of a mental disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association owns the DSM, which allows the organization to monopolize the diagnoses of mental disorder for all mental health professions.

* Aside from using the DSM for rhetorical and institutional purposes, few psychiatrists consider its diagnoses accurate portrayals of underlying natural phenomena. They do, however, religiously use them for educational training, obtaining reimbursement for treatment, submitting grant applications, providing measures for epidemiological studies, and all other activities where some diagnosis is necessary.

* Clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses, mental health counselors, and
other therapists must use the DSM categories to receive third-party payment for their services. In addition, the manual serves as the benchmark for determining mental disorder in the judicial system. As of 2011, more than 5,500 court opinions cited the DSM. Its diagnoses are invoked in widely disparate legal areas including providing
defense from criminal responsibility, exemptions from the death penalty, eligibility for disability benefits, and determinations in child custody cases.

* The use of DSM diagnoses thus makes it seem as if mental disorders are rampant in the population. Far from being a specialty that treats a small group of seriously disturbed people, psychiatry (and other mental health professions) is charged with a mission to confront a large and growing “public health epidemic” that threatens virtually everyone.

* After the 1960s, however, intense pressures developed from, among other sources, federal regulators, insurance companies, and medical schools to portray psychiatrists as doctors practicing medicine. In recent decades, their legitimacy stems from how they name, define, and distinguish their central concepts from each other: “Diagnosis is the first step in the technological process of transforming a person with an ambiguous complaint into a client with a defined mental disorder.” The credibility of the DSM now depends on its depiction as the evidence-based
result of scientific research. This means that diagnoses must be believed to stem from empirically derived data, despite the evidence justifying many diverse interpretations of symptoms.

* after 1980 [the public] increasingly considered mental disorders something independent of individuals (e.g.,
“have depression”) as opposed to something that is an individual attribute (e.g., “am depressed”).

* Xanax showed the drug industry how valuable the DSM diagnoses could be for marketing their products. It was the first of many successful attempts to commercialize the manual’s conditions. The idea of a tranquilizer that worked across a spectrum of nervous states was dead. “Henceforth,” Edward Shorter observes, “magic bullets would match disease labels: There would be only anxiolytics for anxiety, antidepressants for depression, and antipsychotics
for what everybody was calling ‘schizophrenia.’”

* Ironically, the SSRIs are probably least effective for the condition—depression—that they are marketed for. They are less successful in treating melancholic depression than older medications and have marginal impacts on reactive depression, but they are more effective with anxious conditions.96 Despite this evidence, the need to use the DSM straitjacket led to their initial promotion as “antidepressants.” Whatever the SSRIs do has little
relationship to any specific DSM diagnosis but cuts across many diverse syndromes.

* The diagnostic changes in the DSM-IV allowed drug companies to propel a formerly rare condition to prominence as a widely celebrated cultural phenomenon. Bipolar II exemplifies, as historian Andrea Tone observes, a diagnosis that captures “the relentless expansion of illnesses to accommodate new medications that purport to treat them.”

* Perhaps the most important conclusion emerging from genetic studies was that, contrary to the DSM assumption of disorder specificity, genes for virtually all psychiatric disorders are nonspecific. No disorder corresponds to a distinct gene or group of genes; instead, all share large amounts of genetic vulnerability with other conditions: any genetic variant that is tied to one diagnosis is also associated with multiple others. In addition, the most characteristic symptoms of mental disorders were widely distributed across diagnoses and not localized within any
particular one.

* While medical diagnoses are often uncertain and ambiguous, most diseases are distinct from—not continuous with—health. Even such dimensional conditions as blood pressure or cholesterol levels are divided at cut points that indicate likely pathology. Regardless of whether any illness is dichotomous or continuous in nature, clinicians must make decisions to treat or not to treat it. Therefore, the constraints of medical practice lead physicians, including psychiatrists, to think in black and white. Perhaps most important, diagnostic categories make mental
disorders seem more real to the public, to physicians in other medical specialties, to insurance companies,
and to federal regulators.

* No attempt to develop etiologically informed diagnoses has yet to succeed. “Psychiatry is in the position—that
most of medicine was in 200 years ago—of still having to define most of its disorders by their syndromes,” eminent diagnosticians Robert Kendell and Assen Jablensky observe.

* In psychiatry, however, divorcing symptoms from context has the opposite impact of hopelessly blurring situationally appropriate psychological phenomena from mental disorders. This is because all mental
functions are highly sensitive to environmental circumstances. Virtually every symptom of various mental disorders can sometimes be biologically and psychologically suitable adaptations to given contexts, culturally explicable expressions, or both. For example, symptoms resembling depression that arise after the death of a loved one indicate that grief mechanisms are working appropriately, not inappropriately. Likewise, a panic attack is an understandable response when facing an impending fall off a cliff but a sign of disorder in the absence of danger.
Or hearing voices, which can be a hallmark of schizophrenia, is sometimes explicable in particular cultural and religious settings. In contrast, a heart attack always signals a failure of natural functioning regardless of the context or culture in which it emerges. Unlike other medical specialties, context is an intrinsic aspect of deciding what a mental disorder is or is not.

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‘Academia Is Establishing A Permanent Surveillance Bureaucracy That Will Soon Govern The Rest Of Us’

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The Fall Of Howard Stern, The New Abortion Wars, Afghanistan, Australia’s Covid Lockdown (9-23-21)

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