We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
There are (at least) two kinds of tantrums: irrational volcanic explosions and manipulative tantrums. Spanking does not work for the former, but works for the latter. The problem is that the kids know to mainly have the latter in public places, like in supermarkets. They know what they are doing.
What works best for older kids, like college students with tantrums?
Lust, infatuation, True Love, erotic intoxication, romantic passion - call it what you will. We all know that new passion is exhilarating and agonizing too. Humans will do unwise things to taste that fruit. From a scientific standpoint, this is caused by a little devilish prankster named Cupid who gets a kick out of making people crazy.
It is obviously a normal and frequent occurrence, and it is powerful stuff. How is a bourgeois Christian person to handle it when Cupid's arrow strikes in a way which complicates life? How to break free when you have feelings for the wrong person.
Hermann Rorschach worked on an interesting experiment: provide people with an ambiguous stimulus (an image) and find out whether their take on it reveals anything useful about them.
Well, of course it does. In fact, everybody's take on everything and anything reveals things about who they are. All of life can be viewed as a projective experiment but Dr. Rorschach thought that perhaps a standardized ambiguous stimulus might be clinically useful.
I think his hypothesis was correct, but only in the right hands. The challenge is in the interpretation of the responses to projective tests.
Are projective "tests" useful? I think they can be interesting, but not necessary.
It is no use letting kids do whatever they desire unless you have first educated their desire. The first job of the parent is to educate the child’s desire: to instill a longing for something higher and better than video games, TV, or pornography or social media, whether that something be found in science, in music, in the arts, in nature, or in religion.
Whether kids or adults, "natural desires" are usually fairly stupid and useless, but the "better" things are more challenging. If you ever saw an adult playing a video game, you know what I mean.
...and other topics, but I found the part about his course most interesting. It's easy to see why he is such a popular teacher, but the course does not seem particularly academic. It's more of an inspirational sort of program about how to grow up, face life with strength, and things like that.
Peterson has an interesting and unusual life history for an academic. Myths appeal to him. I think he is a capital C Christian.
It's easy for me to see how it could be helpful to young people. He is a natural teacher or preacher. He is smart as a whip and a fearsome debater.
I have always been interested in how psychological disorders/aberrations spread, too. Mass hysterias, fad diseases, and the like. In the 1990s it seemed as if half the hysteric women in New England believed they had chronic Lyme disease and there was no way to dissuade them. Before that, it was Chronic Fatigue. Both are now old hat and no longer in vogue.
I have been reading about the sudden upsurge of trans children. What is that about? It seems rather unusual, and disturbing.
The problem with government medicine is that medical care becomes a government job. How much time must modern physicians spend filling out forms? The administrative mantra today is "If it isn't documented, it didn't happen."
And few people are entirely satisfied with their souls and minds either. Often, we make reasonable efforts to work on all of those things, but at what point do our goals become crazy? If I need to look like Melania, I am crazy. If I need to look like a man, I am double-crazy and should want help separating fantasy from reality.
Fortunately in the USA it is rare that Psychiatric help can be forced, but it distresses me when people seem to endorse double-crazy as normal. But, as I say, in a free country you are free to be crazy, and free to get help with it if you want to. Lots of people are half-crazy, crazy, and double-crazy, but I see no need for the culture to pretend to deny that reality. Or any other reality.
It is interesting to me that the Psychiatric officialdom is expanding the list of "disorders" to the point that nobody can keep track of them anymore, at the same time that the elite culture is normalizing other ones. Something strange is going on on both sides.
Their findings are mainly gross-anatomical, but the connectome mapping goes further. Unsurprisingly, there is some male-female overlap in this effort to define structural sex differences. Anyway, it would be news if no differences were seen in male and female brains.
Legend and anthropology hold that some American Indian cultures believed that, if you rescued somebody, saved somebody's life, or prevented them from disaster, you were indebted to them forever. That is, the saver was beholden to the saved.
My fantasy is that the issue is that you postponed their arrival to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
In Western culture we tend to see it the other way around because of a Christian foundation, or because we want to see this life as heaven (?), but as an American physician who works for nobody - not government, not insurance, not a hospital - except my patients, I see it both ways. If I get you out of big trouble, you sort of own me as long as you want to.
The stuff is too much with us. You only need one of everything you need and, sometimes, less than one. Except for money, less is more.
Every two years, we do a deep Spring Cleaning. Step one is getting rid of things. Step 2 is deep cleaning with cleaning helpers and fresh painting afterwards, as needed. Some years it takes a dumpster, some years our yard guys with a truck, and some years it's just throwing trash bags full of clothing into the back of the Suburban to go to Good Will, Salvation Army or, if really good stuff, Thrift Shop.
We do have a "storage room" in the cottage. Four antique and beautiful andirons. A "brown", once thought elegant, dining room table. Spare brown dining chairs. Extra bookshelves. Spare beds and bedframes, etc. Why? Waiting for what? Death and the Final Dumpster, the Dumpster of Doom? Or the Garage Sale of Death?
One of our projects this year is to convert a college kid's room into a lovely guest room. This means the kid's books into boxes to the attic, the kid's childhood desk and furniture to charity, a new Queen bed, and painting/redecorating.
Projects:
- Any book in the house never to be re-read by us or wanted by kids: Recycling or donated
- Any old surplus furniture not tagged by kids (esp old "brown" furniture): Dumpster if yard guys don't want it Can't give that stuff away.
- Carpets: We have enough antigue oriental carpets to furnish a palace. Mostly in a closet with mothballs. Some won't fit in there. Entirely out of fashion and unwanted but we love them and they once had value. We will not buy another house just to use carpets and paintings. Maybe consign them? Probably not worth the trouble.
- Closets of clothing: If not used in one year, it's gone. If ugly, gone. How many sweaters do you need? It is a liberating experience.
- Boxes of old photos and photo albums: Dumpster if nobody in the family wants them. Seems like a shame, but past is past.
- Knick-knacks, goo-gaws, and misc. decorative items and things kids made in grammar school out of clay - dumpster. It's not immortal art. Getting rid of stuff is painful, but the good, cleansing pain like having a wart removed.
- Excess kitchen and serving items: Unload on your kids, donate, or dumpster.
" On Old Olympus’ Towering Top A Fin, A German, Viewed A Hop." That's how medical students memorize the cranial nerves.
Some lucky people just have velcro memories, photographic memory. A sticky brain is an admirable talent. On the other hand, ordinary brains can be trained for feats of memory: Hack your brain to remember almost anything
As we've said in the past, it depends on how one wishers to define "disease." The term is highly fluid, constantly expanding to include normal variations and things one might term "conditions" (mainly for insurance purposes), and lacks any natural definition.
My view is that substance abuse derives from one simple effect: Some people like it a lot and it makes them feel better than they otherwise feel. Any physiological dependence part is secondary to that. Also, I am not too keen on the criminalization of drugs. The "War on Drugs" has accomplished little good and has many unintended and unfortunate consequences.
This is a downer for Mardi Gras and Carnival season, the modern Saturnalias where no rules apply and reckless hedonism is in the air, but I'll post it anyway like a fuddy-duddy:
I am not sure how to define "natural" for human beings when humans are the ultimate culture-building and society-building animal. For humans, relationship-building and relationship-maintenance are complex, demanding, and sometimes seem almost impossible. Perhaps "natural," though.
Being an acceptable member of a bourgeois society and culture requires hundreds of external restraints (laws, rules, conventions, and expectations) and self-restraints (mostly against temptations and impulses and for reputation-protection). Bourgeois Westerners do not do many very "natural" things like pooping in the park, clubbing people who piss us off, grabbing genitalia when the impulse hits us, stealing people's purses, shooting a neighbor's dog to roast on the backyard grill.
As in ancient times when aristocrats and overlords lived without the constraints of the common folk and the stolid gentry, the Western world still has subcultures which are "above" - or you could call it "below" - the respectable bourgeois Judeo-Christian norms. I am thinking of the special subcultures of Hollywood, Washington, and the like where celebrity, money, and power can exist with separate rules. I am also thinking of some Fishtown subcultures, Tattooland, where there are different standards and expectations.
I must agree with Scarlett Johanssen that monogamy is not "natural" for humans although there is much variation in how libidinally- or id-driven people are. It is definitely not natural for me if some of my X-rated fantasies are evidence but, by behaving myself in many "unnatural" ways, I have managed to build a solid happy life without harming very many people, without blowing up my life, and without too much burden of guilt.
Bill Clinton and Scarlett Johanssen and all the others are free to live as they choose. Tabloid fodder is necessary to drive eyeballs. Perhaps that is why Miss Scarlett made her honest statement about her libidinal intentions. As some guy said on some site, "So I still have a chance to get it on with Scarlett?" Yes, maybe you do if you act charming and catch her in the right mood. Buy her a cocktail and act soulful and deep, wounded but brave. It might work on her and, despite talent, she is not overly bright. Seduction is natural and women like love and sex.
Women are far better at that game than men, however. Women have the power.
Many medical treatments do not work, or do not provide the benefits desired. This is not because of deliberate quackery. It is more because of convention and the slowness of medical practice to change. Furthermore, marginal study results frequently have validity, but so marginally that there is no important clinical use. Try explaining that in court.
One example might be the treatment of borderline hypertension, which is dubious but in the US if a doc doesn't address it he'd be looked at askance because the current consensus is to treat. Next year, it might be the opposite. Another example is coronary artery stents.
It's a discussion about reductionism. Things are usually more than the sum of their parts. Dimensions of the soul do not lend themselves to measurement. No cosmic chemist could have predicted that a combination of hydrogen and oxygen would give me a hot after-tennis shower.
It depends on how obsessionally one wants to categorize mental states and attitudes, or whether one wants to categorize such words at all. I would certainly consider "desire" to be an emotion, as I would the crazy condition of being "in love." Those are wonderful kinds of insanity, but, however intense, tend to be fleeting when reality intrudes.
I think of "love" not as passion but as an enduring attitude of positive appreciation and attachment, with varying degrees of emotional dependency. Anyway, words are crude tools to apply to all of the ambiguities and ambivalences that relationships consist of. I just feel fortunate that there are so many people in my life who I want to hug when I see them.
I have posted in the past about my ideas about how Reality Therapy can help people be their best. Hiding from discomfort gets us nowhere. Bumping against reality teaches us our limits and weaknesses, and invites us to either accept them or to try to figure out how to overcome them.
I have advised people, over the years, to seek rejection as a way to help them deal with their rejection fears. Rejection fears are not neurotic really, just human because we all know that nobody can love or appreciate us as much as Mom did when we were little. Also, because we know our flaws and, as adults, we know we are not precious snowflakes but just ordinary people who are fortunate if we are liked, much less loved.
I once urged a shy, awkward young man to approach the girl he most admired in his class to engage his courage and to face rejection gracefully. Experiment failed: She liked him.
Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals,and to spiritualize them too. Students of animals try very hard to resist those natural inclinations. Animals lack personalities, self-awareness, etc. Those of a species are identical robots, maybe, until you get to the apes.
I am not delving into the psychology of empathy. I'm not trained in it, and I don't know enough to make a statement from that position. I can, however, write about its effect on my own experiences, from my own therapy, and from a recent event which sparked a challenging debate.
That event was Meryl Streep's Golden Globes acceptance speech. I watched about 5 minutes of it, then left. Because I can, and I chose to. While I agreed with a bit, there was far more there than I was interested in hearing. To begin with, I don't watch award shows, I happened to switch it on at just that moment and thought I'd like to see her receive her award. If I am going to watch an awards show, I want to be entertained, not lectured. I turned it off. I did read the text the next day when the brouhaha around it began. Mainly because New York, the center of 'if you disagreed with her, you're insane and wrong and must have something wrong with you' began to show its ugliness. In other words, "Hillary lost and WE STILL HAVE NO CLUE HOW AND WHY IT HAPPENED SO WE MUST LASH OUT!" Meryl was offered a moment to lash out, and she did. Following some kind of empathic tribal code, her supporters rushed to demonize anyone who didn't 'feel' the same way Meryl did.
The half-life of medical knowledge is approximated at seven years. That means that half of what you think you know about health, illness, and medical practice today will be obsolete in seven years.
It will be replaced by new better science of which, in turn, half will be obsolete seven years later. That's how it works. Skepticism about current knowledge is always appropriate. The cholesterol panic is just the most recent, dramatic example. Big mistake. Not all docs have got the memo yet. "Never mind."
Eat those eggs and bacon and sausages like you always wanted to, and skip the darn oatmeal unless it's all you can afford. And imagine that, in seven years, Mr. Science will tell you to eat candy and Dunkin Donuts for breakfast.
Our tummies might be smarter than today's science. Who knows? I love deep-fat fried donuts (not at Dunkin) and French Toast. Doesn't everybody?
Hermann Rorschach worked on an interesting experiment: provide people with an ambiguous stimulus (an image) and find out whether their take on it reveals anything useful about them.
The half-life of medical knowledge