The Ontology of Psychology (ter)

To begin, explicit talk of structural units:

The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction.

-- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

Whence the label for the analytic/therapeutic movement he launched, “Transactional Analysis”.

Birdwhistell calls each of these movements a kine, or the smallest recordable movement.

-- Julius Fast, Body Language (1970)

… the collective unconscious  and the functional units of which it is composed -- the archetypes.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 47

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The notion of a culture unit, the most basic element of all, has been around for over thirty years, and has been dubbed by different authors  variously as mnemotype, idea, idene, meme, sociogene, concept, culturgen, and culture type.  The one label that has caught on the most, and for which I now vote to be winner, is meme.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 136

Actually, in anthropological and folkloristic structuralism, the notion of such units has been around rather longer than that -- Wilson cites an example himself, George Murdoch’s “classic 1945 compendium”. --   Anyhow, Wilson believes that, by working with such postulated units (how like an atom; how like a gene) we may pursue “the central program of consilience, in this instance the causal connections between semiotics and biology."

Causal, note;  strong stuff.  Even physics has in many areas backed off from this terminology of the one-way street.  (What caused the pion to decay at that precise instant, rather than another?  Um…)

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Psychiatry, like any branch of medicine, seeks to heal.   And though  a priori  ills need not come packaged in discrete categories, it is so much more convenient if they are.

Character disorders  do not form a nosological unit.

 -- Otto Fenichel,  The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945), p. 539

The old pathological approach, which persists in general psychiatry to this day, describes mental illnesses  as distinct ‘entia’, each presenting a specific clinical picture.

-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 123

The taxonomy of physical nosology was aided by the discovery of pathogens,  freeing the clinician from the ambiguities of symptomatology.   Where these are absent or multiple, the disease is often ill-defined -- cf. the complexus of the various cancers.  

A historical example:

As to the nosological status of paranoia, Freud agreed with Kraepelin that it should be grouped together with the various forms of dementia praecox, rather than being a distinct entity.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 271

Psychiatry gets even less guidance from microbiology or histology, leaving its taxonomic task problematic.   The attempt is made, nonetheless, every several years, to formalize this down to the last detail, in the much-discussion DSM -- the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders.   Aetiologically problematic to begin with, their stabs at classification have by now been largely divorced from genuine science, the DSM serving mainly simply as a tool for getting reimbursed by insurance companies, rather than any actual assistance to the diagnostician.   The whole enterprise descends to the level of a reductio, as various prickly pressure-groups veto the identification of the misbehaviors that typify them.  These, then, are meekly deleted.  (The labels vanish; the behaviors persist.) Yet the protestors have won but a Pyrrhic victory, as they still need treatment, and want to be covered by insurance;  hence the medical profession must invent euphemistic new categories to cover the old territory.

“There are no schizophrenics;

there are People with Schizophrenia.”

-- Elyn Saks,  2013;  professor of law, and herself a schizophrenic

That slogan, although posing as the denial of the existence of a certain class of entities, while affirming that of another (oddly, coextensive with the one that supposedly does not exist),  has actually nothing to do with ontology, but is simply a familiar move  in the game of rhetorical manipulation by interest groups.   Whether schizophrenia does or does not form a “nosological unit”, is a very open question;  but this “People With …” ploy  is a mere quibble.

A sort of upside-down version of that rhetorical move, from general medicine rather than psychiatry:

Even the hard-headed authors of current medical textbooks  sometimses find it necessary to inform their readers that [quoting from a 1953 text] ‘there is no disease, only the diseased … disease has no real existence.’

-- Jonathan Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning (1963), p.

 138

~

 

While we’re (sort of) on the subject -- savor this tragic disorder which The World of Doctor Justice was the first in the world to identify:  Oligophrenia mathematica.   I shall be lobbying for its inclusion in the next edition of the DSM, and expect gigantic retroactive payouts from my insurance company.

[Update 1 Aug 2013]  The current issue of the London Review of Books  has an article by Ian Hacking on the new DSM-V.  He acutely quotes Darwin saying: “All true classification  is geneological”.  For nosological taxonomy, whether physical or psychiatric, that translates to aetiological.  And, remarkably, the NIMH has suddenly taken this philosophico-methodological precept to heart, having announced, just a week before the DSM-V was released (and thus rather spoiling the launch), “that it was going to abandon the DSM because it dealt only with symptoms.”

*

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*

[Psycho-sociological appendix]

The more intensively we analyze the “self system”, the the more apparent it becomes  that the true unit in the social process  is not the biological entity comprised of man the organism:  rather, each unit is a person-to-person context.

-- Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (1930; 2^nd edn. 1960; re-issued 1977), p. 287

The Ontology of Biology (mise à jour)

We treated of this in some detail in our core essasy, “On What There Is”.  Indeed, the details of this particular discipline threatened to overwhelm that general survey.  Accordingly, we remove to this adjacent seminar-room, for a few additional remarks.

Let it be said, that biology, dealing with actual palpable furry waddling entities, would not appear a priori  a likely arena of serious ontological doubts.   Physics, by contrast, can’t avoid such scruples, since it deals largely with the unseen, and postulates just about everything.  Mathematics, freilich:  it being (as some would see it) about Being itself.   The only reason, then, that the study of biology figures so prominently in our remarks, is the extraordinarily high level of methodological and even philosophical thinking that has been invested in the evolutionary enterprise, beginning with Darwin himself. 

We shall begin, as we love to do, with a quote from Quine:

When we say that some zoölogical species are cross-fertile, we are committing ourselves to recognizing   as entities  the several species themselves, abstract though they are.

-- Quine, “On What There Is”.

This is true -- indeed, true virtually as a matter of sheer quantificational logic; but its proper biological content is nil -- as Quine well knows.   We may avoid this purely formal commitment by “so paraphrasing the statement  as to show that the seeming reference to species on the part of our bound variable  was an avoidable manner of speaking.”  (The substantive, as the saying goes, can be pegasized away.)

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In our essay above-referenced, we focussed on the ontological tug-of-war between species and gene as the favored stockkeeping unit of evolution.  But whatever the upshot of that, species themselves are obviously central.  Only … what are they?

As so often, Darwin was ahead of the time he himself largely created.  Coyne & Orr quote his Origin of Species (1859):  “We shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations  made for convenience.”

And to similar effect:

J.B.S. Haldane observed that “the concept of a species  is a concession to our linguistic habits  and neurological mechanisms”…

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 11

And again:

Ridley notes:  “The fact that independently observing humans  see much the same species in nature  does not show that species are real rather than nominal categories.  The most it shows  is that all human brains are wired up with a similar perceptual cluster statistic.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 14

Why are organisms apportioned into clusters separated by gaps? … Dobzhansky (1935) found this question intractable:  “The manifest tendency of life toward formation of discrete arrays  is not deducible from any a priori considerations.  It is simply a fact to be reckoned with.”  … While history can create discrete clusters containing groups of species, we do not see how it can produce species themselves.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 49

Biologists… even questioned whether species exist.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 5

…whether species are real entities  or arbitrary constructs of the human mind.  [This is the Nominalist or ‘hocus-pocus’ position. -- dbj]  Several lines of evidence  show that species are real.   …  One asks whether assemblages of individuals -- populations -- are partitioned into discrete units that are objective, not subjective.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 7, 10

(To see how far- or over-reaching such scepticism is, for species substitute coffee-cups.)

We pause to marvel at such self-critical ontological nominalism about the central practical entities of one’s own discipline.  As though:

Dentists:  When we speak of ‘teeth’, this is a largely arbitrary demarcation among the hard structures of the body.

Football coaches:  To counterpose ‘offense’ and ‘defense’ is to indulge a false dichotomy -- which is, however, useful for certain purposes.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association:  To talk of ‘crime’ is, of course, merely a façon de parler.

Systematists, whose task is unraveling the history of life, often prefer species concepts  different from those used by evolutionists more interested in evolutionary processes.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 10

~

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~         ~

~

Another ontological posit:

Cluster analysis distinguished 32 fairly discrete groups in phenotypic space (“phenons”).

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 23

(One’s heart rather sinks, reading this.  Recall the profusion of dubious -emes in linguistics.)

… the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social,  not as two distinct spheres … but as ontologically coterminous.

Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, Not in Our Genes (1984)

~ 

All species concepts require some subjective judgments.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 34

This, from a pair of very hard-headed writers.  Cf. similar points by Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (1921).

Because we rejected ecological differentiation as part of the Biological Species Concept in sexually reproducing groups, we obviously endorse the use of different species concepts in different groups.  We do not consider this pluralism to be a weakness of the BSC.  Because the causes of discreteness may well differ among taxa, so may the concepts appropriate to addressing the species problem.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 52

Since this astute observation strikes me as very sound, I shall give it a nice name:  not Nominalism about species, but Polytypic Realism.

~ 

Just as it may be no simple matter to posit the right entities, it may not be evident how to ask the right questions:

The main reason we have had a hard time answering “How many genes cause postzygotic isolation?” should now be clear:  It is not a single question.  Instead, this query masks a large number of questions that may have very different answers.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 306

And indeed, the authors conclude:  “There has been nearly endless discussion of species concepts.   This vast and stupefying literature has produced little new or interesting biology.”

[Update 22 March 2012] And indeed … Andrew Hamilton, reviewing Richard A. Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 2010, writes:

There are four books on my shelf and countless papers in my electronic and physical files with the title "The Species Problem." Many of these were written by philosophers, but almost as many were written by biologists. …  None of the books and papers on this topic contains anything like a consensus solution.

The reviewer then rejects this latest attempt:

As a solution to 'the' problem or as a theory-based definition, however, Richards' strategy isn't going to work. … While it may be true …  that all contemporary species concepts pick out population-level evolutionary lineages, they do so in different and often incompatible ways. Agreeing that species are lineage segments goes no distance toward helping to find the boundaries or to settle the host of arguments about what boundaries to seek. This approach swaps one hard question (what are species?) for another (what's an evolutionary individual?), as is the case with most or all of the other proposed solutions to date.

Metasolution:

Having rejected the solution, I would now like to reject the problem.

That, actually, has pretty much been the history of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, from G. E. Moore on out:  you don’t solve a problem; you unmask it as metaphysical (or some other handy word), and dissolve it.

[Update 26 May 2013]  Even more radically rejectionist is What Darwin Got Wrong (2011), by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.

The latter author (who largely wrote the former half) reviews (p. 57) the entities that have been proposed as the axis upon which all selection turns:

Pleas have been made … for revising the traditional neo-Darwinian thinking that either the individual, or the population as a whole, are the sole units of selection.   There are selective processes … also at the level of genes, chromosomes, whole genomes, whole epigenomes, cells, developing tissues, kin groups, societies and communities;  and, of course, organisms and populations.

(Notice that he doesn’t even mention “species”, as in The Origin of Species, yo?)

The former author, laying about him with a broadsword, writes (p. 126)

Phenotypes aren’t bundles of traits; they’re more like fusions of traits.  Prima facie, the units of phenotypic charge are whole phenotypes.

Compare the famous hyperholistic thrown-gauntlet of Quine: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science”.

On Sex and C. S. Lewis (updated)

I’m in the midst of reading an informative and entertaining volume by Edward Craig:  Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002).  It engagingly tells me about some things which I know little about (e.g. Buddhism -- though here his exposition rather motivates me to know even less) and Nietzsche (whom I haven’t read  since I was a lad in lederhosen, but the reminder  led me to pull down  off the old shelf   those Goldmanns Gelbe Taschenbücher --  alas, in type too small for these old eyes).  But occasionally he writes of matters I do know something about, and one of these I wish to address:  his digs at C. S. Lewis.

Craig begins (p. 91) by alluding to Lewis marveling at the magnitude of a young man’s sex drive (not limited by periods of rut or oestrus), which, if it had its way, might “populate an entire village” (as indeed has apparently happened in the case of certain potentates of history, and occasionally  in our own day).   Craig then makes noises in favor of Nature, which, decoratively red in tooth and claw, “can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happen very often, to put it mildly.”

(Craig’s mild irony, which he puts forward as self-evident, requires some sympathetic interpretation if it is to make sense.   After all, something very much like that male hyperfecundity does regularly happen in some species, such as the elephant seal.  All Craig can really mean is that we can’t all be alpha-males  -- an arithmetic tautology  well within the grasp of C.S. Lewis.)

He concludes (p. 92):

            C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating well clear of the facts.

(If you read that too hastily, you might miss the insinuation in that choice of word, imagination :  the image that epithet covertly  evokes  is that of sexual fantasizing, the frustrated dreams of potency by a celibate Oxford don. )

Well, let us be clear about what the facts actually are, before we go floating off.

Right off, if the author’s intention was to present a gleaming uncontroversial example of Natural Selection, versus a yahoo’s failure to appreciate it, it was a singularly unhappy choice.  Sex has always been a puzzle, precisely for students of Natural Selection, and Darwin himself was the first to notice this.   In a remarkable display of intellectual integrity, no sooner had Darwin achieved renown for his theory of Natural Selection, than he maintained that that very theory was inadequate in an important respect:  Sex just did not fit in with the established pattern of facts.  So far from dismissing this as a mere anomaly, he set up a second and parallel hypothesis of Sexual Selection.   (Sidenote:  Darwin’s reticence and self-critiques are exemplary in the history of public thought.  More typically, an intellectual or semi-intellectual comes up with a single Neat Idea (“soft power”!  “themata”! “the world is flat”!) and attempts to dine out on it for the rest of his career. )

In Darwin’s time, the puzzle was insoluble, since he lacked -- and was candidly aware that he lacked -- knowledge of the mechanism of the rise and maintenance of variation:  the world awaited Mendel, laboring obscurely in his monastery.   Once the algebra of genes was sorted out, for a while some scientists thought they had the key:   Sex dumps two separate sets of genes into the tombola, shuffles well, and voilà, all the variation you could ever wish for, a bonanza for Selection to work on.   That seems so sensible, many of us believed it for years, never giving it a thought.   So I was startled to learn that this account is now quite controversial -- having to do with such matters as the status of group-selection and the game-theoretic view of gene propagation.  The subject deserves a separate essay (or a separate book), but a thumbnail summary might go:  from the standpoint of the Selfish Gene, the world appears as it does to Donald Trump:  “I’m already perfect, just as I am !  Just make more clones of me-e-e-e-e-e ! ! !”

*     *     *

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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~

We thus leave the evolutionary mystery of sex to its able investigators, and return to C.S. Lewis.

Since Craig didn’t source his paraphrase, nor provide a googlable direct quotation, I had to hunt a bit.   And in riffling through a stack of CSL’s writings on my desk, in search of the passage in question, I was reminded that he actually wrote very little about sex itself (as opposed to love: beautifully in The Four Loves), so it is difficult to come up with passages illustrating the range of his thought.   Most of these volumes lack subject-indexes, alas;  and in those that have them, like the essay-collection God in the Dock, the word “sex” does not even appear.  I finally came upon the passage Craig was paraphrasing  in the chapter “Sexual Morality”, originally a wartime radio-talk, collected in the volume Mere Christianity.  Lewis continues the analogy with food, in a sort of parable:

Or take it another way.  You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.  Now supposed you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage  and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that, in that country, something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

The flavor of that passage is probably enough for you to surmise that C.S. Lewis was neither a prude nor a suppressed lecher.   The whole chapter is wonderfully rich and subtle, and it seems Craig must have read it, yet he offers a bonehead summary:  “Before you castigate yourself a sinner and start bewailing the lost innocence of the human male…”   Lewis’ actual emphasis is quite otherwise:

The old Christian teachers said that if Man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. … Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body … If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.

Lewis never hectors his audience about sinfulness and sex; in fact, reminiscing about his talks with the troops, he noted that he soon gave up even mentioning fornication in such a connection, since the troops themselves simply had no conception of sinfulness in that regard;  a much more fruitful subject was always “a sin that I myself had committed the previous week”.   Nor did he much regret this loss of subject-matter, for as he concludes his chapter:

Though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can  that the centre of Christian morality is not here.  If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.  The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

Incidentally -- lest you imagine that Lewis is idiosyncratic on this subject, compare this, from a prominent Jesuit:

Pleasure itself is never wrong.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 102

~

So.  I believe I have successfully defended C.S.Lewis against any suggestions that he was either a prude or a scold;  but what of his original suggestion that the sexual instinct in modern man has somehow gone wrong ?  That is indeed a startling thesis -- and utterly at variance with the  contemporary climate of right-thinking opinion that anything goes and that’s just dandy.  Gone wrong, not in the matter of excess of appetite (his parable about the village-populator was indeed not happily chosen, for the reason Craig notes), but almost the opposite -- in its perversion to ends having nothing to do with procreation.  And in this, I believe he was right -- even prescient, for matters have grown publically worse than in his day.   In his day there were no pressure-groups for the “transgendered”, nor for the sad souls who can find no psychosexual relief until they have their own leg amputated. 

By chance -- though not a long-shot, for the media brim with such things -- upon putting down the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, I picked up a newspaper, and happened upon an article telling of a local man being sentenced to a long prison-term for possession of child pornography.  But what struck me was this detail:  When the police raided his home, they found over seventy-five thousand photographic images.  Now, surely even a naturalist who roams the globe documenting a variety of species in a panoply of ecotones, would not be so dedicated as to accumulate a (much more variegated) cache of that size.   For, all of this sad man’s photos presumably make the same, identical point.  See:  little girl;  no wee-wee.  Granted, every lad needs to learn that, and it’s surprising at first.   But why does he need to be told that, seventy-five thousand times?

Nor is the problem  that of just a few fringe deviants.  Such musically talentless divas as Madonna and (the pen recoils at even spilling its ink  to write this name) Lady Gaga,  have garnered their mass appeal -- among your sons and daughters and mine -- precisely by exploiting the lure of perversion, and the Satanic aspects of fallen sex. 

And even among the generality who do not indulge in such things, the fibre has somehow slackened, so that all we can do is mumble “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”.

But there really is something wrong with that;  and there is no limit to the depths to which depravity will go, if given a leash long enough:  In 2001, a German homosexual named Armin Meiwes posted an online ad for a well-built young male to volunteer to be slaughtered and eaten.  He received numerous replies to this tempting offer;  the lucky winner was a 43-year-old engineer.   Let Wiki tell the rest, in mouth-watering detail:

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes's home in the small village of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes' penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes' penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, "chewy". Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic; he then fried it with some of Brandes' fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog.

Which wine they had set aside to accompany this spicy delicacy is not recorded.

Bad enough;  but again, the supine impotence of the broader society before such atrocities must be noted.  Cannibalism was not even a crime in Germany (it being, after all, the traditional practice of those differently-cultured); nor could a straight case of murder be made out, since the entrée had voluntarily entered into this little intimacy between consenting adults.   They finally charged the gourmand with the archaic charge of “desecrating a corpse”.   This could not refer to the grotesque  and protracted emasculation described above -- the law was cool with that -- since the celebrant was then still living.   It was only because Herr Meiwes chopped up the rest of him and popped it in the pantry, that this ludicrous mini-charge could be brought.

C.S. Lewis was right on target.  There is indeed something amiss in the modern mechanism of sex.  Something is truly out of kilter, in a way that Darwin, despite his many merits, does not begin to explain.

That our philospher can dismiss him offhandedly is probably due, not to any deficiencies in Lewis' arguments, which are closely-reasoned always, but to the unspoken assumption that any out-and-out Christian must be an intellectual lightweight.   But a similar diagnosis was arrived at by the atheist Sigmund Freud:   "The sexual life of man is seriously disabled;  it sometimes makes the impression of being a function in process of becoming atrophied."  (Quoted in E. Jones, Freud, III 341)

(Note:  To keep your own healthy instincts from atrophying, simply click here:
  Dames, dames, dames )

[Update 31 May 2012]  Herr Meiwes is not without his acolytes:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/necrophilia-not-that-theres-anything.html
This is not Darwinian.  This is Satanic.

*

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~

Re-reading, I notice another sidewise swipe at CSL:  Craig identifies him as a “popularist Christian theologian”.   (Sorry, professor:  You mess with my dawg, I mess with you.)  I am unsure what that “popularist” is supposed to imply -- is it a sly way of saying “pop”?  Is it a misspelling of "populist" (something Lewis emphatically was not)?  Or is it an awkwardly-worded reference to Lewis’s thoroughly honorable work -- much of it in the service of British troops in wartime -- in conveying some ideas of philosophy and of Christianity to the general public, much as Craig himself (in Oxford’s cleverly conceived and slickly marketed series of uniform Livre-de-poche-style mini-volumes or maxi-pamphlets) has done for philosophy, minus the Christianity?    Or can he possibly mean that Lewis ‘played to the populace’, watering solid doctrine down into milksop for the masses?  If that be the meaning, he has stood truth on its head.  -- In any event, Lewis never claimed to be a theologian, so far as I know  (In his public talk at Oxford, printed as "The Inner Circle", he describes himself merely as "a middle-aged moralist".)    He claimed to be a professor of literature, and he claimed to be a Christian -- a “mere” Christian, in fact.

~

But let us turn from these perhaps impalpable ethical/sociological observations, and return to the lab-last of exact and unforgiving Science.

Biologically, there is more to reproduction of  kind  than merely impregnation.    Of late, indeed, statistical medical investigations have increasingly stressed developmental (intra-uterine) environmental factors apart from strict Mendelian genetics -- an area that blurs the line between Nature and Nurture.   We shall briefly examine these, note their application to the species Homo sapiens, and conclude that, here as well, there are trends that raise Lewisian concerns.  Darwin, rather than puffing on his pipe and chortling “Just as I predicted !”, would probably recoil in horror.

The three basic stages in the reproductive cycle are:

            (1) Fertilization (impregnation)

            (2) Gestation (pregnancy)

            (3) Post-natal care.

This last, for familiarity and concision, we shall call simply “parenting”, although the behaviors it covers, in this species or that, may be remote from those conjured in any issues of Family Circle.   The mommy ichneumon fly, who unfortunately will be elsewhere engaged when her little ones emerge, thoughtfully provides for them after she is gone, by laying her eggs inside a paralyzed wasp, so that the hatchlings will have something to chow down on right from the get-go.

We have touched above on the paraphilias, in which activities are somehow powered by energy diverted from the sex-drive -- rather like stealing electricity from a power-line -- which do not lead to impregnation.   These need not be floridly deviant to qualify from an impartial Darwinian perspective:  simple contraception falls under this head.

[... tbd ?]

La Nostalgie de la boue

[A nos lecteurs francophones -- bievenues sur le site.  On traite du journalisme deux-poids/deux-mesures, en partant d’une banale affaire de gosses dans l’état d’Ohio, en Amérique profonde; et passe au fétichisme tiers-mondialiste.

Mise à jour concernant les viols collectifs en Inde  en bas de la page.]

[Prefatory note:  The present essay is principally concerned with the way the media mold our perceptions, and the disconnect between actual (messy, hard-to-characterize) events, and the way they are packaged and spun.   Only accidentally does it concern cases of gang-rape (again, most recently a story that hit the world press just today, discussed at the end of this post).  If, therefore, it is principally the politics and theory of sex that interests you, rather than the mind-games of journalism, the following is recommended as an alternative:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-sex-and-c-s-lewis-updated.html

If, on the other hands, the journalistic interest is foremost, then some of the essays in this series might repay attention:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/journalism ]

[One of the themes here -- headlines & subheads (written by the drones with an agenda to push) versus the actual contentful text of the article (written by someone who actually did some legwork, or anyhow brainwork) -- is much more general than mere media criticism.  For consideration in a mathematico-philosophical context, consult this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2010/12/topoi-and-timepiece.html ]

It is generally  not worthwhile to bother with blather, whether of the P.C. or Tea Party stripe.  But the New York Times is the nation’s flagship newspaper; the Sunday edition stands at the head of the week; the Sunday Review is, in principle, its most serious section, since it allows essays not restricted to police-court reporting of whatever happens to have happened the day before;  and the front page is the blazon of that.   So when a well-known longtime columnist (Nicholas Kristof) publishes an article that is packaged  as a moral equation of sexual violence in America and in the Third World, a response is in order.

Note that I say: packaged;   spun, by the editors and publishers.  For the actual contents of the article largely refute its own headline.   The headline reads:

Is Delhi So Different From Steubenville?

Umm…. Yes.  To begin with, the showcase crimes-of-the-moment (which being each an individual event, are hardly probatory, but they are, after all, the police-blotter ‘hook’ on which he hangs his bigthink essay) are different.  One involves sexual activity of which the victim has no memory;  the other was gang-rape plus murder : one of the attackers shoved an iron bar inside her and ripped her guts out, then threw her out onto the street to die.   One of the Steubenville louts was video’d guffawing, over and over, “She’s so dead!”  but he was being metaphorical -- dead drunk, maybe.  In the New Delhi case, the victim was unmetaphorically, really most sincerely dead.

[Update 17 March 2013, 11 a.m.   Breaking news -- for the Ohio footballers case, the verdict is in.  The feminists get their revenge:

            Rape Inflation  ]

And indeed, the actual facts presented in the article, the statistics that go beyond this case or that, resoundingly refute the implication of the headline.  “In South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent of men reported that they had raped a woman.”  Reported, that is; the actual percentage of perpetrators may well be higher.  Nor does the writer mention the motive for some of these rapes, a motive peculiar to South Africa:  apart from mere lust, there has been the folk-belief that you can get rid of your AIDS by passing it on to someone else.  -- As for America, “Few people realize it, but Justice Department statistics suggest that the incidence of rape has fallen by three-quarters over the last four decades.”   So where is your story?

Indeed, if we leave the protected playground of the Sunday Review goodthink, and delve inside the news section, we find (p. 11) that India is especially known for crimes almost unheard of here, such as splashing acid into the face of your daughter-in-law.  And this is not the rare, Steubenville-style case:  In India, “Anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 women a year are killed over dowry disputes.  Many are burned alive…”

Nevertheless, the headline-writer for Kristof’s essays adds these subheads:

Rapists keep raping, and Congress keeps ignoring it.

Wh-Wha-?   What is needed is good police work.  Do you really want even more pointless grandstanding by this Congress?

And best of all:

Americans should look in their mirror before denouncing barbarity elsewhere

Oh, please.   When I look in the mirror, I see a man who has been thirty-six years in a faithful Christian marriage, and who has neither thrown, nor knows anyone who has thrown, nor (to my knowledge) knows anyone who knows anyone who has thrown, acid into the face of their daughter-in-law, over greed for an even bigger dowry.

[Note:  The point of this post is not to beat up on Indians;  they have a hard row to hoe, and I wish them well.  The point is rather to counter the false equations of corrupt journalism motivated by PC/post-modernist self-laceration.]

[Update 20 June 2014]  It turns out Kristof got the headline-writer he deserved, since he is actually a repeat offender in this area, having been one of the chief shills for the Cambodian P.C. con-artist Somaly Mam:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/asia/anti-trafficking-activist-quits-amid-charges-stories-were-fabricated.html?hp&_r=1

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update -- Sunday afternoon -- this just in]  There has just been yet another horrific nightlong mass rape involving a bus passenger in India:

http://www.elle.fr/Societe/News/Inde-nouvelle-affaire-de-viol-collectif-2288256

A French reader offers the following interesting comment:

La France est 25 fois moins peuplée que l'Inde et pourtant nous avons chaque années nos affaires de tournante dans les caves de cités, ici c'est encore pire car ces tournantes sont racistes ce qui n'est pas le cas en Inde. Pourquoi se focaliser sur 'Inde et étouffée les centaines de faits similaires en France, il y a un tabou bien plus grand en France, les médias ne veulent pas stigmatiser donc ça passe sous silence.

Now -- superficially, this reader might seem to be making the same point as our headline-writer:  Watch not the straw in thy neighbor’s eye, but the beam in thine own.   But a décryptage of the euphemisms here  makes rather the reverse case, and is anything but a comfort to the hawkers of political correctness.
First, "les caves de cités" refers to the cellars of the massive taxpayer-subsidized housing-projects that encircle Paris, given over  almost exclusively to African immigrants.

Next:  Tournante means basically ‘gang-bang’:  but of a sort peculiar to France.  Thus:

Au début des années 2000, la société française a découvert avec consternation que la montée constante de la délinquance ne se limitait pas aux seuls feux de voitures. Elle s'accompagnait de la banalisation de crimes particulièrement abjects que les médias allaient baptiser des "tournantes", reprenant le terme d'argot utilisés par les jeunes des cités pour désigner des viols collectifs. Le viol collectif, certes, n'est pas en soi une nouveauté et aucun peuple n'en a le monopole, mais ce qui allait particulièrement choquer les Français, c'est à la fois sa banalisation, la jeunesse des criminels mais aussi leur parfaite indifférence et leur absence de remord vis-à-vis de leurs victimes, souvent des adolescentes ou des pré-adolescentes. Si la majorité des victimes de tournantes sont des françaises de souche, on en trouve dans tous les groupes ethniques et elles sont de toutes les couleurs de peau. Il convient de donc de préciser que dans les exemples cités ci-dessous, les victimes ne sont pas nécessairement de souche européenne.

Néanmoins, les liens entre l'immigration afro-maghrébine, la haine envers les Blancs - ou l'occident - et la recrudescence de ce type d'agressions est indéniable : des chiffres, des faits et des témoignages le confirme.

Now we can understand what the commentor meant when she said that the French media suppress reportage of such events, for fear of “stigmatising” (a lexicographically transitive verb, here used de-transitively out of euphemism).  The commentor herself suppressed the implied direct-object of the verb, because no-one who follows French events -- in samizdat, s’entend, since the MSM shy away -- needs to be told whom we are talking about here.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible ???

*

~     ~      ~

Let us emphasize the importance of the fact of this packaging.    Major events go on in the world, and in this age of readily-shared information, cannot be passed over in silence forever;  but the way the medium spins things, reveals their agenda.   And at the New York Times, the folks who provide the fluff -- headlines and captions and artwork -- frequently push the atavistic post-Modernist agenda.

Thus, to take an equally prominent example from the very same morning’s newspaper:  the front-page review by the well-known columnist David Brooks, of Jared Diamond’s new book:  The World Until Yesterday:  What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

Now, already in the title, there is a P.C. sleight of hand.  After all, Victorian England and Troubadour France were traditional societies, though they allowed for effervescence and creativity within them.  What Diamond means here is not that:  he means primitive societies, savage societies.  Brooks picks a more neutral term, but does report the facts:  “The most obvious difference between us  is that pre-state tribal societies are just a lot more violent.”

Nevertheless, the large headline over the review reads:

Tribal Lessons

clearly implying that there are some;  and the sub-head (page 20):

Traditional societies have much to teach us about child-rearing, the treatment of the elderly, and dispute resolution.

So-o, what might these useful lessons be?  Well, the very first paragraph of the review  offers this heart-warming anecdote:

The custom among the Pirahã Indians of Brazil is that women give birth alone. The linguist Steve Sheldon once saw a Pirahã woman giving birth on a beach, while members of her tribe waited nearby. It was a breech birth, however, and the woman started crying in agony. “Help me, please! The baby will not come.” Sheldon went to help her, but the other Pirahã stopped him, saying that she didn’t want his help. The woman kept up her screams. The next morning both mother and baby were found dead.

Nice!  Keeps those male-chauvinist ob-gyns out of the delivery-room.  Empower yourself, practice self-midwifery.

And what of the elderly?

The anthropologist Allan Holmberg was with a group of Siriono Indians of Bolivia when a middle-aged woman grew gravely ill. She lay in her hammock, too unwell to walk or speak. Her husband told Holmberg that the tribe had to move on and would leave her there to die. They left her a fire and some water and walked away without saying goodbye. Even her husband had no parting words for her.

Oh-kayyy… lesson learned!  Throw grannie under the bus!

Ah, and widows:  we learn of one tribe in which “widows insisted on being strangled just after their husbands passed away”.   A sort of quick-and-easy variation on the more elaborate practice in traditional India (look up suttee).

And how about dispute-resolution?

The problem is that the warfare was constant, and over time the casualties added up. Between April and September 1961, 0.14 percent of the alliances’ total populations was killed in this war. As a share of total population, that’s a higher casualty rate than Europe, Japan, China or America suffered during the world wars.

The signature method of dispute-resolution in the Third World  is nothing so patriarchal and unfeeling as a decision in a court of law, but vendettas that can last for decades.

[Nota bene:  I am not here traipsing about picking-&-choosing faits-divers from police blotters around the world, which indeed would be pointless, but simply quoting paragraphs from the very article that, according to the editors and headline writers at the New York Times, is supposed to make out the case for the exemplary nature of tribalism.   The point of this essay is not to wring our hands over conditions in partibus infidelium;  if that is all you are getting out of it, you are reading it wrong.]

As for child-rearing, the author marvels that primitive mothers actually breast-feed.  Bravo:  so does any mother in our own society, with an ounce of sense.   But the Third World offers some curious child-rearing techniques that are sadly absent from our shores:  look up infibulation and clitoridectomy in the encylopedia.

The magazine then holds up for our admiration, for such lessons as we may glean, a photograph of the aptly-named New Guinea mudmen, no less.

Nostalgie de la boue …

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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~

Thus, in both cases, a prominent writer has published a not-very-good but not-terrible-either essay, which the headline-writers spin into an absurdity, into a celebration of primitivism and a slur against the West.   This matters, since most newspaper-skimmers will only take in the headlines, subheads, pictures and captions:  that is the takeaway for them.

We have here to deal with two different types of journalists;  and the man who writes the headlines  I will not dare to describe;  for I have not seen him  except in dreams.

-- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (1922)

Now, there are whole sections of the Sunday Times devoted almost exclusively to what we shall delphically allude to as la mouvance paraphile, notably the Style section, and to some extent even the Magazine (today’s cover is a pink monstrosity devoted to Lindsay Lohan.)   Fine, let that be their sandbox.  But when the sullage spills over into the News sections, it is time to sound the alarm.

[For further linguistically-alert observations on media spin, click here.]

Thus, consider the article that is featured, not simply on the front page of the Week in Review, but above the fold, titled

Darwin Was Wrong About Dating

The headline falls into the genre of Freud-bashing and “What Einstein Got Wrong”, pandering to the self-satisfactions of those who never actually bothered to read deeply in the literature of Natural Selection, or Psychoanalysis, or Relativity.   And the article itself takes a cheap shot at Darwin, to tickle the fancies of those who like to take at swat at traditional English society:

In “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Charles Darwin gathered evidence for the notion that, through competition for mates and sustenance, natural selection had encouraged man’s “more inventive genius” while nurturing woman’s “greater tenderness.” In this way, he suggested that the gender differences he saw around him — men sought power and made money; women stayed at home — weren’t simply the way things were in Victorian England. They were the way things had always been.

Cheap, because it suggests that the man led a blinkered existence in an overstuffed armchair;  whereas in fact, he cut his teeth in Patagonia, and (as anyone who dips into The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can swiftly verify) was well-read in the ethnology and ethology of his day.

Now:  I have more than once broken a lance against the occasional excesses of the ultra-Darwinists;  but Darwin himself is sound.

The writer focusses on two topics that are of sociological interest to be sure, but extraordinarily unlikely to overturn Darwin.

First:  the relative tendency to promiscuity among men vs. women.   He goes into the weeds, as such articles tend to do, without noticing one elementary arithmetical fact:  Each time a man has slept with a woman, a woman has slept with a man.  It’s like the north and south poles of magnets:  count them however you like, they will of necessity be equinumerous.  It is astonishing that columnists never seem to realize this, though one reader-commentor on this article did point it out.

Second:  Various amusing experiments are described, in which, if you load the dice right, people will (temporarily, during the artificial conditions of the experiment) act differently from the way they do in real life.  And you can so pre-set things that your results will flatter those who imagine that sex differences are not part of nature, but result from (scheming, white, patriarchal, Western) cultural conditioning.   Whereas if you acquaint yourself with history and ethnology, you soon see that it is precisely Western civilization which has freed the species from some of the age-old distinction of roles;  in any savage society whatever, the roles of men and women are starkly distinct. 

Thus, in the speed-dating improv (as we shall call it, so as not to dignify it with the title of “experiment”), it is unsurprising (especially to a Freudian) that, placed into a normally masculine role and given license by the experimental milieu, women might act out their fantasies, and the men might play along:  even outside of the ‘experimental’ situation, such techniques are sometimes used in flirting (witness "Sadie Hawkins day").  But it is no more telling for Darwinian theory than is the Woody-Allen/Diane-Keaton shtick in “Sleeper”, in which they respectively channel (with convincing authenticity) respectively Blanche du Bois and Stanley Kowalski.

[Click here for convincing proof that the genders are freely interchangeable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IF8-QQSDbk ]

So -- All in all, a thin and throwaway essay.  And to his credit, the author does quote Steven Pinker in rebuttal.  But our quarry lies elsewhere:  in the meta-message, in the packaging.   And here, long after recollection of that forgettable article has faded (if indeed the audience even read it past the first paragraph), the gigantic artwork that surmounts it -- taking up more than half a page, right at the top of the front page -- may leave its sticky subliminal traces.

The Mask of the Beast

In ugly colors, and against a jungle background, it depicts what at a first hasty glance may appear a heterosexual couple engaged in a kiss.  But wait -- no -- the figure of the man is wearing a skirt and high heels, while the woman is wearing trousers.   The top half of the man has been sliced off and placed upon the lower trunk of a woman;  the upper half of the woman has been perched atop the legs of a man:  as much as to say, that the sexes are literally interchangeable.   (More darkly still, it hints at the fantasy of the invert dépeceur.)

More chillingly still, what from a distance resembles a kiss, is something truly repugnant: for these creatures are more than mere centaurs:  the heads have blended into each other -- the faces have entirely disappeared.   The resulting monstrosity  -- neither woman, nor man, nor good red herring -- appears the product of an imperfectly divided zygote; and the triangular area where the faces should have been  suggests the visage of a bat or a goat, crowned by outsize feral ears:   the Mask of the Beast.

This is not an isolated case.  For another example of the New York Times celebrating the Pornography of Deformity, click here:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/scorecard-azzedine-alaia-wins/

We examine that atrocious image in detail here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/07/vade-retro-satanas.html

~     ~     ~

Ever since the earliest preserved literature -- from a time which to us, would itself appear as Classical Antiquity or a Golden Age -- there has been a myth of things having been once much better. (Start with Eden and Genesis, in fact.)   The idea has had many forms, and may even be spiritually akin to that mathematical Platonism which I myself espouse;  the instantiation characteristic of our own present Western civilization is the Myth of the Noble Savage, which developed during the Romantic period.   It is lurking behind the spin put on the facts reported above.

Thus, take our same author Jared Diamond.  He won fame by his earlier book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).  It is a wide-ranging, deep-delving book, chocked with fact and curiosa, engagingly written, and well-argued.   Yet in the very prologue to the book -- the initial spin-setter, the “Please don’t hate me for what I have to say” section -- as though to forestall the vituperation that (witness Pinker) must be the lot of anyone who trots out an abundance of facts and cool analysis, since these jar against the ambient bath of popular fantasies, he writes, of himself and his New-Guinea best-bud:

He and I both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans.

Now, as semanticians, and analysts of rhetoric,  let us lay out what this sentence (call it sentence “A”) literally and plainly implies.

(1)  There is a proposition (call it P, namely “New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans.”)  whose truth is uncontroversial -- not really open to discussion, even.  (That is what is meant by the phrase “know perfectly well”.  -- And indeed, if you are a competent speaker of English, you know that semantic fact perfectly well yourself, though your brain might resist it in this case, since you can sense where this is going, and you don’t want to go there.)

P in turn implies two propositions:

(2a)   It is possible that the various races  differ in average intelligence.  (The pragmatic implication is actually even stronger -- more like “likely” or “almost certainly”.  Again,  your brain might refuse to process this assertion in the present context;  if so, simply replace “smarter” by “taller”, and “New Guineans” with “Dinka”.)

(2b)  If such is the case in the New-Guinean/European matchup, then it is the New Guineans who come out on top.

These are straightforward logico-pragmatic entailments of Diamond’s original assertion;  yet we may doubt whether he would acknowledge this if pressed.   His sentence was possibly intended as propitiatory, not meant to be examined or taken literally:  lip-service, as in a politician’s speech.

And indeed, but a few pages later comes a startling fact that rather casts doubt upon (2b).    For whereas Europeans, in order to exchange the gifts of tradition and the ferment of new ideas, erected Latin into an international language for such discourse, and used it for centuries (now English fills that role), these brainy New Guineans, all on their little island there, apparently found little to say to one another, for:

Of the modern world’s 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.

Thinking their great thoughts silently, no doubt.

Yet it is precisely for such statements as A, rather than for the minutiae of plant domestication and prevailing winds, that Jared Diamond has been grasped to the bosom of the P.C. media -- in particular, in a three-part PBS television extravaganza, in 2005, dutifully following him as he traipses around the world.   Reviewing this for a scientific journal, Machael Balter writes

Diamond’s thesis is one of the most widely discussed big ideas of recent years … For one thing, it is an explicitly anti-racist explanation for social and economic inequalities on a global level.

-- “Is This How the West Won?”, in Science, 8 July 2005, p. 248

Short version:

(B)  It’s not in the genes, it’s the geography, stupid.

The reviewer demurs:

There are scholars who disagree with his thesis.  Nor are any of these dissenters ever interviewed, though a number of other experts and personalities appear in the film  to bolster Diamond’s viewpoint.  This imbalance is a disservice.

-- id.

I have neither the time nor the qualifications to weigh Diamond’s arguments in detail:   but the point here is that, whatever the book’s merits (and they are many, whatever you think of B), neither does the general reader nor the media producer have the least interest in getting to the bottom of things:  they’re just putting on a show, or watching the show.   In a similar fashion, the immense popularity of Albert Einstein among the American public  had little to do with the details of his tensor equations.  These, like Diamond’s detailed examples, are functionally mere window-dressing  on the public square.

[Update 2 September 2013] For more on the cultural wonders of New Guinea, check this out:

«Schwarzer Jesus» gelyncht und geschändet

Er nannte sich Black Jesus und soll Kannibalismus betrieben und mehrere Frauen vergewaltigt haben. Jetzt haben Dorfbewohner den Sektenführer auf Neuguinea ermordet.

Ein als «Schwarzer Jesus» bekannter Sektenguru ist auf Papua-Neuguinea von einem wütenden Mob gelyncht worden. Steven Tari hatte zuvor mehrere junge Mädchen als Opfergabe getötet, wie die Zeitung «The National» am Montag berichtete.

http://www.20min.ch/ausland/news/story/-Schwarzer-Jesus--gelyncht-und-geschaendet-22716069

An infamous Papua New Guinea cult leader known as “Black Jesus” was castrated by an angry mob after being hacked to death for killing young girls as sacrifices.

Steven Tari, a convicted rapist who was suspected of cannibalism, was killed in a remote PNG village.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/479857/black-jesus-castrated-after-cult-sacrifices-report

[Update 19 November 2013]  Cf. now this, in the London Review of Books, taking apart Jared Diamond’s recent The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live. The malaise is all the more remarkable when the culture in question is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place – a Shangri-la – or a time, a Golden Age, that promises to reset our compass to true north.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n22/james-c-scott/crops-towns-government

~

[Update 18 January 2013]  A reader sent me this link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-21059681

under the subject-line “Rape is not just a problem in India. It's also a problem in the UK”.   And indeed, the opening paragraph is truly horrific:

A 12-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped by a group of men was also made to have a back-room abortion after falling pregnant, a court has heard.  She is one of six alleged victims of nine men accused of grooming children and exploiting them for sex in Oxford.

She was also "branded" with the initial of a man who claimed to "own her".

This is as much of what comes out of the Third World.   So -- are the Oxford dons, or whoever it may be, on a moral par with the subcontinental diabolists?

Well, no.  Read on, see the names and pictures of the accused, and you realize, this is the Third World;  these men are in England, but not of it.

The account continues:

The men deny 51 charges including rape, arranging child prostitution and trafficking relating to girls aged between 11 and 15 from 2004 to 2012.

Jurors at the Old Bailey heard the victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was "sold" to Mohammed Karrar when she had just turned 11 to "cure her bad attitude".

The nine men are demons.   But a detail slipped into that last sentence, and never expanded-on nor explained, is actually more chilling.  “Sold” …. by whom?  Her family?  If so, we have to deal, not simply with (as it were) some rabid dogs who strayed into a neighborhood and terrorized the populace … but a populace of curs.

*     *     * 

Tired of marinating in a rehash of such squalid shenanigans?

Then bail out and read something timeless instead:

Consilience in Mathematics

Theologia mathematica

The Ladder of Abstraction

(For those not opting to do so --

We now return you to the folly of life here below.)

*     *     *

 

[Update]  Still stunned, I searched for further details of the case, and found this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/girl-was-sold-aged-11-drugged-and-raped-by-child-sex-ring-court-told-8456041.html

A 14-year-old girl who went to the police after allegedly being beaten up and repeatedly raped by a member of a child sex trafficking ring was persuaded to drop her complaint by another girl who was “seeing” her attacker, a court heard today.

So, yes:   We have here to deal, not with a handful of demons on one side, and the innocent on the other, but a whole infected culture in that milieu.

Now -- What milieu are we dealing with here?  Neither the BBC nor The Independent is inclined to breathe word of this.   It is sad when you have to turn to the tabloids to get the real deal, but here it is:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2263924/Oxford-sex-gang-victim-aged-11-branded-initial-abuser.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Seven men of Pakistani origin and two from North Africa are accused of 79 offences against six vulnerable white British girls. The charges include child rape, sexual trafficking and child prostitution.

From the age of 12 the girl was sold to groups of Asian men who violently raped her in private homes and guesthouses around Oxford and elsewhere. Sometimes she was injected with heroin or given date drugs to ensure she complied with the gang’s sick demands.

~

There is a highly curious aspect to this latest case, quite different in its dynamics from the familiar crime and disorder of Third World life, involving rather Cultures in Contact -- but a contact basically at the level of the Unconscious.   To pursue this would take us out of sociopolitical territory, and into the psychoanalytical.   Perhaps, if I come to understand it better, I might blog about it, under the rubric

Bluebeard and the Little Drummer Girl

Readers wishing to have a glimpse of the sort of thing this involves, in a CT context, might profitably dip into an extensively researched and grippingly written thriller (only, it’s not fiction) by John Follain, Jackal (1998), the saga of the charismatic terrorist Carlos, who somehow excited  many a Bartholin's gland.

            In an earlier essay, Pride and the Laws of Motion,  we examined the thesis that Superbia, at least as much as the factors considered by Marx, was essential to understanding the psychodynamics of the subaltern.  This mostly involves the depth-psychology of the male.   This other dynamic, less often explored in a political setting, depends principally on the depth-psychology of the female.  Deep waters, where we fear to wade.

[Update 27 January 2013] Latest reflection of the Bluebeard syndrome:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-linda-pugach-20130127,0,6094929.story

Linda Riss went on to marry Burton Pugach, who in 1959 hired a goon to splash lye on her face. Their baffling but long-lasting union fascinated the media.

[Update 16 Feb 2013]  And now another:

http://etudiant.lefigaro.fr/les-news/actu/detail/article/une-jeune-femme-epouse-l-assassin-de-sa-soeur-jumelle-1196/

The eligible bachelor ... and the blushing bride

The enigma of a woman’s heart,

finally espied  by a Private Eye,

for less than the price  of a Valentine …

This Rose

[Kindle]  [Nook]

[Aug 2014] And another:

http://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/star-25-ans-sapprete-epouser-tueur-charles-manson-190814-900495

~

[Update 16 March 2013]  The latest, from central India:  a bike-ride gone bad.

Une touriste suisse a été victime d'un viol collectif hier soir dans le centre de l'Inde, a indiqué aujourd'hui la police. La victime se promenait à vélo avec son mari dans le quartier de Datia, dans l'état du Madhya Pradesh, quand sept à huit hommes les ont attaqués. Ils ont attaché l'homme et violé la femme en sa présence, avant de leur voler leurs biens, a précisé la police. Huit suspects sont actuellement entendus par les enquêteurs.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2013/03/16/97001-20130316FILWWW00285-une-touriste-suisse-victime-d-un-viol-collectif-en-inde.php?m_i=D0ED72Wz3PmsJVpoXr2kcLQ_56B_QbLByf43orfHAl43xQK9l

As always, a cauldron of comment boils behind the bland wire-services account.  In the columns of todays’s Le Figaro, much the same debate plays out (“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” vs. “C’est un poids, deux mesures”) as in the New Delhi case treated above.   Representing the first camp, a reader writes (I normally don’t include the poster’s name, even though these are quite public, but in this case it is necessary for comprehension of the second reply below):

NADIA GENJI

Ca suffit le racisme. C'est quoi ces internautes qui ont la langue plus rapide que leur cerveau et qui font des "bug"....
Petit rappel pour un retour à la triste réalité :
1/ Tous les 8 minutes une femme est victime de viol en France.
2/ Tous les 3 jours une femme meurt sous les coups de son mari ou compagnon en France.

Representing the second:

Vous répétez des chiffres erronés et issus de la propagande associative.

Certaines associations féministes ont décidé pour mieux marquer les esprits de considérer en dehors de toute réalité statistique que les viols déclarés ne représentent que 10 % des viols en France. Cela nous donne la statistique choc de 1 viol toutes les 8 minutes rabâchée depuis des années.

--

et quand on sait que les prisonniers sont aux trois quart vos coreligionaires, il n'est pas difficile de faire le lien avec ces 200 viols

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

 

And now, an exact parallel in the German press,

http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/gruppenvergewaltigung-schweizer-touristin-in-indien-mehrfach-vergewaltigt_aid_941420.html

where a reader comments

aus irgendeinem Grund greift die Presse solche Fälle nur auf wenn sie sehr weit weg passieren. Vor einigen Wochen gab es beispielsweise eine Massenvergewaltigung in München, ausserhalb der Lokalmedien hat man hiervon allerdings nichts lesen können, und selbst da wurde, wie üblich, die Herkunft der Täter verschleiert.

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

For further essays and stories, check this out:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

~

[Update 30 March 2013]  The latest piece of particularist piffle, from the reliably wool-headed Washington Post, appeared prominently featured on their Website, written by a couple of women.:

White men with guns

Our nation must confront why they perpetrate so many shootings.

To point out the obvious  would be churlish.

[Update 20 April 2013]  More from India’s bulging police-blotter:

NEW DELHI — The case of a 5-year-old girl who was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, starved and tortured has provoked a protest

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/asia/reports-of-rape-of-5-year-old-in-india-set-off-furor.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

[Update 4 June 2013]  Ho hum, another one:

An American woman was apparently gang-raped by three men in the tourist area of Manali in India’s mountainous northern state of Himachal Pradesh

http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-american-tourist-rape-india-20130604,0,879484.story

Well, you may say, these things happen, you can always pick up some oddity from the police blotters by trolling around.    But what makes this an indictment of India, specifically, rather than of just a handful of rural louts, is this:

Cases entering the legal system can take years, even decades, to resolve.

So, good luck getting any justice.

Once again:  The attempt by the New York Times to smear America and bring it down to the level of India in matters like this, is contemptible.

[Update 13 Aug 2014]  From the world of fashion, a degenerate Western response  to the India outrages:

http://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/photos-de-mode-inspirees-dun-viol-collectif-suscitent-lindignation-inde-120814-900110

But what do you expect, from the world of fashion.

[Update 27 Aug 2014] On the mass-rape issue, more re Swedish political-correctness,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_znVnOizU8

now with a new relevance, given this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11059138/Rotherham-In-the-face-of-such-evil-who-is-the-racist-now.html

[Update 10 November 2015]  Acid attacks on the upswing.  (No, not on U.S. campuses.)

In Indien nehmen Attentate zu, die Täter zielen auf Gesicht und Augen. Die gefährlichen Chemikalien lassen sich problemlos kaufen

http://derstandard.at/2000025380271/Saeureangriffe-in-Indien-Die-aetzende-Antwort-verschmaehter-Verehrer

[Update Jan 2019]
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/world/asia/india-girl-beheading-honor-killing.html