Brayton muses:
Someone recently left a link on my blog to a study that found that masturbation reduces the risk of prostate enlargement. For some reason, that popped into my head last night along with an obvious question: how did they find a control group for such a study?
Long-term solitary confinement produces an assortment of psychological reactions. Few prisoners are unaffected … Many prisoners have been placed on antipsychotic drugs. Most of these individuals are not suffering from the normal, or common, mental issues. They are developing stress, depression, and psychotic behavior that is a product of the treatment, conditions, and isolation they are forced to live with. Many people are unable to cope.
The prison responds in a two-fold manner. The warden and his administration handle the prisoner’s physical placement and respond to any security concerns. The medical staff, which is under different management, deals with the mental complications that result from whatever the administration inflicts on its captives.
The guards walk the runs, provoking, harassing, and subjecting the prisoners to often idiotic enforcement of petty rules, and new, or otherwise never-before-enforced policies that are ever-changing and designed to torment. The psychological staff makes occasional rounds, or walk-throughs, with clipboards, inquiring in an uncaring way about each prisoners’ well-being. “How are you doing today?” to which most people normally just tell them to get the fuck on, or “bump it on down.” …it is obvious to even the most seriously mentally ill inmate in this prison that they are calloused and uncaring concerning our circumstances and the way we are being treated.
"Unrelentingly conservative?" Maybe if "The Pursuit Of Happyness" is conservative. And Barack Obama is conservative.
Some milbloggers, somewhat over-attuned, I’d say, to MSM anti-war sentiment, want to downplay Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As in Blackfive:
"PTSD is not an illness. It is a normal condition for people who have been through what you have been through."
One of "Jonah’s Military Guys" dissents a little:
The best way to mitigate stigmatization of these conditions, improve acceptance, increase treatment and reduce the chances of PTS becoming "chronic" or even PTSD turning into suicidal tendencies, is to accept it ourselves. Isn’t it time we milblogs stopped worrying about "the politics" started having a real conversation?
Beware this one: Zipskinny lets you analyze your own zip-code by census data. Then it lets you compare it with neighboring zipcodes and the country as a whole. I got lost for a while. Michael Blowhard did the same. Race, income, marital status – it’s all there. See you when you re-emerge.
Eric Black ponders the meaning of the departure of Rachel Paulose.
A classic, I’d say. I’d reiterate what I wrote when I first posted this:
If you were gay and young in the 1980s, the pop music was a form of emancipation and revelation. Early PSBs, Erasure and Bronski Beat captured the breakthrough. Many of us as teens lived in small towns and yearned for the big city. And no music video spoke to our lives as powerfully as "Smalltown Boy." Even now, it chokes me up.
You can vote for it here, or pick from nine others in the Best category:
With the deletion of TimesDelete, the NYT just had a record month online. More here.
The novelist and Hitch-chum Martin Amis has been catching a lot of flak for Steyn-like utterances about Muslims. The line between perfectly reasonable – and important – criticism of Islamism and even Islam, and sweeping statements about all Muslims is a vital one to maintain, it seems to me. The reason is that the former criticisms are so important they need to be shielded from legitimate accusations of bigotry. Amis seems to me to have teetered very close to the line, if not tripped over it. Here’s the relevant passage that has provoked some harrumphing from the left:
""There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’"
On its face, you can see the logic, especially with the opening qualification. Being able to say some things candidly – about Islam’s treatment of women, Jews and gays, about the backwardness of much of Muslim Middle East, about the anti-intellectual bullying of Islamist thought – is vital. But these important critiques will get overwhelmed by bigotry if we are not extremely careful. And musing about mass punishment of all Muslims is Malkinian. Ronan Bennett protests here. Kamila Shamsie seconds here. Pickled Politics gets into a, er, pickle here. Memo to the pickles: try not to criticize bigots by calling other people "inbreds", ok?
David Bernstein got the blogosphere roiling with this post:
Ron Paul is a tempting protest vote, and I did support him in 1988 when he ran as a Libertarian, but he strikes me as running less of a "libertarian" campaign than a pacifist, populist campaign that does have some appeal to young and idealistic libertarians, but has too much appeal to the old, paranoid, and racist pseudo-conservatives. There seems to be a right-wing version of the Popular Front mentality among many Paul supporters: just like it was okay for Social Democrats to ally with Stalinists for "Progressive" ends in the old days, it’s okay to ally with 9/11 and various other conspiracy theorists, southern secessionists, Nazis and fascists, anti-Semites and racists, against the common enemy of the modern "welfare-warfare" state. Count me out!
The guilt-by-association thing seems unfair to me. Matt Barganier agrees. Ditto the Rockwell brigade. But this post might prove Bernstein’s point:
Note that southern secessionists are lumped in with the rest of the laundry list. So support of a political tactic of disunion and decentralization has also become a thought crime?
One libertarian has Bernstein’s back, but David can defend himself:
Paul certainly has the potential to be the best thing that has happened to libertarianism as a political movement in a long time. He also has the potential to be the worst thing, if, as he gets more public exposure libertarianism gets associated in the public mind with 9/11 truther, southern irredentists, "white nationalists," and so forth.
It would be pretty easy for Paul to distance himself from some of the kooks who will always gravitate to a non-interventionist, small government candidacy. I don’t know why he hasn’t. But I also think that the Iraq war and the massive spending and anti-federalist impulses of the current GOP make Paul’s candidacy important – as a corrective to abuse and a reminder of some core conservative principles.
