Insert a Trite Metaphor About a Corral #67

Posted on March 9, 2007 in Roundup

Young girl, get out of my mind
My love for you is way out of line
Better run, girl,
You’re much too young, girl
With all the charms of a woman
You’ve kept the secret of your youth
You led me to believe
You’re old enough
To give me Love
And now it hurts to know the truth, Oh,
Beneath your perfume and make-up
You’re just a baby in disguise
And though you know
That it is wrong to be
Alone with me
That come on look is in your eyes, Oh,
So hurry home to your mama
I’m sure she wonders where you are
Get out of here
Before I have the time
To change my mind
‘Cause I’m afraid we’ll go too far, Oh,
Young girl

– Gary Puckett and the Union Gap

How do you write about child porn without looking at the pictures? Current laws say that only law enforcement officers may examine the material without fear of prosecution (can you see the loophole for a pedophile?) FAIR asks us to look at the case of Kurt Eichenwald who was accused of looking at pedoporn by another reporter. Eichenwald, the father of three young children, was alarmed when he read on Salon that he had “looked at a lot of kiddie porn.” “There could be, by necessity, a referral to Child Services and the removal of children from my home,” says Eichenwald. “All anyone needed to do was forward the Salon story to the Dallas District Attorney’s office and I would have been under federal investigation.” He called the statements in Nathan’s essay “playing Russian roulette with my kids,” as the content of her essay gave his pedophile enemies “the power to get me arrested.” Just what can we prohibit journalists from not seeing? And what can we do about the damage journalists cause to one another in the name of exposing the dilemnas in the system?

For the record, I do not support the publication or ownership of child porn. The issue isn’t so much the viewing as it is the circumstances under which a child is compelled to pose. Current laws allow people to possess erotic writing about children. And this is considered fine (if immoral) because children are not being forced to pose.

I part ways with Debbie Nathan who has made a career out of defending people who want porn and who have been accused of child molestation. (Isn’t it ironic that Nathan implicitly accepts the ability of a children to make their own decisions about posing for porn while attacking their malleability in a series of articles she wrote about the McMartin preschool case?) Nathan proposes licenses for researchers who want to examine the material in connection with valid research projects.

But Eichewald asks “Who’s going to be applying for these licenses she dreams up?”

The recent article by FAIR fails to ask the big question: are the children who are posing for the pieces being molested? Does a child possess sufficient judgement to be able to understand what is being asked of her/him? My favorite media watchdog organization buys into the “this is about the viewer” argument. No, it is about the subject of the photos and the market the viewer helps to create by her/his purchases of photos, magazines, and site memberships. That FAIR — an organization that usually is spot on regarding the follies and hypocrisies of the media — did not consider this end disappoints me.

• Turn, Turn Until People are Dizzy: If beneficiaries of [[Medicare_(United_States)|Medicare]] don’t like it, the media and the big drug companies sure do because it spells profits. FAIR discovered some interesting discrepancies in a recent article in the Washington Post lauding the revamped program: It’s true that the projected cost for 2006 was reduced significantly, from $38.1 billion to $30.5 billion (www.hhs.gov, 9/26/06). The biggest reason for this cost reduction, though, was that far fewer people than expected signed up for the plan (AP, 11/28/06). But isn’t it “more popular than anyone imagined”? The Post article cited polls saying that “more than 80 percent of enrollees are satisfied”—but that figure has to do with whether people feel they’ve chosen the right plan out of the many offered by the program, not whether they’re happy with the program itself. Personally, I have not yet met a person who likes having to pore over the promises of hundreds of insurance programs, hoping to find one that covers all of her/his formulary. There’s nothing like the careful rephrasing of a question to get the spin you want, isn’t there?
• They Want Us To Buy This: Suppose I told you that the reason why Rush Limbaugh attracts advertising dollars is because he’s a phenomenal radio talent and that his being a conservative has nothing to do with it, would you believe me? Didn’t think so. Yet there are aspects of the [[Air_America_Radio|Air America]] failure which suggest that it failed at articulating a progressive agenda. If this was the progressive voice, it didn’t say what needed to be said. The hoodwink was all around.
• Posting a Ban: Turkish viewers are the latest to be prohibited from viewing Youtube because of videos insulting the memory of [[Mustafa Kemal Ataturk]]. A cult of personality has a long life it seems, even after death.
• Choice Article: Not One Red Cent — Bono’s Bullshit
• Milestone: Captain America is dead
• Looking Out for His Friends: Will Bush pardon Libby?
• Feudalism is Alive: Just go to the island of Sark and see for yourself.
• I am Great So I Can’t be Kind: New research holds that narcissists do not hate themselves on the inside: as others have been accusing for years, they love themselves beyond all reason. Campbell, Bosson and colleagues used an Implicit Association Test to assess the participant’s underlying views on their self-esteem. Essentially, the test works by recording reaction times to computer-based word associations and relies on the notion that the participants are not aware that their self-esteem is being assessed while they are taking the test. This test was tailored to measure narcissism as it relates to agency, communion, and self-esteem. The results, which appear in the March issue of Psychological Science, show that narcissists do not uniformly dislike themselves “deep down inside.” Rather, narcissists reported positive unconscious self-views in agentic domains and not in communal areas. This study provides new evidence that narcissists exhibit a somewhat imbalanced self at both conscious and unconscious levels.
• Cognitum Ergo Sum: holds for rats as well as people a new study demonstrates. For the first time, nonhuman primates have been shown to think about the things they do. The study involved what is called a “duration-discrimination” test–offering rats rewards for classifying a signal as either short or long. As in most such tests, the “right” answer led to a large food reward, while a “wrong” answer led to no reward at all. The twist, however, is that before taking the duration test, the rats were given the chance to decline the test completely. If they made that choice, they got a small reward anyway. “If rats have knowledge about whether they know or don’t know the answer to the test, we would expect them to decline most frequently on difficult tests,” said Crystal. “They would also show the lowest accuracy on difficult tests that they can’t decline. Our data showed both to be true, suggesting the rats have knowledge of their own cognitive states.”
• Results of another study: Think your brother can be happy no matter what, so he should stop whining? Think again: The party line for most psychologists has been that happiness – or what psychologists call subjective well-being – is largely independent of life circumstances. The dominant model: People adapt to major life events, both positive and negative, and happiness pretty much stays constant through life, even if it is occasionally disrupted. Under this theory, winning the lottery won’t make you happier in the long run and while a divorce or even a major illness will throw your life into upheaval for a while, your happiness level will eventually return to where it was at before – that is, its set point. Lucas and his colleagues, however, looked at two large national prospective panel studies, one in Germany and the other in Great Britain. These studies – spanning some 24 years in Germany and 15 years in Great Britain – captured levels of life satisfaction both prior to and after major life events like marriage, divorce, unemployment and illness or disability. Lucas found that not all of life’s slings and arrows are created equal. On average, most people adapt quickly to marriage, for example — within a couple of years. People mostly adapt to the sorrows of losing a spouse too, but this takes longer — about seven years. In general, people spike in happiness, then return to previous levels of happiness. People who get divorced and people who become unemployed, however, do not, on average, return to the level of happiness they were at previously. The same can be said about physical debilitation. Reminds me of another study that I saw years ago. Psychologists looked into whether people were putting down certain patients and discovered that they were! Change happens in psychology by rejecting one shibboleth at a time.
• The Big Question: Is God a Democrat or a Republican?

If you find any articles worthy of mention in these roundups, send the URL to gazissax at best dot com. And feel free to comment!