And Yet, After So Much... Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain

Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain
By ADAM COHEN
Published: December 28, 2008
New York Times

It appears that ordinary Americans are about as willing to blindly follow orders to inflict pain on an innocent stranger as they were four decades ago.

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

For the complete, brief, and shocking (?) article click here.

Whirimako Black 'E Te Kai'

Gracias a Huia y Shelley por introducirme a la voz de Whirimako Black.

En estos dias espero que todos esten cerca de familia y de sus mas querid@s.

Let's Connect The Dots

Police in SF Bay Area investigate brutal gang rape of lesbian by 4 strangers

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer
6:24 PM PST, December 22, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A woman in the San Francisco Bay area was jumped by four men, taunted for being a lesbian, repeatedly raped and left naked outside an abandoned apartment building, authorities said Monday.

Detectives say the 28-year-old victim was attacked Dec. 13 after she got out of her car, which bore a rainbow gay pride sticker. The men, who ranged from their late teens to their 30s, made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation, said Richmond police Lt. Mark Gagan.

...

"Assailants target LGBT people of all gender identities with sexual assault," he said. "Such targeting is one of the most cruel, dehumanizing and violent forms of hate violence that our communities experience."

Skolnik said the group plans to analyze hate crime data to see whether fluctuations may be related to the gay marriage bans that appeared on ballots this year in California, Arizona and Florida.

"Anytime there is an anti-LGBT initiative, we tend to see spikes both in the numbers and the severity of attacks," he said. "People feel this extra entitlement to act out their prejudice."

click for complete article

Pragmatic Inclusion?

I’m not surprised by Rev. Rick Warren’s comparison of gay men and lesbians getting married to marriages between brothers and sisters (yes, that would be incest) and with pedophilia (yes, that would be sex with children). After all, haven’t we heard all this before and much more?

I’m not surprised that Rev. Warren believes we can be cured of being gay. After all, the miracle of medical science seeks to cure all that ails us.

I’m not surprised by Rev. Warren saying, “I want to have sex with every attractive woman I meet, but I have to control my impulses” or something to that effect in a TV interview. Mr. Warren said this with a straight face (pun intended). The interviewer worked hard to control her facial expressions, but a smirk came through.

Rev. Warren believes that being attracted to people of the same sex is an impulse that is a kin to addiction, and a symptom of a weak moral character. It’s not surprising that he echoes the failed “just say no” slogans as a response to being gay and lesbian. So, this is how gayness can be cured; just say no. Oh, by the way, that didn’t work for drug use and take a look at the stats for abstinence.

I’m not surprised that Saddleback Church does not welcome “homosexuals” who have friendships, children, families, and partners that accept them for who they are. In other words, “homosexuals” who take their own right to self-determination seriously, who see discrimination for being gay or lesbian as a violation of human rights, and who see no reason to be heterosexual are not welcome to Rev. Warren’s church.

I’m not surprised that Rev. Warren is not “inclusive.”

Nope. None of that surprises me. Hey, I ain’t 50 for nothing.

I’m not even surprised that gay men and lesbians are still the only group of humans in the United States that can be thrown under the bus for political “pragmatism” and that the only ones who care are gay men and lesbians and some progressive allies.

I wish I could say that I am surprised by President-Elect Barack Obama’s choice of this pastor to speak at this historic inauguration; to give the inaugural invocation. But I remember what candidate Obama clearly stated: Marriage is between a man and a woman. Not that I want to get married, but the fact that this fundamental right that is available to everyone except gay men and lesbians is one which President Obama will continue to deny is not that far away from the exclusionary impulses of Rev. Warren.

If you substitute “gay men and lesbians” or “homosexuals,” as these have been used by Rev. Warren and President-Elect Obama, with any other group in society today, how would what they are saying sound to you? Why is it that gay men and lesbians can still be thrown under the bus and we are expected to accept this as a form of being included?

Um, nice of you to include me, darling, but could you let me out from under this tire, I'd like to get on the bus.


Pragmatic inclusion? Let’s define that, shall we?

Here is an interesting perspective from Frank Rich of the New York Times:

"When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.

It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words."

For the complete Op-Ed by Frank Rich titled, "You're Likable Enough, Gay People," published 26 December, click here.

Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: December 17, 2008

The book is at least three years away from publication, but it is already stirring bitter debates over a new set of possible psychiatric disorders.

Is compulsive shopping a mental problem? Do children who continually recoil from sights and sounds suffer from sensory problems — or just need extra attention? Should a fetish be considered a mental disorder, as many now are?

Panels of psychiatrists are hashing out just such questions, and their answers — to be published in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — will have consequences for insurance reimbursement, research and individuals’ psychological identity for years to come.

The process has become such a contentious social and scientific exercise that for the first time the book’s publisher, the American Psychiatric Association, has required its contributors to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

The debate is particularly intense because the manual is both a medical guidebook and a cultural institution. It helps doctors make a diagnosis and provides insurance companies with diagnostic codes without which the insurers will not reimburse patients’ claims for treatment.

The manual — known by its initials and edition number, DSM-V — often organizes symptoms under an evocative name. Labels like obsessive-compulsive disorder have connotations in the wider culture and for an individual’s self-perception.

...


The debate over gender identity, characterized in the manual as “strong and persistent cross-gender identification,” is already burning hot among transgender people. Soon after the psychiatric association named the group of researchers working on sexual and gender identity, advocates circulated online petitions objecting to two members whose work they considered demeaning.

Transgender people are themselves divided about their place in the manual. Some transgender men and women want nothing to do with psychiatry and demand that the diagnosis be dropped. Others prefer that it remain, in some form, because a doctor’s written diagnosis is needed to obtain insurance coverage for treatment or surgery.

“The language needs to be reformed, at a minimum,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equity. “Right now, the manual implies that you cannot be a happy transgender person, that you have to be a social wreck.”

Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychoanalyst and member of the sexual disorders work group, said that, in some ways, the gender identity debate echoed efforts to remove homosexuality from the manual in the 1970s.

After protests by gay activists provoked a scientific review, the “homosexuality” diagnosis was dropped in 1973. It was replaced by “sexual orientation disturbance” and then “ego-dystonic homosexuality” before being dropped in 1987.

“You had, in my opinion, what was a social issue, not a medical one; and, in some sense, psychiatry evolved through interaction with the wider culture,” Dr. Drescher said.

Click for complete article.