ShrinkWrapped

The Clock is Ticking

The Islamic rage over the Danish newspaper's publishing of 12 cartoons of Muhammad deemed offensive to Islam has been nurtured and fanned into flames by the clever exploitation of state run media in a number of Arab countries.  Michelle Malkin has a round-up  and images of the cartoons.  The BBC reports that Danes face growing Muslim storm:

Denmark has advised citizens against travel to Saudi Arabia, amid growing anger across the Muslim world at Danish depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

A newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet, one of which pictured a bomb hidden in his turban, apologised on Monday for offending Muslims.

Islam bans any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad or Allah.

The backlash has included a boycott of Danish goods, diplomatic sanctions, and Islamic militant threats.

Zombietime helpfully points out that this well traveled meme, that "Islam bans any depiction of the Prophet Muhammed", is disinformation.

The rage of Islam is intimately connected to the psychology of the Islamic world.  Dr. Sanity some months ago wrote about SHAME, THE ARAB PSYCHE, AND ISLAM.  Her post is invaluable reading for understanding the world of the Islamists:

As stated earlier in this essay, one of the ways that those who fear shame protect their fragile self is to subjugate those who he perceives as weaker. By doing so, he can rationalize that he is superior to the subjugated individual. In fact, this is the only way he can maximize his honor. In Arab/Islamic culture, women are one of the primary instruments of achieving honor. Hence the bizarre and distorted attitude that the culture has toward women and the exaggerated means by which "honor" must be maintained. So strong is the cultural pressure, even women buy into the delusion (as eloquently demonstrated by Dymphna in this post)

The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time Revisited

It has been a particularly interesting and enlightening experience reading the comments to my post The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time.  Stephanie Guttman made some comments that suggested to me that I had done a poor job of communicating some of my basic points, ie that I think that liberals believes that people are basically good (the "noble savages" concept) and there is little need for them to control their impulses, while conservatives believe society works best when people are acculturated in ways which promote their ability to control the expression of their instincts. 

Another, more Psychodynamic formulation would be that Liberals believe in unleashing the Id and mitigating the effects of the Superego, while Conservatives believe in supporting the Superego in its attempts to rein in the id.  For just one example, a Liberal approach to the spread of AIDS by homosexual men would involve offering condoms while a conservative approach might be to close down gay bath houses where promiscuous sex takes place.  (Please do not start an argument as to which approach works better; we almost certainly need a mix of approaches and adequate research to determine which works better.)

Gary Farber, who posts at Amygdala, was kind enough to offer a comment from the point of view of a self-described Liberal, in which he, not unexpectedly, took issue with many of my comments. 

The Council Has Spoken!

This weeks winners in the Council category were an outstanding piece by Done with Mirrors, Chaos or Community, which asked the poignant question:

Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?

It is a long, but highly rewarding, post.  In second place was a reminiscence by Dr. Sanity, who at a moment of great pain, unexpectedly received some welcome and powerful solace from a man whose greatness many of us only have recognized in retrospect.  RONALD REAGAN - A Personal Recollection is a deeply moving piece.

Among the non-Council posts, Armed Liberal at Winds of Change, counsels restraint in Just A Second – It’s Not That Dark Yet (And We Have A Really Big Flashlight) and offers reasons to continue our reliance on diplomacy in dealing with Iran.  As he puts it:

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ while reaching for a stick.”

Tied for second place, among a plethora of excellent posts, was Maobi's Malaysia and the pact of Omar, an unflinching look at Sharia law in practice, and a typically excellent post by Wretchard at the Belmont Club on The Coming of the Bomb in which he includes a quote by H.G. Wells and comments:

H.G. Wells described how complacent men could be in the presence of unseen but growing danger.

As always, all the winners and nominees are available at the Watcher of Weasels and all warrant a leisurely Sunday perusal.

Bear Baiting Revisited: Venezuala and Iran

Recently I described part of a treatment with a 5 year old boy in which we were able to understand his provocations of me as "bear baiting."  All children in therapy will test the limits of tolerance; there are three prime rules in my office:  No behavior which can hurt the child, hurt me,or damage the office, is allowed:

In one particular case, a 5 year old boy was unable or unwilling to play by the rules.  He insisted on trying to break things in the office, put himself into precarious positions and finally, when I would stop his dangerous or destructive activity, would directly attack me.  After some time (a rather stressful and difficult time, I might add) we arrived at a good working relationship; from time to time however, he would regress and tease me with threats to harm himself or break things.  Eventually, when this was better under control, we were able to use some humor to leaven his anger; at times when he wanted to provoke me, he would feint toward disallowed behavior and one or the other of us would point out that he was engaging in "bear baiting."  This was an activity made popular in Russia ~100 years ago.  A circus or traveling bazaar would come to town and they would often have a trained bear, staked to a post with a stout chain.  The village boys would test their mettle by seeing how close they could get to the bear to tease him without getting injured.  Hence, the name "bear baiting."  My young patient would see just how close he could get to the limits of my chain (my patience) before provoking a frightening reaction, ie, a physical intervention from me to protect him, me, or the office.

Often, children do such "bear baiting" in order to get attention; bad attention is almost always preferable to being ignored.  Apparently, not enough attention is being paid to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.  He is desperate to be seen as the great rebel following in the footsteps of his hero, Fidel Castro:

Another Paradox of Liberalism: Free Speech at Risk

Most people do not like to be criticized.  It hurts our feelings when it is accurate and it infuriates us when it is unfair.  Most authority figures do not like to be challenged.  If the challenger is someone powerful, it is threatening; if the challenger is someone who is powerless, it is irritating.  This is human nature, not likely to change any time soon.  Only someone who has a very secure sense of self worth, with good and realistic self-esteem, can hear criticism and reflect on the content of the criticism rather than reacting to the emotional upset it evokes. 

When we bring these tendencies into the political arena, where people often feel passionately about their positions, the tendency to hear disagreement as criticism and the tendency to react to criticism, real and imagined, with anger and resentment, is exponentially increased.  Throughout history the first move of most tyrants, as soon as they consolidated their power, was to institute censorship of the press.  While such a direct assault on our free speech rights is unlikely here, the greater danger exists of an incremental erosion of free speech rights under the guise of liberal good intentions.

The most obvious area of concern remains the McCain-Feingold abomination which attempted to lessen the influence of big money on our political discourse.  In a post from March of last year, Intellectualization, Free Speech, & Unintended Consequences: Part III, I wrote about McCain-Feingold's unintended consequences:

The Value of Clarity

Hamas has apparently won a significant victory in the Palestinian voting and will be forming the next government.  This has been almost universally depicted as a disaster for the "peace process" and for the Middle East. 

It is understandable that the election of Hamas will likely have an untoward effect on the current "Peace Process" in the short term; however, this betrays a misunderstanding of what a "Peace Process" actually is and how it can ever come to a successful conclusion. 

Yesterday, in The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time, I referred to an article by Angelo M. Cordevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, called "The Logic of the Peace Process" in which he explored the difficulty the United States faced bringing about a peaceful solution to the Sunni vs Shia/Kurd civil war in Iraq.  Cordevilla made the point that it is impossible to end a war until one side has been convinced it has lost.

The Palestinian conflict with Israel is a part, the optimists would suggest just a remnant, of a larger war of Islam against Israel, which started in 1948 before the ink was dry on the paper proclaiming the establishment of the state of Israel.  The war is itself merely part of an even larger, longer term war of fundamentalist Islam against the kaffir.  Whether you date this war from 9/11/2001, October 3, 1993, the 1979 hostage crisis with Iran, 1683 or 630, it is clear the conflict has been going on for quite some time.   

The Paradox of Liberalism in War Time

Liberals believe that a system works best when it appeals to the better qualities of human nature while Conservatives believe that society works best when the worst tendencies in human beings are constrained. As a result, Liberals tend to see themselves as more caring and compassionate than Conservatives, who they often see as cruel and unfeeling. This has been captured by the aphorism that Liberals think Conservatives are "evil" while Conservatives think Liberals are wrong.  I admire the liberal impulse to seek,, and expect, the best in everybody, and most of the time, my trust is rewarded. The problem for Liberalism is that by living as if their philosophy was not only better, but was true, we have effectively made international relations much more risky and made international disaster much more likely.

Two weeks ago Scott Johnson at Powerline wrote about an article in the current Claremont Review of Books that sought to understand why Israel has been losing the war with the Palestinians while having an overwhelming military advantage.  Joseph Tartakovsky's review of Stephanie Gutmann’s The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy is Pictures worth a thousand lives.  He suggests that there are three main reasons the Israelis have lost the media war:

Liberalism, Dependency, and Adulthood

The philosophy of liberalism, which attempted to lift up the down trodden by offering them "entitlements" as a means to bring the poor out of poverty, has permeated political thinking for the last 50-70 years.  It did some things exceptionally well, but its limitations have become increasingly obvious.  People have noticed that entitlements given without responsibilities and duties expected from the receivers of largess lead to a slow slippage in the sense of responsibility; eventually that slippage passes a threshold to become an avalanche.  Some societies are beginning the difficult process of redressing the imbalance.  The United States is further along in this than many other nations, but there is hope that our neighbors to the north are ready to join us as responsible members of the Global Community.  This redress is reverberating at all levels of our social structure. 

First, why does the liberal impulse, as admirable as it is, necessarily lead to the kinds of societal distress we see all around us?

A child enters the world completely dependent upon its parents for survival.  During its first few years of life, every milestone is treated by its loving parents as a delightful achievement, to be praised and applauded.  Somewhere between 2 and 3, for most children, the idyllic paradise of entitlements without responsibility comes to an end.  Now the font of all nurturance begins to exact a price.  The child, in order to stay in its parent's loving embrace, must learn to inhibit its own free expression of instinctual life; in other words, it is time for toilet training.  Here, for the first time, a contingency is introduced.

The Difference Between Truth, "Truth" and Lies

One of the more vexing problems for the Psychoanalyst is the determination of the historical reality of our patient's memories.  Some try to finesse the problem by suggesting that Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists are only interested in psychic reality and that not only is it impossible to know if an event happened the way our patient remembers, but it ultimately doesn't matter.  I believe that it is not only important but crucial to reconstruct as good a congruence as possible between historical fact and memory, even while I recognize this is not always possible.  It is worthwhile exploring why the distinction matters (if it does) and how this question resonates through our culture. 

The crux of the problem for an individual patient is that when a "memory" appears in their treatment which has no independent corroboration, its accuracy as a reflection of an historical event is uncertain.  If the event is incorrectly accepted as genuine in such a case, it risks turning into a new (and very stubborn) type of resistance that can then hide (screen) other memories behind it.   As an example, many people have become falsely convinced (often through the ministrations of well meaning but poorly trained and/or agenda-driven therapists) that they have been abused as a child.  When a memory like this occurs, if the memory is confirmed, it leads to a re-evaluation of all past relationships in light of the new information; if the memory cannot be confirmed, the uncertainty must be dealt with (a much more difficult therapeutic task); if the memory is refuted, the patient then has the job of understanding why they would unconsciously create such a memory and how it fits into their current difficulties.  For the patient who arrives at new memories of abuse (which in my experience is actually pretty rare) and accepts it uncritically, the memory/fantasy prevents them from this deeper understanding which would allow them to make a more appropriate adjustment to reality and their role in shaping their reality.

Yesterday John Leo weighed in on the significance of the recent revelations that James Frey's recent memoir of redemption, "A Million Little Pieces", more closely resembled a work of pure fiction than an attempt at an historical reconstruction. [Hat tip: larwyn]  It wasn't just that Frey fooled himself into believing things that weren't true, but that he knowingly lied and created events to make his story more dramatic and commercially successful.  Leo commented on Oprah's reaction to the news that Frey is a fraud:

When Frey appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live," Oprah made things worse by phoning in to say, "The underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me." Apparently this meant that she was so moved by the book that she doesn't care that it contains many untruths. Resonance makes lying defensible.

He continued with his concerns about how this is expressed in other settings:

A Teachable Moment: The Danger of Uncertainty

Early in my Residency in Psychiatry, at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, I was faced with a difficult situation which ultimately proved to be extremely educational.  AT the time, the Psychiatric emergency room, after 4 PM and through the night, was staffed by PGY-2's (second year Residents in Psychiatry.)  We spent our first month on -call with PGY-3's who supplied supervision on-site.  After the first month, we were on our own, with the PGY-3's available for phone consultation and to be called in when necessary.  Over the course of the first month of the residency year, July, we would each spend ~3 or 4 on-call nights with our more senior colleagues.  The Bellevue Psychiatric ER at the time was a busy, often overly interesting, place. 

On the night in question I was doing my second ever solo coverage of the ER.  Parenthetically, we had some training in how to handle paranoid patients; the idea was to recognize how frightened they were and do nothing to increase their fear, which could inadvertently trigger violence.  The Attending Psychiatrist had taught us that we should always allow our patients to sit near the door so they wouldn't feel trapped and threatened.  I should also point out that there were essentially two means by which patients arrived in the ER and they presented (usually) distinctly different problems.  Perhaps a third to a half of the patients were there because they had been acting in a bizarre fashion and were brought in by the police.  In those cases, the patients were routinely restrained, in wheelchairs or on stretchers, with the police accompanying them in the ER until a Psychiatric evaluation and disposition could be made.  It was relatively easy to do a quick ER evaluation, medicate when necessary and send the police on their way.  The other type of patient was more complicated but generally less urgent.  These people came in by themselves and typically, unless they were overtly agitated, would sit quietly until  called for an interview.

On the night in question, I entered the ER to see a very large, but very calm and pleasant seeming man sitting quietly and reading a magazine.  He was the first patient for me to see.  There was nothing particularly threatening about him, he had no psychiatric history according to the triage nurse, and he was complaining of depression.