 | ― I know it’s hard, Miles, but try to think of this experience as a miracle of science.
― A miracle of science is going to the hospital for a minor operation, I come out the next day, my rent isn’t months overdue. That’s a miracle of science. This is what I call a cosmic screwing. And then where am I anyhow? What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
― You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly two hundred years.
― BUT THEY ALL ATE ORGANIC RICE! |
✖ Via Sleeper, Woody Allen, 1973 Full script available over at Script-O-Rama. |
↳Shareskandalon
Feb 25 link notes
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 | Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil. |
✖ Via National Review Online: “Don’t Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders” by David French, Feb. 18, 2010 David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:
“Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.”
On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.)
On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument.
More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009).
Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge. |
↳Shareskandalon
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