Oscar Pistorius -- Psychiatric Evaluation

So they are sending Oscar Pistorius to a mental hospital for a month for a psychiatric evaluation. I really, really want to read that report (even though I doubt that it will have any bearing on the outcome of the trial). Even his own psychiatric witness testified that she doesn't think that he was insane at the time of the crime. It might have some mitigating effect on his sentencing, however.

I've got a big problem with the "generalized anxiety disorder" diagnosis that his shrink is trying to say applies to him. Most importantly, GAD has no known association with violence risk. As a matter of fact, it might be a protective factor against violence.

What she is describing is Paranoid Personality Disorder ("mistrustful and guarded person"). There is a genetic component to that condition (mother slept with gun under pillow). And it is certainly associated with violence. Might his traumatic amputations have contributed to the development of PPD? Sure. Does it mean that he was an automaton who is not responsible for his actions on the night he shot his girlfriend? C'mon.


ABC News

Oscar Pistorius' own psychiatric witness told a court today that the paraylmpic sprinter could be a danger to society if armed with a gun because of a life-long battle with a mental disorder that stemmed from having his legs amputated while he was an infant.

The testimony of Dr. Merryl Vorster prompted prosecutor Gerrie Nel to indicate that he will ask that Pistorius undergo psychiatric evaluation. If the requested is approved, Pistorius would have to spend a month in a hospital being evaluated.

 

Pistorius' murder trial appeared to enter the final week of testimony today. He is charged with killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp before dawn on Valentine's Day 2013. Pistorius, 27, claims he mistook his lover for a burglar. He could face at least 25 years in prison if convicted.

 

Vorster told the court that Pistorius suffers from generalized anxiety disorder brought on by difficulties handling the amputation of his lower legs, his mother’s death and his growing fame.

 

Pistorius’ legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old. Vorster highlighted the impact of Pistorius’ double amputation at the “pre-language” stage of his development, saying without the ability to understand language, the boy would have experienced the amputation of his lower legs as a "traumatic assault.”

 

Vorster said Pistorius "appears to be a mistrustful and guarded person," a tendency that went back to his mother who slept with a gun under her pillow. She said that the star sprinter displayed "escalating levels of anxiety" as he got older.

 

The psychiatrist said under cross examination that Pistorius knew right from wrong, but his generalized anxiety disorder could have influenced his actions the night he shot Steenkamp because of his constant state of fear.

 

Vorster testified that Pistorius' physical vulnerability also meant that his first impulse when it comes to a fight or flight situation would almost always be to fight since it was physically difficult for him to flee. Pistorius was on his stumps when he shot Steenkamp.

 

The prosecutor asked Vorster if a person who is suffering from a general anxiety disorder would be a danger to society if he had access to a gun, and Vorster replied, "Yes." [Ed., I strongly disagree with that assessment.]

 

Vorster described Pistorius as a person acutely affected by losses during his life.

 

Despite the surgeries to amputate his legs, Pistorius was brought up to believe he was normal, giving him little opportunity to find peace with his situation, Vorster said.

 

“Concealing his disability made him less able to access the emotional support he needed,” Vorster said.

 

His mother died when he was 15 years old, a crushing loss for the teen, Vorster said. He later became estranged from his father at age 21.

 

The psychiatrist testified that Pistorius’ anxiety increased as his fame rose and that he grew increasingly more concerned about crime. At the time of the shooting, she said, his physical vulnerability and his anxiety disorder would have converged.

 

She also told the trial court that since shooting Reeva Steenkamp, Pistorius suffered from depression and that she believed his vomiting in the courtroom was a genuine sign of emotional distress.

 

 

 

World's best final exam question

NAS

"...the Internet has made the teaching of literature a sad and disheartening mess.

Search engines and electronic information storage have made us all empty and stupid. Memory is externalized and disembodied in the cloud; imagining is externalized in film, TV, and Google images. As a result, many students find reading uncomfortable because they have been fed images all their lives and can no longer “make pictures” in their heads. Diverted by entertainment, gaming, and social media, students no longer develop the religious, historical, or cultural knowledge essential for literary study. The “laterally associative” nature of electronic linking replaces the “vertically cumulative” richness and linearity of print. When that happens, everything that depends on the linear disappears: grammar, logic, history, narrative, and morality. Nor do students develop the necessary vocabulary from using email, Twitter, blog posts, and comment threads. These losses make literary comprehension and appreciation, much less literary interpretation, impossible. Mark Edmundson relates a story “about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question at the end of his literature course.  

Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike?   

Part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you?” 

The format and content of the Internet creates an environment seemingly designed to cause students to fail as readers, to dislike books and, consequently, to suffer from books’ demands."

What is most sad about all this is that the functionally illiterate college graduates of today don't even realize that they are illiterate. They actually think that they "read" the books assigned (because they googled a synopsis of it, or watched a movie version, or kinda listened to a few minutes of a class lecture on it). Ask any college student, "When is the last time you sat down, alone in a room, with no phone, or earbuds, or music, or other distractions, and read a difficult, worthwhile book -- what some professor around here might call "a classic" -- without interruption, for at least an hour?"

In my experience, unless the student is religious and the book is the Bible, the typical response to that question is incredulity.

The thing today's students have got to realize is illustrated in the (hopefully genuine) final exam question above: The problem isn't that the books are boring or the authors irrelevant -- it's that you don't have the cognitive abilities necessary to read and understand challenging material. You can't pay attention to anything for more than seven minutes. You have an arid vocabulary and are largely ignorant of the cultural knowledge necessary to read great works. You don't have the capacity to tell something of value from crap. Thinking is painful to you, so you avoid it all costs.

Want a gut-check? Go check out J.S. Mill's On Liberty (1869) from the library, or better yet buy a copy on Amazon. Here's an on-line version you can peruse until your copy arrives. Print out a few pages, sit down, and read it for 15 minutes straight. Difficult? For most college students, it's impossible, like a young adult version of the marshmallow test. If you were able to read it for a whole quarter hour, how do you think you would do on an oral exam of the content? Remember, Mr. Mill is neither stupid nor boring -- and if you think he is, then You Are.

"Why Science Does Not Disprove God" (Book Review)

A useful reminder that there isn't any evidence for "multiverses," minds are nowhere near ready for "uploading," and that no biologist has ever been able to create life from non-life.


WSJ

In the 1850s, Darwin's theory of evolution removed the need for a god to have designed all living things. Then a century of brilliant scientists cracked the mysteries of physics, cured feared diseases and explained inheritance through DNA. Science was on a roll and, to atheists, must have seemed to be on the verge of finishing off religious belief. By the 1950s, life, it was said, was about to be made in a test tube, artificial intelligence in computers was just around the corner, and the mind would be fully accounted for by behaviorist psychology and brain chemistry. It must have seemed that the Sea of Faith was enduring, as Matthew Arnold feared, its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

Then the going got tough for the atheists. While the amount of successful science done increased enormously, the spectacular breakthroughs of the previous century dried up. That was especially so in the areas that were supposed to make the world uninhabitable for religious belief or for any non-materialist view of humanity. The process of making life from nonlife, which was believed to have happened by chance near the beginning of the earth's history, could not be replicated in the laboratory even in the most favorable conditions. Artificial intelligence has remained rudimentary; even its signature success— victory over the world chess champion in 1997—was mostly a demonstration of the uniqueness of human intelligence. The computer Deep Blue played chess by searching hundreds of millions of moves a second, assisted by rules cloned from human experts. It could not think about the game like a human. The programmers' inability to make computers imitate understanding, that most human of mental activities, exploded our naïve and simplistic views of the mind.

To make matters worse, physics unexpectedly created trouble. (Physics? Et tu, Brute?) Physics is the science of matter itself, the foundational science for all the other natural sciences. In the 1960s and 1970s, it gradually became clear that the universe was very "fine-tuned" for the existence of life. If the basic physical constants, like the strength of gravity, had been very slightly different, the universe would be unable to support life. The fine-tuning is very, very fine: for the strength of gravity, perhaps one part in 10 to the power of 40. In the physicist Freeman Dyson's words, "it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."

For those who prefer not to have a Divine Engineer tuning the dials, the alternatives are unpalatable. The most natural are multiverse theories, according to which all possible universes exist simultaneously and we simply find ourselves in the one that makes our existence possible. This is not out of the question, but there is no actual evidence for it. It is just an "atheism of the gaps," calling imaginary entities from the vasty deep to plug a theoretical hole. The postulation probably involves gods, too—maybe not the omnipotent creator of the Abrahamic religions, but surely some unlikely combination of quantum fluctuations could produce Zeus and his colorful activities? Zeus is just a very big superman (physically, of course, not morally) up on Olympus and thus something that physics could manage to account for. The other possibility is to hope that there is some unknown mathematical reason why the constants are locked in as they are—again, a possibility, but one for which there is currently no other evidence.

...

The book will be quite satisfactory as a generally reliable introduction for readers who know nothing about the subject. But those who are prepared to try something more nuanced would be wise to consider three recent books by serious philosophers: "There Is a God" by the former noted atheist Antony Flew; Ronald Dworkin's "Religion Without God"; and Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos." They reach similar conclusions to Mr. Aczel's, but the authors are all top-flight (yet generally accessible) philosophers. None of their arguments make revealed religion any more likely. But the days of triumphalist scientism are over.

 

 

 

 

The Unquiet Grave -- Anonymous

 

 

“The wind doth blow today, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true-love,

In cold grave she was lain.

“I’ll do as much for my true-love

As any young man may;

I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave

For a twelvemonth and a day.”

The twelvemonth and a day being up,

The dead began to speak:

“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,

And will not let me sleep?”

“’T is I, my love, sits on your grave,

And will not let you sleep;

For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,

And that is all I seek.”

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

But my breath smells earthy strong;

If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

Your time will not be long.

“’T'is down in yonder garden green,

Love, where we used to walk,

The finest flower that e’re was seen

Is withered to a stalk.

“The stalk is withered dry, my love,

So will our hearts decay;

So make yourself content, my love,

Till God calls you away.”

 

 

 

 

Call Me Irresponsible -- Dinah Washington

Call me irresponsible
Call me unreliable
Go on and throw in,
Undependable too

Well, do my foolish alibies
Bore you
Well I'm not clever
Baby I just adore you

Go on and call me unpredictable
Tell me I'm inpractical
Rainbows I'm inclined to pursue

Ooh go on and call me irresponsible
Yes I'm unreliable
but it's undeniably, it's undeniably true
I'm irresponsibly mad about you

I Stood Upon a High Place -- Stephen Crane

I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping, and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, "Comrade! Brother!"

The World Is Too Much With Us -- William Wordsworth (1807)

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.