Posts by Russell Brown
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But then I've got a lot out of the little behaviourism I've managed to understand too! :-)
I'd say "a little behaviourism is a dangerous thing", but I'm not sure if I'd know what I meant ...
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I am closely related to a what might be termed a 'severely'autistic person. This person is 30 years old now. I remember, when he was 11 or 12, the thoughts being expressed that there may be a high degree of violence from this person when puberty came on. It never happened fortunately.
A lot of that can stem from stress and anxiety about the world not making sense. It's not just fretting and can periodically extend to meltdowns that are akin to a computer crashing. I guess the thing to remember is that it's worse for the person it's happening to than it is for anyone else. Even some of the most successful adult ASD people, like Temple Grandin and Dave Spicer, rely on low-dose anti-depressants to curb the anxiety. For others, it's not an issue.
There's so many degrees of asperger and autism. On the one hand it's almost indetectable, but supplies enough differences to "normal" people who thrive on bullying such people they can't explain.
I'm so glad that bullying hasn't been much of an issue for our kids ...
I don't think there are any statistics to prove that violence emanates more from autistic people than others.
No - and it would be the reverse in many cases. But, regrettably, they tend to be over-represented in prison statistics, as you might expect for people who can't decode the world they're in.
The key is to treat them with the dignity any person deserves. I tappears this guy at VT was treated appallingly by many over the years. A very sad episode all around.
As I said in the speech I gave at the Hustle for Russell (which I might actually edit and post), one very practical gift of having two kids who are different in this way is that it teaches you a lot about how we're all different.
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i could never condone Cho's actions but the need to pathologize him rather than question whether he is partly a product of his world is interesting.
The comments posted to some of the YouTube instances of his video (via NBC) were interesting, if a little alarming. There are tortured kids out there seeing him as a hero - which may have been what he was after all along.
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I'd be very cautious about any diagnosis of autism with Cho Seung Hui. He appears to me to have been narcissistic with a huge sense of entitlement and (therefore) agrievement. Those aren't as far as I know characteristics of autism.
Narcissism and autism are sort of similar, but narcissists see everyone as an extension of themselves and are aware of social dynamics (especially of hierachy - these are all males who feel hard done by and/or rejected by social groups) whereas autistics lack an understanding of the social evironment.
The childhood autism diagnosis was stated as a fact by the aunt, and it does actually fit the characteristics I cited. Even the stalking could have been a failure to read social cues. So I'm fairly convinced that it was part of the mix, just not the whole picture. Martin Bryant had sundry other personality disorders going on too.
It does underline the importance of addressing autism early in life, which it appears was not what happened in Cho's family. Killing people is no more a characteristic of being autistic than it is of being Korean, but it's likely both had a role in his disastrous alienation from the society he lived in.
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This is Russell Brown's interview with Steven Price of the Coalition for Open Government on Public Address Radio on Saturday, April 21.
You can find out more about the Coalition for Open Government and discuss its proposals for electoral funding reform at the COG website.
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The following is the text of 180 Seconds with Craig Ranapia from Saturday April 21. You can read more of Craig's commentary on his recently-revived blog.
The murder of thirty three students and faculty members at Virginia Tech this week inevitably raised this question: Could it have been avoided?
Unfortunately, a headline in the usually sober Washington Post implied entirely the wrong answer:
**STUDENT WROTE ABOUT DEATH AND SPOKE IN WHISPERS, BUT NO ONE IMAGINED WHAT CHO SEUNG-HUI WOULD DO**
Why would anyone? Twenty-twenty hindsight is a perfectly human — and perfectly useless — response to adversity.
No educator should imagine that reserve, shyness or good old-fashioned emo sulking is a pathological trait.
And how much should you read into Cho’s much-reported morbidly violent creative writing exercises? Well, let’s consider what another English major once cooked up in another idyllic college town: Orono, home of the University of Maine.
In 1967, this freshman wrote a novel with an all-too topical premise: A high school student is reluctantly re-admitted after attacking a teacher with a wrench. When a counselling session goes horribly wrong, he sets fire to his locker, shoots two teachers, and holds his classmates hostage. Over a long, hot day he forces them to ‘share’ at gunpoint while rambling at length about his uncontrollable ‘rage’.
The ravings of a freaking psycho who’s rotting in a locked ward as we speak? Not quite — welcome to the first novel of Stephen Edwin King, B.A. (Class of ’71), successful purveyor of the twisted and disturbing for over thirty years.
King allowed Rage to go out of print in the United States following the Columbine shooting, but its not hard to find if you’re so inclined.
While King has often been accused of doing decadent and depraved things to the Western Civilization, he hasn’t killed anyone.
What should have run every bell in town, if recent media reports are accurate, is that Cho was stalking at least two women – and charges weren’t pressed. But bad snuff fiction in a creative writing class? I’m not so sure it should have attracted any more attention than a very bad grade.
My university days — for better and worse — were full of the mad, bad and dangerous to know. As well as nuts, sluts, freaks, geeks and drama queens of all genders and sexual orientations.
Most of us just grew up; and none of the remainder became mass murderers no matter how ‘weird’ and ‘dark’ they got.
Stalkers have no place on a university campus, or anywhere else. I just hope one tragedy doesn’t result in the sad, lonely, socially inept and depressed being forced into compulsory counselling because they’re bad writers or don’t fit some surreal standard of ‘emotional correctness’.
Growing up is hard enough.
SPECIAL FEATURESBut before I get too down on Stephen King, I’d recommend reading his keynote address to the 1999 Vermont Library Conference on ” something very serious indeed: adolescent violence in American schools”, how it connects with his own work among much else.
A three minute radio slot doesn’t give you any time to consider the question: But does profiling actually work? One place to start is the discussions on the subject here, and another thoughtful if depressing roundtable on how “safe” you can realistically keep a campus the size of a small town. They were originally broadcast last week on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, which screens at 10pm, Tuesday – Saturday, Triangle TV in Wellington or Auckland.)
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I've quite dramatically drifted away from all that over the years; I'm now a heartless atheist and materialist, and think that Jung is pretty silly. I went back to try and read it again a few years ago and ended up being sullenly disappointed. It all seems so trite and mannered, with such overtones of the Übermensch, that I can't even imagine what it must have been like to be that 16 year old who loved it so dearly. But yes, at the time I was reading it, I was in a dialogue with an author who understood where I was coming from like no other.
It probably didn't help that you'd fallen out of touch with the elliptical, sometimes difficult, prose style too.
I read a lot of Jung for a while (although even at the time I was picking and choosing the parts I bought into) and I can't imagine picking it up again either. But the grounding in the ideas of myth and archetype hasn't gone to waste. It's still a help in modelling the world.
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or calling liberals "communists". my real question is how come these people believe this dave gaubatz guy, but refused to believe another former weapons inspector called scott ritter?
They didn't so much refuse to believe Ritter as try and burn him to the ground. Sean Hannity actually accused him of being in the pay of the Iraqi government, during an interview.
Funny thing is, Ritter had far, far more authority than Gaubatz, who basically spent a few months talking to the locals in 2003.
Ritter was in Iraq as a weapons inspector for seven years, and before that had been a senior military analyst for the Marine Corps and then, in Desert Storm, for Gen. Schwarzkopf.
He was a Republican and even a Fox News commentator. But then he spoke out of turn and the Bush cultists descended on him.
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*sigh* Yeah, whatever gets you through the night and doesn't require AA batteries.
Zzzing! And it's only Monday!
Personally, I'd rather leave the casual use of that kind of language to people who have some first hand experience of the real deal. Otherwise, it's all too much like being trapped in an episode of The Young Ones.
Yeah, although in cases like these it's nice to have a word to distinguish certain people from actual conservatives (and I'm so over "neocon", I already hate myself for using it this morning). I do like "winger".
Anyway, found this interview with Melanie Phillips from The Guardian last year. She seems so stressed-out and paranoid I sort of feel sorry for her.
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Nice to see Mr Wishart's onto it.
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