Posts by Kracklite
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Bingo! I can see this whole nasty business has touched a nerve with you
Well, I can say it's very complicated, with some deeply mixed loyalties at a personal level. Beyond that, I'll let discretion prevail.
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I'm curious: could anybody name a single case in which the strategy of blaming the media has actually paid off?
As a strategy, no, but as a reflex... well in that case, payoffs aren't consciously considered.
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So often it seems one would do better to simply walk away and spare yourself the agony.
That, Kerry, is the thing I am bothered by.
It worries me too, considering the statistics of rape and abuse - that which occurs versus that which is reported... and the police's willingness to take complaints seriously.
We place too much faith in the absolutes of the law - and I do not mean that in a cynical way, rather I mean that ultimately it is culture that matters, and therefore the 'It's not OK' campaign is definitely vital to raise awareness and to - however incrementally - change the climate of attitudes.
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As a corollary or elaboration, abusers try to make their victims think that they have at some level brought it upon themselves and that they are if not guilty, helpless and fated in some way to endure what they receive, disconnected from other, luckier, people. People who wonder why abused persons do not simply leave their abusers do not understand the insidious dynamics of an abusive relationship - the very strategy and nature of abuse is to demolish any resistance or path of escape so that the abuse can continue (and escalate) with full 'justification'.
Sacha, I do not by any means accuse you of any naivete, by the way. I'm talking to the gallery, as it were.
To get on my soapbox, if you see that a woman's refuge is collecting, give. Even if someone can 'get away with it', then the thing that must matter, the one positive thing that can come out of this, is the certainty that there always is a place to go, somewhere safe.
Most reasonable people will believe in the power of redemption if they think it is founded on a genuine belief or desire to make good on past mistakes.
I'm reminded of a student of mine, with convictions for GBH and Heroin offences, who said that A Clockwork Orange had been his youth but who had, by the time I met him, changed quite sincerely and had become (and is) someone I quite like and admire. Here's hoping, but Veitch, I'm afraid, does not strike me as someone that intelligent.
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If that's true, it's disgusting - but it is nothing more than speculation right now
Maybe, but it was used by the defence, with Veitch's approval, apparently to his benefit. Admittedly, I do not know what the judge thought of it and I'm likely relying overmuch on my own experience in which some people who are emotional narcissists/sadists try to inflict as much pain as they can on other people (often those they have selected precisely because they are vulnerable) by any means at hand so as to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. It is entirely my own observation, but Veitch is a thug who cannot accept that he is responsible for anything and the moment he is faced with responsibility, overdramatises his own plight. It's a trick I've seen again and again at greater and lesser magnitude.
It is the pattern that I see that I despise. Abuse is so often compounded beyond the physical events and their direct consequences by the psychological self-justification that follows, and no court can deal with that.
Anyway, as I've implied, I'm not a judge nor on any jury, I'm not presented with the evidence and I'm not bound by their responsibilities and if I were, I would be far more temperate, I hope [grinding teeth again].
If you like, if you wish to furnish me with an escape clause, pretend that I'm dealing with the category of abuse, rather than Veitch himself.
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I think the judge did a judgy job to the best of her ability with all information to hand.That is what Law seems (to me)to be.Justice on t'other hand.......
I do agree, alas. The legals system that must be supported is the worst of all possible systems - except for all the others. A sentence has to delivered according to the case presented. I suspect that had I been on the jury trying Rickards, for example, I would have been compelled to extend the benefit of the doubt according to the evidence as it was presented in the context of the trial. [grits teeth]
This may account for my rage, which disturbs me as I don't imagine myself as the sort who'd join a lynch mob. It's just that I don't believe in karma.. but if there were such a thing, I'd be able to account for the quantity of E. coli in my gut.
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I've refrained from commenting, because while I share the opinions of many who have commented, I have not felt that I have had anything unique to add to the conversation.
However, I find this to be particularly vile (sorry, I don't mean the poster, I mean the actions by Veitch):
I really wonder if all the talk of suicide attempts wasn't just a smart gambit on the part of the defence team, knowing that when the time came it could be used to leverage their client out of a custodial sentence.
More than one close family member of mine has attempted (and succeeded) in suicide attempts, and I've noticed also someone who's tried the 'hey, look at me, look what you've driven me to' kind of grandstanding and emotional blackmail and the effect that that has had on people around them, and I've had to counsel students of mine who have been contemplating suicide (already after their own failed attempts) and I have only recently emerged from my own depressive (__not__ suicidal) illness of a three-four year period and I find the behaviour of Veitch and his defence team in trying this gambit to be utterly, utterly disgusting.
Suicidal feelings are no trivial matter (OK, no shit, Sherlock, and all that), but the kind of people who use it and its effect on people around them as yet another component of their narcissistic self-dramatisation fill me with no compassion at all, just contempt. Had Veitch (clearly incompetent) succeeded, I would have made the most ruthlessly Darwinist interpretation of his action.
I am scarcely less disgusted by his supporters, who unlike Susan Devoy, were not deceived, or did not care that they were.
Damn, that contributes nothing new, violating my own rule. It even looks like the sort of rant you'd see in the Herald's 'Your Views' sewer. Sorry. I've just had to deal with the real thing too many times.
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Also, thanks, Giovanni, some pearls of your own.
At the risk of mischief, Nick Lowe's 'The Art of the Well-Tempered Plot Device
Wherein you will find a new sport involving books everyone can agree to hate, which can be played at the pub:
Clench Racing
This is a social and competitive sport, that can be played over and over with renewed pleasure. Playing equipment currently on the market restricts the number of players to six, but the manufacturers may yet issue the series of proposed supplements to raise the maximum eventually to nine.
The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word "go" all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word "clench". It's a fast, exciting game -- sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out -- and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.... It's a great way to get thrown out of bookshops. Good racing!
Right, back to First Life and bloody marking...
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But telling parents they are stupid for their wrong beliefs, is not going to win any converts. So what does work in persuading people to change their fundamental beliefs?
Random and tangential musings follow...
Maybe by somehow arguing that there should be no fundamental beliefs that are held as absolute and inflexible? I have no idea how.
It seems characteristic of what I'd...er... characterise as modernism (in the broad sense) to think that absolutist systems of belief lead us into trouble. To say something is empirically true and therefore absolutely true seems sufficient on the face of it, but all evidence has to be weighed and valued and integrated into an overall system of thought in a pragmatic manner.
For example, there may be elements of evidence that, say vaccines correlate with autism (bollocks IMO), but in the absence of certainty, one has to make to with strong certainty that it does not. Someone unable to think in terms of probable or contingent truth and only absolute truth will randomly seize upon whatever element of evidence that seems in isolation to support a position that they have (irrationally perhaps) chosen to take. In the face of contradiction, one retreats into cognitive dissonance - ie., all contrary evidence is fraudulent and maliciously fraudulent. Something is true or it is not - there are no other possible states, and if it is not true, then evidence for a contrary and unwelcome position must therefore be part of a vast conspiracy.
The scientific method has the inbuilt advantage of a self-checking process (peer review, reproducibility), but in the arena of public opinion where this process is naively understood, and where the media, perhaps earnestly and in good faith, practice the principle of fair play, any random or even dishonest interpretation of data is equally weighted, leading to a smorgasbord where old X-Files slogans such as 'I want to believe' become genuine radical acts. Those uneducated in the scientific method will take on pseudo-scientific beliefs as an attempt to counter the perceived elitism of the scientific establishment.
Ironically, 'pseudoscience' gains its legitimacy solely by imitating the form of science while attacking the conventional method.
If the word 'truth' itself is carefully framed by its applicability to various circumstances, frameworks, contexts and 'meaning' itself is subject to an understanding of the system that generates meaning of a proposition, perhaps some more practical means of dealing with these concepts and how we should apply them to discourse and action... er... lost my thread there... It has something to do with my impression that absolute truth is a fine ideal, but next to impossible to achieve in practice which can be comprehended in terms of lived experience.
2+2=4 is truth as Orwell famously pointed out, but he was being naive in his rhetoric. That is empirically true, but if Keats were to say, as he did, that truth is beauty, was he a liar, or is the word 'truth' itself needing of some more nuanced and contingent understanding? I tend to the latter. I love a woman, I love chocolate. Obviously the word 'love' is to be interpreted differently according to use, but in the case of truth, no less deeply in either case while my love of chocolate might be comparatively shallow.
Wearing one of my hats as architectural historian, I'm constantly reminded by the failure of modernist housing (most infamously, Pruitt Igoe, the demolition of which Charles Jencks said marked the death of modernist architecture). 'We got the ergonomics right! What else did they want?' 'Well, quite a lot that you never thought to ask them about, as it happened...'
What I appreciate about the, for want of a better term, 'spiritual' attitude in the context of modern or postmodern thought is its doubt and uncertainty paradoxically mixed with hope. That at least accommodates a comprehension that knowledge is contingent and incomplete. The main criticism of the 'God of the gaps' - that if something can't be explained now, then it never will be and God is responsible for whatever bridge there across the gap - is that science will eventually close those gaps and consequently God will disappear is valid, however, the 'spiritual' or 'animist' view is useful in such circumstances in that it allows a society to deal with the fact that there are gaps and lacunae. The universe will always to some degree be incomprehensible, so therefore a flexible, 'soft' worldview that incorporates mystery and uncertainty with a corollary of cautious action as its foundation may suit the emerging world of the 21st century. By that I mean, if we are uncertain, rather than grasping at a conspirational view of the world (global warming is a hoax, vaccines cause autism etc) where absolute certainty, however flawed is desired, we might withdraw and observe correlates and construct contingent narratives instead.
Now, I don't propose this as a manifesto by any means, but as an observation. In the field of mathematics, Michael Horgan, in the October 1993 (a long time ago, that was!) edition of Scientific American observed that mathematical proofs now required advance (for the time) computer programmes to generate mathematic proofs that were literally incomprehensible to human mathematicians. If anything, this is even more the case now, and the implications of this will become increasingly apparent in other fields of knowledge. We will not comprehend a truth, but have to 'take the computer's word for it' (I use the word, 'comprehend' deliberately - one can at a formal level 'understand' a thing, but comprehension has to do with fully conscious and imaginative appreciation of a concept).
At the moment we think that we choose to place faith in computers without really knowing what that faith means and soon we will have to come to terms with having no choice but to place faith in AIs. I'm not say that that is a good thing, or a pattern to follow, but the kinds of systems of thought that can accommodate a sense of mystery in a world that nonetheless continues to operate without our comprehension may provide a better pattern than the old (naively-interpreted) Humanist or Enlightenment model of the universe and even the subset of our technological world being subject to our understanding.
That's all rather abstract and long-winded, I'm afraid, but not being a Christian, I will still use the time of Easter to speculate as best I can on issues of wider import than the number of buns I can stuff into my face. I have no trouble with Easter being the celebration of a strange conjunction of a number of Christian and pagan myths, because I revere myth itself that has meaning independent of empirical truth, and therefore its own kind of truth.
(Said Queen Victoria of Gladstone, 'He addresses me as if I were a public meeting' - sometimes I can't do anything other than that, goes with the territory and all that, sorry)
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Giovanni, yes, thank you, you're right. I was being glib. Or, to be glib again, as Ken McLeod put it, 'the rapture of the nerds'. Seriously though, the book is a wonderfully elegant and rich melange of living myth and technology. Thanks for the link.
Robert:
figures that Gray's failing is that he lumps them together and therefore cant see the wood through the tree's as it were.
My problem with Gray is in his treatment of lineage as synonymous with category, specifically in Black Mass he argues that since Nazism appropriated some Enlightenment principles, therefore the Enlightenment is essentially a form of proto-Nazism. That is, I think, apart from being a literary Godwinism, just silly. My problems with the Enlightenment have more to do with the issues outlined by John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards , but that's for another day... despite my basic respect (shared with JRS) for Voltaire.
Generally I'm uncomfortable with absolutist or essentialist arguments anyway as being a triumph of pedantry over intelligence.
Embeds. Bah. I have a slowdem at home and free broadband at work. It'll have to bloody wait for Tuesday. In the meantime, I'll discard the Jesus Jingles for some good Christian music - now will it be Bach interpreted by the poster boy for autism, Glenn Gould, or Thomas Tallis (who never bore anyone any malice, except for an organist named Ken, who played badly now and then)?
BTW, just saw Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect at the World Cinema Showcase today. Welly gets another screening on Sunday and Auckland gets some later. Strongly recommended for anyone interested in architecture and/or situationism. The film is a rich feast of graphics and a superb presentation of Koolhaas' methodology. It's truly necessary for any architecture student. If Hubertus Bigend was an architect...