information addict

Whoopi On Roman Polanski: It Wasn't 'Rape-Rape'

Dear Whoopi,

This is not third grade, where “I like you” and “I like-like you” have two different meanings. RAPE IS RAPE.

Head. Desk.

Yes I can totally see how arresting a fugitive child rapist is a slippery slope toward censorship. If I were a creative professional, I’d certainly be concerned about the authorities coming after me and my work! Except, I am a creative professional, and I’m not worried, because unlike Roman Polanski, I have neither raped a child nor jumped bail and evaded capture for three decades. See how that works?

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Letters From Hollywood: Roman Polanski’s Rape Of Child No Big Thing

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Et tu, Alfonso Cuaron?

Sigh.

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Connecting a Few More Dots. « PostBourgie

abbyjean:

If you were going to translate “practical interests of black people” into a legislative program, it would look pretty similar to the platform liberals have been pushing for the better part of a century: universal health care, robust public education, and generous income supports (EITC, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc.). And so when Obama says that we should connect the practical issues of African-Americans to those of the country, what he means – really – is the opposite: the practical issues of the country are those of black people; and programs designed to benefit the country at large will also benefit (maybe even disproportionately) black people.

But here is where anti-racism and public policy is directly connected. It’s not just that racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation that directly addresses problems within minority communities – no, racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation which directly benefits the majority of Americans.

yes. this.

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We Are Heroes. <3.

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Introductory Post

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if…

September 28

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-9-27)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

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Internet addiction: New-age diagnosis or symptom of age-old problem?

psychotherapy:

A great little read about the battle within the field over the validity of such issues as “internet addiction”. Even better, the voice of the opposition is none other than Vaughn Bell, who runs a fabulous site (Mind Hacks) that I often get stuff from for this site! He certainly sounds like the voice of reason here…

Vaughan Bell, a visiting research fellow with the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London in the United Kingdom, has argued that the internet is not an activity, and therefore internet addiction is a flawed idea (J Ment Health 2007;16[4]:445-57).

“Fundamentally, the internet is a medium of communication,” says Bell, who claims that one can no more be addicted to the internet than to radio waves. “The concept itself doesn’t make sense.”

Bell acknowledges that some people use the internet and other technologies to excess, but believes they do so to avoid dealing with underlying problems, such as depression or social anxiety disorder, which have well-established treatments. Mental health problems often result in obsessions, which could range from watching too many hockey games to reading too much science fiction. In Japan, for instance, many youth are obsessed with comic books, though this is framed as a social withdrawal problem, not a comic book addiction.

Creating new “addictions” is misleading and confusing, says Bell, and will only prevent people from getting the help they need, while undermining their self-efficacy.

“The overmedicalization of life’s problems is damaging,” he adds. “Your actual difficulty may be that you are in a bad relationship or you are depressed, not addicted to the internet. It’s a neat placebo explanation that doesn’t fully address the complexity of people’s problems.”

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I think the internet is a wonderful technology, and I think Bell is right that if you use it to excess, you’re probably avoiding a deeper problem.

On the other hand, sometimes I spend so much time online that I get physically sick of it and have to go lie down. So what am I avoiding?

(Answer: homework)

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So I’m pretty sure that what happened is that Wilner is so ignorant that he doesn’t know the difference between the “unemployment rate” — the percent of people who are looking for work without success — and the “employment-population ratio,” which is the percent of people who have a job.

It’s okay not to know that difference. Lots of smart people don’t. But if you’re going to write a column read by hundreds of thousands of people, it would be helpful to have a clue what you’re talking about.

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Ampersand (via amberlrhea)

duly noted.

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Your personality type affects the situations you place yourself in (BPS Research Digest)

psychotherapy:

I know, I know, this is a little bit of an obvious thing when you think about it, but I still found this research quite fascinating…

People with so-called “avoidant” personalities, who fear intimacy, also tend to shun the kind of social situations that could lead them to forge meaningful relations with others, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle.

That’s according to Lindsey Beck and Margaret Clark who conducted three studies testing participants’ preference for “diagnostic social situations” in which they’re likely to receive feedback regarding whether other people like them or not.

An initial study showed that participants who scored highly on avoidant attachment (associated with fear of intimacy and closeness to others), but not high scorers on anxious attachment (who fear rejection), tended to say they would prefer hypothetical situations that weren’t socially diagnostic - for example, they’d prefer to be allocated a partner in a language class, rather than be in a situation where the class arranged themselves into pairs. This aversion was specific to social diagnostic situations, with avoidant characters just as likely to opt for feedback on their hearing or pronunciation ability as other participants.

The pattern was replicated in a second study that involved a real-life choice between participants forming groups in class for a research project, or having the lecturer dictate the groups. In this case, highly avoidant participants tended to opt for the lecturer to select the groups.

A final study showed that it was possible to provoke aversion to socially diagnostic situations by priming participants to think about a person they felt uncomfortable being close to.

Beck and Clark said their findings provided a specific example of an under-explored area - that is, how personality can affect people’s lives by influencing the situations they place themselves in. “By sidestepping [socially diagnostic] situations … avoidant individuals may protect themselves from intimacy, loss of control, and early rejection, but they also forgo the joys and benefits of a reciprocal, trusting relationship,” the researchers said, “as well as the benefits that early negative signals can serve in limiting investments into relationships not worthy of such investments.”

This is totally me. I get really nervous when people have to pick partners. Old fears from gym class, maybe.

I’m not great at making friends, so I don’t tend to try. It is indeed a vicious cycle.

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People don’t like to hear that their heroes can also be rapists, and that rapists can also be heroes. People don’t like to hear that rapists can have separate qualities worth admiring, can have talent, and depth, and people who love them. People don’t want to hear anything about rapists that doesn’t involve them being evil, slimy, instantly identifiable monsters, who have absolutely no worth or humanity. People don’t want to hear it because it makes rape easier to ignore, deny, forget, and believe could never happen to them, could never be committed by someone they know.

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Rape Apologism and the Response to Mackenzie Phillips : The Curvature

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Cake Wrecks: 'Twas a Sweet & Starry Night in the Jet City

What do you think would happen if two bakeries received the exact same phone order, but interpreted it in two very different ways?

Oh, Cake Wrecks, thank you for being you.

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If Air Travel Worked Like Health Care | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

think4yourself:

“Hello! Thank you for calling Air Health Care, the airline that works like the health care system. My name is Cynthia. How can I give you travel care today?”

“Hi. My name is Jonathan Rauch. I need to fly from Washington, D.C., to Eugene, Oregon, on October 23.”

“Yes, I’d be happy to assist you with that. It does look like we can get you on a flight on January 23 at 1 p.m. or February 8 at 3 p.m. Which would you prefer?”

“Neither. I need to be in Eugene on October 23. As in, the 23rd of October.”

“I’m sorry, we have nothing open on that date. You might try another carrier.”

“I suppose I’d better. Who has availability?”

“I’m afraid I have no way to know that. I have no way to look into their systems.”

“Who would know?”

“You can call them individually and ask. I’m sure you can find one.”

“Look, I don’t have time to call two dozen airlines. It’s important that I get to Eugene on the 23rd. There must be something you can do.”

“Well, it looks like maybe we could squeeze you in on October 26, if you don’t mind departing Washington Dulles at 5:35 a.m.”

“Good grief. All right, I suppose it will do.”

“Great, thank you, I’ll be happy to make that booking for you. That’s one flight from Washington Dulles to Chicago O’Hare on October 26. Will there be anything else?”

“Wait, hold on. Chicago? I’m going to Eugene. It’s in Oregon.”

“Yes, sir. The Eugene portion of your trip will be handled by a western specialist. We’ll be glad to bring you back from Chicago to Washington, though.”

By Jonathan Rauch, The National Journal

There’s more to this story at the link above

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think4yourself:

Cool Ad Watch | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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it's time to go hard on this

abbyjean:

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let’s just start right there, because that’s the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in “exile” (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never — poor baby — being able to return to the U.S.). Let’s keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she’d rather not see him prosecuted because she can’t stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let’s take a moment to recall that according to the victim’s grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, “No,” then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.

Joan Z. Shore at the Huffington Post, who once met Polanski and “was utterly charmed by [his] sobriety and intelligence,” also seems to believe that a child with an unpleasant stage mother could not possibly have been raped: “The 13-year old model ‘seduced’ by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies.” Oh, well, then! If her mom put her into that situation, that makes it much better! Shore continues: “The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It’s probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.”

Wow, OK, let’s break that down. First, as blogger Jeff Fecke says, “Fun fact: the age of consent in 1977 in California was 16. It’s now 18. But of course, the age of consent isn’t like horseshoes or global thermonuclear war; close doesn’t count. Even if the age of consent had been 14, the girl wasn’t 14.” Also, even if the girl had been old enough to consent, she testified that she did not consent. There’s that. Though of course everyone makes a bigger deal of her age than her testimony that she did not consent, because if she’d been 18 and kept saying no while he kissed her, licked her, screwed her and sodomized her, this would almost certainly be a whole different story — most likely one about her past sexual experiences and drug and alcohol use, about her desire to be famous, about what she was wearing, about how easy it would be for Roman Polanski to get consensual sex, so hey, why would he need to rape anyone? It would quite possibly be a story about a wealthy and famous director who pled not guilty to sexual assault, was acquitted on “she wanted it” grounds, and continued to live and work happily in the U.S. Which is to say that 30 years on, it would not be a story at all. So it’s much safer to focus on the victim’s age removing any legal question of consent than to get tied up in that thorny “he said, she said” stuff about her begging Polanski to stop and being terrified of him.

Second, Polanski was “demonized by the press” because he raped a child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He “feared heavy sentencing” because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned upon by the legal system. Shore really wants us to pity him because of these things?

But what of the now-45-year-old victim, who received a settlement from Polanski in a civil case, saying she’d like to see the charges dropped? Shouldn’t we be honoring her wishes above all else?

In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is why I haven’t named her here, even though she chose to make her identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke said it quite well: “I understand the victim’s feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice.”

It works on behalf of the people, in fact — the people whose laws in every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not — and at least in theory, does not — tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you’ve made.

Roman Polanski raped a child. No one, not even him, disputes that. Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted. (condensed by me from kate harding at salon)

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it's time to go hard on this