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Thursday, December 08, 2005On the airline shooting:I haven't found a lot of details on this one, but there's one area of the story where I have fairly good knowledge: I know what it's like dealing with someone with bipolar, both on and off of medication. On is better. It is true that those with milder cases can take themselves off of medication over time. But this requires both the self-knowledge to recognize what's going on before things get out of hand and an inner circle to help put on the breaks and get the person to treatment if necessary. Bipolars don't typically take themselves off medication because life's gotten normal enough that cognitive behavioral therapy and carefully practiced self-awareness can substitute; they do so because the current meds aren't working well enough. From the sounds of it, this gentleman was a walking time bomb, even if there was no bomb in his satchel. There are those who will rush to judge the air marshall. Others will judge this gentleman. The real judgment, though, is on a society where mental illness is treated as special - far more debilitating than, say, the common cold, it's also far more likely to go untreated, as even those with insurance face no end of hassles getting reimbursement for services many don't believe in. We all know a pompous ass or two who never gets a cold and mocks as weak, ridiculous or sniveling those who get the sniffles and go to the doctor. Never having experienced mental illness, this is the approach a lot of the populace takes to those who, sadly, have messed up brain chemistry. And between the Tom Cruise/Scientology types and the Christian kooks who think demon possession and serotonin imbalances are the same thing, things are only slowly getting easier for those whose brain chemistry doesn't balance out quite right. The killer, of course, is that most of the truly mentally unstable can't even get it together enough to obtain the lousy treatment too often on offer. And they're too far off tilt to appreciate the more subtle adjustments medication gradually brings. In such circumstances, barriers to getting medication are the last thing that's needed. Better to have barriers to leaving the house before you take your pills. But we don't do that. Where does that leave us? A man was acting dangerously in a crowded public place - an air terminal - and the air marshall did the right thing in neutralizing him to protect the many others in the vicinity. A man with a mental illness and his wife were endeavoring to live a normal life, or so it seems, and that, too, is right. But something broke down in the middle, making the man a threat to himself. Was this suicide by cop? A fit of paronoia badly understood? Or something else? We'll never know. Let's hope that somewhere down the road, the stigma of mental illness will finally fade away enough that the mentally ill come into our consciousness is in their testimony to how far they've come, not news reports about poor souls gone astray in a society that neither acknowledges their plight nor offers much in the way of help except to those whose behavior has gone off the deep end, becoming both ugly and dangerous. We can do better. 
posted by gbarto at 4:53 PM When it's okay to be an anti-Semite... So, since Mel Gibson's father denied the Holocaust, Gibson is a suspected Holocaust denier and likely anti-Semite who needs to speak out strongest terms to repudiate this foul possibility and make clear that his father was a bigoted, raving lout of whom he's deeply ashamed. But if you're President of Iran and, say, deny the Holocaust and demand the Jews be repatriated to Europe... you're an international leader with whom Washington should work to bring about Middle East peace by negotiating nukes to Iran's satisfaction. I guess moviemakers are more important than the leaders of nations. Either that, or our elites are comfortable about slaughtering Jews, just not having it talked about too much.
posted by gbarto at 12:14 PM Wednesday, December 07, 2005Must read:So long, Marianne It looks at the problem of political correctness excusing Muslim bigotry and sexism, and the consequences for the cars of Paris and the very lives of immigrant girls. It is time someone took up a new chant of "Ecrasez l'infâme!"
posted by gbarto at 1:50 PM Tuesday, December 06, 2005Instapundit is among many writing about the flying fur in the latest CIA kerfuffle. Or, rather, non-kerfuffle: Since the Bush White House isn't on the hot seat in this one, no one cares about the most recently outed operative.Looking at all the nonsense, I'm reminded of the Buckley quip (I paraphrase): "It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation: Everyone except the target was killed." The tricky bit in the Plame case, of course, is that while those who care know about Plame - and Libby - no one seems to know, at least that I've found - who sent a private citizen on a deep cover mission without getting the "keep your lip buttoned" documents necessary to prevent publication of the findings of that deep cover mission in a New York Times op-ed. There is one person in this whole mess who truly warrants being taken out and shot, but he or she is lost in the bureaucratic smoke. This, more than anything, has all the earmarks of the CIA/National Security Apparat liberals know and love: a group of know-it-alls conspiring to alter U.S. policies through non-democratic means. What's the difference between Ollie North and Joe Wilson's handler? As far as I can tell, they both used sloppy procedures and questionable loopholes in order to get around democratically decided U.S. policies with which they disagreed. As for the latest CIA outing, what it proves is that the media only cares about its storyline, not about the probity of disclosing the identity of operatives or making their identities discernible. But we knew that. Which is why, ultimately, the real victims in this will be those in the Mainstream Media who still pursue honest journalism as best they understand it: Newspapers and television anchors were already held in the same esteem as used car salesmen. If this keeps up, however, they'll drop below. After all, the used car salesman might sell you a lemon, but at least it truly is a car. On the other hand, what the news media peddles is proving not to be news at all, but merely an anti-Bush counterfactual reality in which a couple hundred looters in a major disaster represent anarchy rising in New Orleans but the torching of thousands of cars in Paris takes a week to become "youth unrest". In the end, then, I think that we are seeing the ultimate Rovean game. There are those who wanted the administration to push back a lot sooner. But in a peculiar way, the Bush team was wise not to push back until there was so much crap out there that the necessity of their pushing back was more evident: Had they pushed back against the Robert Scheers and Daily Kos, they would have been perceived as a touch sensitive. By waiting till the noise got loud enough in the echo chamber that the ordinarily careful bloviators thought they could join the shout-a-thon, they were able credibly to claim that the MSM had lost its mind and point to blatant idiocies, not mere nuances that, alone, seemed benign, though cumulatively they were more dangerous. The new CIA bit seems a bit outrageous. But if you're Scooter Libby's lawyer, you're taking notes and preparing a "vulgar witchhunt that entrapped my client to justify itself" defense. With the right jury, Libby will walk, not because he is innocent of perjury, but because this new case will prove that, à la Bill Clinton, he was being asked pointless questions for extra-legal reasons, as proved by the fact that no one is investigating the parties to a far more egregious leak than the one he was involved in.
posted by gbarto at 11:08 PM |
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