Picture: Psychological Self-Portrait

Sometimes You're the Bug.

Comments Elsewhere: Citizenship and Personhood

In a discussion of Republican selectivity on Constitutional principles, including a issues of immigration and abortion, I wrote (satirically, just to be clear):

And since the unborn are persons, their being born doesn’t change their personhood, and therefore shouldn’t change their citizenship status. Only people whose parents can prove that the pregancy was conceived on American soil (preferably in a suburb) should be considered citizens.

Curiously, it undercuts the attack on Republicans as hypocritical, because it creates a consistency in their thought that they don't deserve.

Comment Elsewhere: Academic Psychology an oxymoron?

In a discussion of one of the least impressive bits of well-publicized psychology "research" I've seen in years, I avered:

Cherry picking and confirmation bias! Without them, psychology would hardly exist as an academic discipline. I understand the inclination to give these people databases and statistics packages as a corrective, but you have to fix the, if you'll pardon the reference, underlying psychology first.

The Bill of Commandments

John McKay has translated the Bill of Rights into King James English:

1. Thou shalt not make laws respecting an establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
   
2. Thou shalt not not make laws abridging the freedom of speech nor the freedom of the press.
   
3. Thou shalt respect the right of the people peaceably to assemble and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
   
4. Thou shalt not infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
   
5. Thou shalt not quarter troops during peacetime in any house without the consent of the owner.
   
6. Thou shalt not perform unreasonable searches. Neither shall thou seize without warrant.
   
7. Thou shalt not hold a person to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, without first indicting by a Grand Jury. Neither shall thou twice put a person put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offense. Neither shall thou compel self incrimination.
   
8. Thou shalt give speedy and public trial and preserve the right to trial by a jury of peers.
   
9. Thou shalt not impose excessive bail or fines. Neither shall thou inflict cruel and unusual punishments.
   
10. Thou shalt preserve for the States and the people those rights not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

Awesome. Go ye and sin no more.

Comment Elsewhere: Color Coded Fiscal Crisis

In response to this story and this story about state government budget impasses leading to the brink of shutdowns, layoffs, etc. -- in the comment section here, I made a suggestion (color added):

We’re going to need color-coded maps:

• Red = Republican-induced Shutdown
• Orange = Republican Brinksmanship
• Yellow = Budget Impasse but still solvent
• Blue = Blue Dog Democrat Capitulation slashes social, educational funds and corporate taxes
• Green = Sane people still in charge.

[Welcome, Avedon Carol readers!]

Comment Elsewhere and The Ten Rules of Poststructuralist Prose

In response to an Orac takedown of New Age pseudo-scientific quackery, I wrote

The challenge in studying semiotics or postmodernism is that, unlike studying literature, or history, or medicine, they are not first-order fields. Both of them are the study of the way in which we think, and as such have been very useful. Scholars like Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Kuhn, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault have really expanded our understanding of our own linguistic and cultural habits, the ways in which we both comprehend the world and limit our scope of action therein.

That said, there have been some truly awful intellectual and linguistic directions taken by postmodernism and semiotics: the former lends itself to a kind of nihilistic relativism which denies truth and meaning entirely; the latter to a kind of free-association in which things end up meaning rather the opposite of what everyone intuitively expects. There's junk science in every field, and these are relatively new fields; the ratio is still kind of high and both tend to attract "maverick" and "ooh, it's new and cool" types.

As I said before, the woo-use of semiotics draws on the way in which "signifier" and "signified" can be very different things: the way the flag stands for the nation, or "White House" stands for the presidency (or the nation). The wooists are taking that fairly straightforward process of unpacking meaning from language, and turning it into sympathetic magic. It's no different from their use of quantum mechanics, and you won't understand semiotics or postmodernism by reading Milgrom more than you'll understand Heisenberg.

One thing I didn't say is that postmodernists and semioticists have been responsible for some of the most opaque and bizarre prose in academic history, which is part of why they are so useful to voodoo peddlers. I remembered a piece I read back when post-modernism was just getting a foothold in US academia, and it was still called by its more linguistic term, "post-structuralism." It's a funny piece, still, for those of us who have to read this stuff:

TEN RULES FOR MAKING YOUR PROSE POSTSTRUCTURALIST:
Ruth and Kenny Mostern, Z Magazine, June 1991, p. 7.

1. Change all appearances of the verb "to be" to "can be represented as." Corrolary: Always refer to the word "is" as the copula.

2. Never "analyze"; always "deconstruct."

3. Never refer to "ideas" or "thoughts"; replace these concepts with "episteme," "habitus," or "ideological structure."

4. Actions are "always already overdetermined" by the categories in rule 3.

5. Feel free to add the following prefixes and suffixes to any word in your vocabulary: "post," "neo," "dis," "over," "quasi," "co," "de," "ism," "ize," "ify," "ness," "ology."

6. Use parentheses and dashes in the middle of words.

7. Every activity is "writing"; all things are "texts"; all people are "subject positions"; all collections of things are "structures"; all that is outside a structure is a "margin."

8. Conclude all discourse with several options and a question.

9. Call anything you don't understand "essentialist" and denounce it.

10. Refer to at least one of the following three French authors in everything you write: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Corollary: Appropriate all untranslated French words from your English versions of their texts.

Oh, that takes me back....

See also here and here and here.