: DDN: So your system of human medical experimentation assumes some enlightened state of humanity where irrational belief systems (like racism) are impossible. That’s a pretty big “WHAT IF”, isn’t it? Cynic: I don't really think so. I'll be an optimist for a change and assert that since everyone is PHYSICALLY capable of living without prejudice, they can subvert whatever mental tendencies their experiences produce.
DDN: Well, yes they probably CAN, but you make it sound like all they need to do is through some salt over their shoulder or knock on some wood and their minds would be magically free of predjudice tendencies. Racism in our legal system is not just some minor little nuisance that is magically going to dissappear just because you have some great ideas about conducting medical experiments on prisoners. I think its obvious that racism in general is much more deeply rooted than that. Can it be uprooted? Yeah, maybe, but at what expense? After what lenghts? After how many other changes to society have to be made in order to support a racist free enviroment and propagate nonracist citizens? After how many reincarnations of a racist individual and after how many other life lessons learned for that individual? The point is that this racism isn’t going away all by itself just because its theoretically possible for us to survive “physically” without it. Racism is an integral part our society, no easier to remove than cancerous bone marrow. If racism is so easy to eradicate, then why has it been here for so long? Because you weren’t here to inform the leaders of the world that all we had to do was “subvert our mental tendencies”? What would you expect their reactions to be when you rush up to the podium at the UN and excitedly announce that you have found a incredibly simple cure for racism: “subvert our mental tendencies”? Cheers? Confetti? A Nobel Peace Prize?
Cynic, you seem very intelligent on one hand, but then on the other, you seem to have a very difficult time seeing problem in terms of the SYSTEMS they are embedded in, of recognizing the many intricate interelationships between different parts of reality, distinguishing between sickness and SYMPTOMS of sickness. We don’t have “mental tendencies” for just no damned reason. These tendencies are probably symptomatic of deeper problems and, as with any illness, if you simply supress or “subvert” the symptoms, you really aren’t CURING anything.
If you’re going to eradicate racism then your going to have to address those reasons. You’re either going to have to choose between things like free brain surgery for 100,000,000 racists or one World Government where even a racist thought is simply illegal; between mandatory psychiatric treament for people with racists tendencies or overthrowing our current government so that we can replace our current lifestyles with ones where we have to (or get to) interract with each other on a more personal community level. And these are the SHORT TERM avenues. The long term avenues could entail even MORE profound changes in humanity – perhaps we spiritually evolve beyond our racist tendencies. Either way, Cynic, we’re talking about altering levels of society that completely transcend subjects such as animal testing and medical research.
Cynic: …….If my systems exclude victims, it's because victims are uninteresting. I am interested principally in survivors.
DDN:
1) What’s so uninteresting about victims? Aren’t they an intricate part of society’s ills? Why would you willfully exclude such huge pieces of the puzzle when analyzing humanity’s problems? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to take into account ALL of the components of an interconnected system before deciding on what kinds of changes should be made to it? Again, it seems, you do not really want to solve problems – you just want to take out your own rage on society, but instead of murdering or raping anyone yourself, you’ve seen ways of getting back at society by supporting vengefull, superficial, myopic political ideas and agendas. Its cowardly.
2) How do you distinguish betweeen a survivor and a victim? For example, a friend of mine suffers from multiple personality dissorder as a result of being repeatedly raped by her grandfather and his friends from the age of 5 to 9.
She hasn’t commited suicide? Is she a survivor? She has received professional help, but she still has a cruel personality in her that takes over and does mean things to people. Survivor or victim? She can no longer afford professional help so she no longer receives any. Does her lack of funds strip her of “survivor” status? I think you should review your “survivor” theory.
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: DDN: Would animal/human testing even be an issue in such a pristine world? Would we still need health care? Would we even have to eat food? Maybe we would become breatharians. WHAT IF we were all perfect, god-like immortal beings? Would we need to conduct tests of any kind on anything?
Cynic: Each of those things is ridiculous to say. I'll allow you that we can't completely eliminate racism,.................
DDN: Then what’s the point of this debate? The original argument is that prisoner testing is unfair because of racism in the justice system. If there is always going to be racism in the justice system then prisoner testing will ALWAYS be unfair.
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Cynic: Actually, I believe such an overhaul of the system is what I implicitly proposed. We can't eliminate irrational thinking, but it is time we stopped protecting it. It's still been the source of more human misery than poverty and hunger combined. To my sentiment that makes simple-mindedness near criminal.
DDN: Whose to say what constitutes simple mindedness though? I find many of YOUR proposals and ideas to be VERY simple-minded? Conduct medical tests on prisoners as a solution to animal testing? That concept has so many holes in it I don’t even know where to begin. It smacks of someone who understands very little if anything about animal experimentation, the medical system, medical monopolies, etc. Racism is no big deal? Just subvert our mental tendencies? Everyone, all at once. Ready……………….GO! Hey, it worked! I’m able to ignore my own mental processes at will just by desiring to do so!!! No, nothing simple-minded about that.
: DDN: But murdering, raping, and thieving are activities that are confined almost exclusively to humans...
Cynic: I covered this sort of rebuttal earlier in a response to Lark's post. See it there if you are interested. The point of fact is that I agree with you. The comparison was meant to illustrate that if the criteria proposed by humans to separate ourselves from animals includes moral cores, then grossly criminal human beings are not human even by our own standards. I was being tongue-in-cheek in my original post and am regretting it now.
DDN: Yes, but that criteria can easily be shown to be a bogus one and you yourself agree. So why are you jumping on a bandwagon that you don’t even agree with?
: DDN: This is atrocious and disgusting. I wonder what kind of sick society this psycho COMES from. It must be a horrible place. Oh shit…..wait a minute….He’s from planet EARTH!!!
Cynic: And so am I and so are you. I've never killed anyone or particiapted in rape, though. Have you? I've certainly seen depictions of it on TV, so I know what it'd look, sound like, etc. Why aren't I running out to do that right this instant, and why aren't you?
DDN: Good question? Do you know the answer? NO, YOU DO NOT. And to the degree that you don’t, you would be wise to refrain from exposing prisoners to a medical testing system that would most certainly be abused (asside from it being abusive by its very nature).
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: DDN: But seriously Cynic…..My point here is that individual human behavior is, to some significant degree, a product of environmental factors over which the individual often has very little or no control: parents, schools, governments, socio-economic factors, television, books, food, water, air, religion, etc. A dysfunctional idiot like this doesn’t know WHY he did it. He’s obviously mentally disturbed. How can we expect someone this unstable and out of touch to accurately account for his behavior? Why is your decision on this man’s fate based only on one piece of junk data regurgitated from his twisted and degenerate mind?
Cynic: Even if I don't fully trust a criminal's sense of place or time, I do maintain that an individual SHOULD always endevour to conquer their negative experiences and channel them for usefulness. Circumstances cannot excuse future behavior.
DDN: Now you’re just being hateful and rediculous. Keep a child gagged and bound in a closet and beat him to a bloody pulp everyday from birth until he’s 18. Then let him out and send him a highschool prom. Is behavior going to be appropriate? Of course not. Shouldn’t it be excused to SOME degree? Shouldn’t it be taken into account when deciding how his actions should be dealt with? My inclinations would be the following:
1) Do whatever is necessary to protect others from his behavior – probably some sort of confinement.
2) Get him some mental help and care deeply for him.
And here’s Cynic’s solution: Punish him some more. His circumstances are no excuse.
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DDN: Also, why are you willing to rehabilitate humanity with regards to its racism but not with regards to its other evils such as murder? If murder is really the unforgivable, uncorrectable, meaningless behavior you denote it to be then why not conduct medical experiments on RACISTS who’s racism has caused millions of murders worldwide?
Cynic: That'd be great! I'd love to be able to police other's thoughts. But I know I could never endorse a system which would. That would be too easily open to abuses, since I don't trust the state usually knows what's best for the citizenry; and it creates a way for the unjust powerful to subvert the weaker and ensure a dominant, if utterly wrong ideology. I'd like ideology to stay a useful construct, so I think I'll avoid its hegemonization at the hands of money, even if it puts deserving racists under the knife.
DDN: I think you got too excited about getting to torture some more people and missed the point. Your whole argument earlier regarding medical testing on prisoners was founded on the idea that racism was SO easy to erradicate that it need not be seriously considered as a significant moral barrier to prisoner testing. You said it was simply a matter of “subverting our mental tendancies”. Why are you now so anxious to conduct medical experiments on racists if correcting their behavior and thinking is such a trivial matter. Sounds like you just want to cause somebody pain just for the hell of it.
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: DDN: Also, why would we extend the offer of “medical testing in exchange for your freedom” only to murderers? Why should murderers be given an opportunity for freedom but not arsonists, drug dealers, traffic violators, or political prisoners? If murderers are the worst among us then should they have LESS privileges than other prisoners and not MORE?
Cynic: Very insightful, I hadn't thought about it. Yeah, why not? Save the really dangerous research for the murderers, test shampoo acidity on the eyes of pickpockets. To be fair and consistent, I'm all for electable testing as punishment.
DDN: Do you know how shampoo is tested Cynic? They secure the subject’s head (in this case 20 or 30 rabbits at a time) so that it cannot move and force their eyes to remain open while they carefully drop acidic shampoos in their eyes. The rabbits scream in agony and terror – did you know rabbits could scream? (I didn’t until I saw a cat catch one and try to eat it. It was screaming its head off – it almost sounds human. It was horrible.) This is what you are proposing for a homeless guy whose kids needed some food so he stole somebody’s wallet. Brilliant, Cynic.
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: DDN: Can human willpower come up with a better way of handling crime than just imprisonment, gas chambers, and electric chairs? Can your willpower come up with a more evolved solution than dismemberment and canibalism? Can human willpower find a way to live a healthy life without inflicting agonizing and unspeakable pain on animals and other people?
Cynic: I'd say no, that's reason's job. Willpower is necessary for use in the individual sense. It is important we recognize the value inherent in overcoming the ways in which we have been wrong and determine not to extend such injustice on others.
DDN: But that’s exactly what you are proposing to do: not only do you want to continue with a penal system that doesn’t rehabilitate jack shit, but you want to amp it up with medical testing on prisoners that will continue to deliver the same valuable relevations over and over again like: shampoo hurts when it gets in your eyes. You seem determined to extend these injustices to others. You don’t seem willing to correct past mistakes insofar as such corrections would entail a truthful analysis of past mistakes that takes all relevant data into account. If you are determined not to extend further injustice to others then you are not going to escape an analyis of how and why those injustices occurred in the first place (as you have endeavored to escape throughout this debate).
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: DDN: If we expect the poorest street kid from the black inner city ghetto with no father, a mother hooked on crack, and no hope for the future to grow up without ever acting out his rage on society then shouldn’t we expect ourselves to overcome our disdain for his violent behavior, perhaps to the degree that we not inflict, nor allow any harm to be inflicted, on him?
Cynic: Nope. He's got a brain in his head and I'll bet it works. I bet he can flip on the television, see life from different, more livable angles and think: "That is what I'd rather have." And if the kid has any degree of self-determination he or she can work at it. With enough effort and a little luck, he could overcome the obstacle of his youth.
The only people who slip, slip voluntarily. It's pure concentrated B.S. when people posit the excuse "But that's all he's ever known!" Did he have blinders on? Never watch television or read a book? Never took a bus out of his neighborhood and saw other human beings doing things besides smoking crack and stealing? I'll bet he did. The many factors affecting children in their youth ENSURE that they should be capable of making competent decisions, not prevent it.
DDN: You’re so enthralled with punishing the bad behavior and thinking of others you are unwilling or incapable of looking at your own. You’ve missed my point entirely. Everything that you’ve just said could just as well apply to you and barbaric and unconstructive approach to justice. You’ve got a brain in YOUR head TOO, don’t you? Does it work? Can you do anything that would help you see life from an angle other than the extremely limited one you are seeing it from now? Where is your determination to have a world where people torturing other people and other living things unecessary? Isn’t this what you’d really rather have? If so, then according to your own words above, you are simply not exerting enough effort. And according to you, you’ve made this mistake voluntarily. I know that the modern justice system is all you’ve ever known, but that’s no excuse, is it? Don’t you ever watch TV or read books? There’s been plenty of very solid arguments presented about why a justice system based exclusively on punishment doesn’t work, why a medical system that recognizes only symptoms of disease and not causes of disease does not work, and why so many toxic, processed substances that burn our eyes an poison our food are not necessary in our lives. According to you, you were ensured of being exposed to these ideas as a youth,so you simply have no one to blame but yourself for such a lame world.
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: DDN: Sounds like you’ve got a double standard going on here otherwise?
Cynic: Not that I can see. I feel for the kid you just described, and I want to see him succeed and overcome it. If he doesn't it's because he let himself down. I can't pity the condition of those who won't help themselves.
DDN: You’re insane cynic. How do YOU know what 6 billion people are doing or not doing to help themslves? How do you know even what 6 billion people are capable of doing to help themselves out of the trillions of situations they find themselves in? What audacity.
: DDN: …..That’s just plain sad, Cynic. We’ve reached an impasse here; one that I think can only be traversed with some probing psychoanalysis. I’ll forego such analysis for now and note only that you sound like a seriously unhappy person and that I’m sorry for whatever happened to you that got you in this bad headspace.
Cynic: Nothing happened to me save to be taught my behavior is attributable only to me. Things out of my past can only affect me if I let them.
DDN: (This is laughable). There’s not one respectable psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, mental health professional, social worker, biologist, physicist, phisiologist or full grown thinking adult that would agree with that statement. You would essentially have to be God (or established in a unity consciuosness with God) in order for that statement to be true. These are the words of pure intellectual desperation reaching for some non-existent set of black and white absolutes that can be relied upon without having to think, feel, etc. Go get your money back for this one. You either missunderstood the teaching or your teacher was a little out of touch with reality.
Cynic: ... Having undergone trauma is not grounds for perpetuating it.
: DDN: Actually, Cynic, yes it is. We’ve been closely observing victims of trauma very closely for several decades and it became abundantly clear quite some time ago that the minds of trauma victims unconsciously work (and work OVERTIME) to recreate past traumatic experiences in the present. Theories vary as to WHY this occurs but I don’t think any respectable mental health expert would refute that it DOES. It may very well be the mind’s attempt to heal itself – reliving the trauma again and again in an attempt to “make the story come out right”, rescue parts of the mind that were shut down in response to the trauma, regain perceived lost control of one’s physical safety.
Cynic: And people can exercise their volition and seek counseling, if their condition is so miserable. We can always work to better ourselves. People who won't try, determine they can't try (when it's obvious to anyone else that they could) and then use their problems to justify hitting kids, smoking crack, whoring for money, etc., aren't making use of their own potential. It's deplorable, and in cases where it affects others, thus damaging them so that they too must conquer new demons... I must sigh because it burdens me so and shake my head. How disturbingly wrong.
: DDN: I know a thing or two about phenomena like this having been diagnosed and treated by several highly respected health professionals from various corners of the mental health profession as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Basically it means that I am stuck in a hyper alert mode – a residue from a time in my life when I needed to be hyper alert in order to survive. I found a counselor that specialized in treating this disorder and he was able to help me a great deal, but I’ll probably always be at least a little fucked up the rest of my life.
Cynic: You chose treatment. Good for you.
: DDN: The point is that being inappropriately alert in certain situations is not something I consciously chose to do. It doesn’t require my consciousness AT ALL – it happens ALL BY ITSELF. For all intents and purposes, there is another person running around inside of my head with his own separate agenda, making decisions and doing and saying things that I don’t approve of at all. I have established a line of communication with the little fucker but we still have our differences and we’re trying our best to resolve them.
Cynic: But you are to be commended for having recognized a problem and attempted to best it. You are not the examples I cited before. You are infinately their superior.
DDN: Maybe. But you said that having undergone trauma is no grounds for perpetuating it and I’ve just explained very clearly that sometimes IT IS. And whether I had attempted to do anything about it or not, I would still have a subconscious at work that sometimes subverts my own conscious desires to behave and think correctly. The past trauma I experienced IS primarily the grounds for this phenomena. Thank you for your commendation, but it is not relevant here.
: DDN: In the meantime, I make “mistakes”: say the wrong thing, overreact, make incorrect assumptions about people and situations – things that we all do but with a little more intensity behind it. So, you see, I AM exerting a tremendous amount of will over the situation, but I still do things that are wrong, so where does that leave us, Cynic?
Cynic: ....You're trying......
DDN: How do you know I’m trying? Maybe I’m lying to you? Maybe I’m lying to myself. How do you know that other people aren’t trying? Because they haven’t each personally posted to you on this form and told you their life story. What are you using to measure their desire to improve or their use of willpower to not fuck things up any worse than they already are? Sounds like you’ve got a pandora’s box of assumptions going on that may or may not accurately reflect reality.
Cynic: ………I think we can endeavor to understand the situation of people who try. There are many who don't though. the degree of their behavior makes it abundantly clear to me, if not to you as well. What errors of perception ever make forcible rape sound ok to someone?
DDN: No one’s trying to make forcible rape “sound ok”. Its not ok, OK? But neither in punishing the rapist without considering the SYSTEMS in which that individual evolved (or didn’t evovle as the case may be). I’m not suggesting that we do NOTHING in response to a rapist’s actions because of his bad childhood, in fact, I’m suggesting quite the opposite. I’m saying that we need to attack the problem at a much deeper level than just punishing the rapist. We need to do much much MORE than just inflict more suffering on humanity. Alas, you don’t have the reason, the willpower, or the luck to see it any other way.
Cynic:…….Your situation, you must allow, is a benign example compared to the socipathy I am taking a stand against.
: DDN: Do I “deserve” additional suffering?
Cynic: Only if you stop exerting effort and submit to your troubles.
DDN: But there again, Cynic……how do you know what efforts other people with bad behaviors are exerting?
I wouldn’t even pretend to know what ONE person’s efforts were at least not without talking to them first. Yet YOU have somehow read the minds of billions of people and determined that they are not exerting any effort AT ALL to evolve out of their current state.
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: DDN: Am “I” 100% responsible for my actions? Did I cause my own original trauma?
Cynic: I doubt it.
DDN: So I’ve just won a big part of this debate? I’m not 100% responsible for my actions?
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Cynic:…. But even the abused wife that refuses to leave her husband is not the "cause" of the trauma. She is guilty of staying, however, thus allowing her abuser to continue victimizing her. That is akin to sanctioning the abuse. That's a horrible failure of will and self-respect. I think I do right to speak against it, and also to help any woman in that situation I may know to help her realize what she's doing to herself.
DDN: Well, you’d make one horrible therapist, let me tell you that much. You don’t even have a basic understanding of the psychology of the typical spousal abuse victim. There’s an overwhelmingly addictive cycle of shame and guilt involved that generally has its origins in the woman’s youth and in her relationship with her parents. If you don’t address the problem from this level, all you’d being doing is removing her from one bad situation so she could go and set up a brand new one – probably even worse because of you having aggravated her “original guilt” by labeling her as “a horrible failure”. (If you know anyone in a situation like this I would highly recommend that you refer her to a trained therapist and not try to speak with her directly about the situation.)
