Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Psychotic phenomena
Last night the skeptical writer was subjected, for the first time, to the rash of "psychic detective" programs on Sydney terrestrial television. Mrs S is a solid believer in things spiritual and psychic.
So S had no choice, and probed for little flaws in the - admittedly: extraordinary - path to crime resolution pursued by some of these "psychic detectives". Then I reported them (as diplomatically as possible) to Mrs S, who chided me.
To the rhythm of my vigorously nodding diplomatic head.
In truth, misgivings about so-called psychic "phenomena" remain with me, ostensibly or otherwise. Still, who knows. Maybe a murder can be solved by having a "psychic" fiddle with the victim's keys, or photograph, or even their birthdate.
Even a skeptic like moi recognises the power of the sub-conscious.
We've all had the experience of, say, hearing a song hummed that we were just that second thinking of, or of knowing full well, as we reached into our change purse, that the amount of coins retrieved would be exactly one coin short of the amount required for a purchase.
Such minor happenings can be explained in terms of the sub-conscious:- the song example by virtue of, say, both parties having that day heard the tune on the same radio station; the second case by having registered, without conscious exertion, the exact amount of coinage passed by one's own fingers into the purse.
Something said by one of the "psychics" on last night's TV broadcasts made me think of the above:
That we ought to pay more attention to those everyday occurences we logically dismiss as trivial, but somehow stay with us. According to this "psychic", such events have greater underlying significance.
********************
Contra to the "psychic"'s claim is a message in the vaunted Arthur Miller play, "The Crucible", a story about the once-serious business of witch-hunting. It warns precisely against reading significance into anything other than that which is absolutely apparent, lest hysteria and paranoia take over, leading to tragic consequences of the kind that befell the play's "witches".
This idea was thrust at me, before last night's TV-watching, as a reason not to try to imagine expansive sub-texts relating to racist comments made on-field by a high-profile Australian rugby player (rugby is a big sport Down Under).
The player had called a South African opponent a "fcuking black cnut".
The targeted player reported the incident, and the - very contrite, regretful and quite convincingly apologetic - perpetrator was suspended.
It was subsequently revealed in (loud, long, finicky) media coverage that the same Australian player (Justin Harrison) had previously publicly joked (apparently on microphone at a club presentation) that one of his team-mates looked like a "jewboy ... (with) short arms and long pockets".
Several former players defended Harrison. One of them (Sam Scott-Young) was once reported to have defended his own interest in collecting Nazi memorabilia.
Now, the above is a ruthlessly bitter capsule highlighting some of the very nastiest speculation related to the Harrison affair, while culpably ignoring the stellar record of multicultural harmony in rugby and Australian sport in general. And ignoring the likelihood that Justin Harrison is, in Australian terms, a spirited "sledger" rather than a racist.
But it's the kind of thing that makes the news. And news reporters are more likely to operate on the "hunch" rather than the "Crucible" principle.
So it was that the Harrison incident was reported far and wide and in places where rugby normally rates zero attention.
For perhaps the same reason, some years ago, the anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal rights politician Pauline Hanson's federal election campaign received more international media attention than is normally devoted to the the entire Australian election process, let alone serious campaigners therein.
"Racist" incidents involving Australia tend to stir up media attention throughout Asia, as well as attention amongst Australian Aboriginals (including Aboriginal rugby players, regarding the Harrison incident).
That may be because persons of non-white-European ethnicity are sensitive to racist sub-text, believe it is an unspoken but sad reality in Australia, and hence jump at the opportunity to highlight and expose it whenever such opportunity presents itself.
Arthur Miller would not recommend such an approach. So I was told by someone claiming too much was made of the Harrison affair.
But there is a lot to be said for following hunches, or recognising the symbolic, or being sensitive - as per the "psychic"'s prescription.
After all, just because something is not proven to some kind of evidentiary standard doesn't mean it's not a reality.
Paranoia and sensitivity are said to be common traits of highly successful business people - people for whom foreseeing possible future threats are a necessity of maintaining and building an enterprise.
********************
Today, another set of coincidences caused me to consider whether to apply the psychic's prescription of paying attention, or else to remember Arthur Miller and not waste time worrying.
The harbinger was a double-linking to today's Drudge Report:
Firstly, the news that Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol had been pelted with an ice cream pie at a public engagement.
Just under that heading, the item highlighting the heckling of Ann Coulter at Kansas University.
Stone the crows if I wasn't myself pelted with a raw egg while innocently hailing a taxi at Sydney's Bondi Beach late the other evening.
The incident stayed in my mind -just the thing the TV "psychic" had warned to watch out for.
Admittedly, this sticking in mind might have been related to the pain that stuck to my upper arm after being hit there, or else to the dribbly egg that stuck to my shirt for the duration of the taxi ride.
Dang kids, I thought at the time - though I did not see who was in the passed car from which the missile was launched. In my own youth I did idiotic things like that. Maybe it's karma.
Possibly that. Certainly: just a random incident.
The paranoid side of me couldn't help dwelling though, at least for an hour or so. Normally no-one, not even Mrs S, would hear my musings.
Such things are admitted only in the private-public blog of the 21st century.
I speculatively related the hooliganism to one of the distinct changes that beachside Bondi has seen since my own long-ago youth - its growing rowdiness, especially in the evenings. People from outside suburbs flock there now for entertainment.
Some of them seem to come there with "have-not" chips on their shoulders. Bondi is noted for being glitzy and touristy, frequented by "haves" and, famously amongst these, Jews. It's also a very, very multicultural area - but that doesn't change these other givens.
Amongst Bondi's visiting outsiders are a not-inconsiderable number - many of them with Lebanese or other Middle Eastern ethnic roots - who ostentatiously wear "Bulldogs" shirts and identificants.
The famous Canterbury Bulldogs are currently Australia's champion rugby league team. Their Canterbury headquarters is in a Sydney suburb far away from Bondi. Their broad support base includes a percentage of persons with Muslim and Arab heritage. One of the current team's star players is the brilliant Hazem El-Masri, proud muslim, national icon and one of the finest goal-kickers in the history of rugby league.
Bulldogs paraphernalia was much in evidence around Bondi in the days following the 2004 championship Grand Final. In that match, the Bulldogs triumphed over the Bondi-based Sydney Roosters.
Thrashed 'em.
So the parading of the Bulldogs shirts and hats and banners around Bondi Roosterville after that game was a bit like rubbing salt into wounds.
In a good-natured way, perhaps. Nobody really minded. The 'Dogs supporters were proud, and dersevedly so. Australian sport is about fun and enjoyment and good-natured rivalry, where everyone ribs each other and has a drink together afterwards.
Having said that, a slightly eery pallor has tainted Australian sport in recent years.
It was during 2004 that an in-season Bulldogs-Roosters match became embroiled in large-scale crowd violence. It was big news, and perhaps the first time in the history of traditional Australian sport that such a thing had ever occured.
Much has been done by rugby league authorities since that time to crack down on the psychotic behaviour of the minority of spectators who might be tempted to engage in violence at games, and their efforts have so far been successful. There has never been any overt hint of ethnicity or racial motivation inspiring such behaviour, nor have any such overtones affected or coloured the crackdown.
Nor should they. Paranoid joining of far-flung dots, as hinted at above, has no legitimate basis. The Miller prescriprtion defines the appropriate treatment here.
There are indeed minor - psychotic - groups that bear watching though, as underlined by the youth recently featured in Australian headlines after a video was found showing him making a suicide-bombing style threat against Australian military targets, Australian flag in the backdrop of a film piece otherwise notable for its Islamofascist style.
Let's hope patriotism and love of country runs deep with many of us, and that same does not become muddied with cancerous, violent ideas.
***************
Back to the egg, and the Kristol ice-cream pie, and the Coulter heckling. And one more item not yet mentioned: the hallucination offered March 29 by far-left guru Noam Chomsky, inter alia:
He's a psychotic phenomenon, is Mr Chomsky, and possibly the prototype useful idiot of his generation. A Jewish-American academic of niche standing who disdains religion, and hates capitalist Israel and the United States, and a prolific activist regarding said hatreds. A gift-wrapped nasty for the murky ideologues of fanatical Islam in the crusade against common enemies.
We wouldn't accept someone like Chomsky in any kind of responsible mainstream position in western public affairs. Hence the same kind of ridiculous Bush-is-a-liar/America-hates-democracy allusion ascribed to Washington Post Managing Editor Bennett recently was roundly condemned, and I (and many, many others) have delineated its rank illogic.
That is not why the item caught my eye - save for the bald-faced intellectual dishonesty of Chomsky, a professor of linguistics, failing to distinguish between foreseeable concerns about radical elements taking advantage of Iraqi democratic processes, on the one hand, and outright opposition to democracy per se, on the other.
What caught my eye was the reference to "non-violent resistance". Was my bombardment with an egg some kind of spiritual or "psychic" alert to a new pattern? Does the Kristol ice cream pie battering and the Coulter heckling herald a new phase in leftist tactics?
I think not as to the psychic business, but possibly yes as to the new pattern.
Violent anti (-capitalist, -Israel, -US, take your pick) tactics - epitomised by the 9/11 cannibalism - have failed to overcome, overwhelmingly frighten, or galvanise high levels of sympathy for the far left or Islamofascists in western democracies. On the contrary.
Following the Bush re-election, his opponents of various stripes have been forced to navel-gaze. And the collective result may well be a mere change of tack, rather than deep-seated consideration of ideology.
Eggs instead of bombs - a more civilised proposition, but not an entirely civilised one, and not one that is likely to be perceived as fair or persuasive. And therefore a mistake, yet another one.
EDIT: April, 2007, and the egg-throwing phenomenon has taken off
Michelle Malkin, the presenter of this clip, has herself become a favourite target of racist left-wing assault.
So S had no choice, and probed for little flaws in the - admittedly: extraordinary - path to crime resolution pursued by some of these "psychic detectives". Then I reported them (as diplomatically as possible) to Mrs S, who chided me.
To the rhythm of my vigorously nodding diplomatic head.
In truth, misgivings about so-called psychic "phenomena" remain with me, ostensibly or otherwise. Still, who knows. Maybe a murder can be solved by having a "psychic" fiddle with the victim's keys, or photograph, or even their birthdate.
Even a skeptic like moi recognises the power of the sub-conscious.
We've all had the experience of, say, hearing a song hummed that we were just that second thinking of, or of knowing full well, as we reached into our change purse, that the amount of coins retrieved would be exactly one coin short of the amount required for a purchase.
Such minor happenings can be explained in terms of the sub-conscious:- the song example by virtue of, say, both parties having that day heard the tune on the same radio station; the second case by having registered, without conscious exertion, the exact amount of coinage passed by one's own fingers into the purse.
Something said by one of the "psychics" on last night's TV broadcasts made me think of the above:
That we ought to pay more attention to those everyday occurences we logically dismiss as trivial, but somehow stay with us. According to this "psychic", such events have greater underlying significance.
********************
Contra to the "psychic"'s claim is a message in the vaunted Arthur Miller play, "The Crucible", a story about the once-serious business of witch-hunting. It warns precisely against reading significance into anything other than that which is absolutely apparent, lest hysteria and paranoia take over, leading to tragic consequences of the kind that befell the play's "witches".
This idea was thrust at me, before last night's TV-watching, as a reason not to try to imagine expansive sub-texts relating to racist comments made on-field by a high-profile Australian rugby player (rugby is a big sport Down Under).
The player had called a South African opponent a "fcuking black cnut".
The targeted player reported the incident, and the - very contrite, regretful and quite convincingly apologetic - perpetrator was suspended.
It was subsequently revealed in (loud, long, finicky) media coverage that the same Australian player (Justin Harrison) had previously publicly joked (apparently on microphone at a club presentation) that one of his team-mates looked like a "jewboy ... (with) short arms and long pockets".
Several former players defended Harrison. One of them (Sam Scott-Young) was once reported to have defended his own interest in collecting Nazi memorabilia.
Now, the above is a ruthlessly bitter capsule highlighting some of the very nastiest speculation related to the Harrison affair, while culpably ignoring the stellar record of multicultural harmony in rugby and Australian sport in general. And ignoring the likelihood that Justin Harrison is, in Australian terms, a spirited "sledger" rather than a racist.
But it's the kind of thing that makes the news. And news reporters are more likely to operate on the "hunch" rather than the "Crucible" principle.
So it was that the Harrison incident was reported far and wide and in places where rugby normally rates zero attention.
For perhaps the same reason, some years ago, the anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal rights politician Pauline Hanson's federal election campaign received more international media attention than is normally devoted to the the entire Australian election process, let alone serious campaigners therein.
"Racist" incidents involving Australia tend to stir up media attention throughout Asia, as well as attention amongst Australian Aboriginals (including Aboriginal rugby players, regarding the Harrison incident).
That may be because persons of non-white-European ethnicity are sensitive to racist sub-text, believe it is an unspoken but sad reality in Australia, and hence jump at the opportunity to highlight and expose it whenever such opportunity presents itself.
Arthur Miller would not recommend such an approach. So I was told by someone claiming too much was made of the Harrison affair.
But there is a lot to be said for following hunches, or recognising the symbolic, or being sensitive - as per the "psychic"'s prescription.
After all, just because something is not proven to some kind of evidentiary standard doesn't mean it's not a reality.
Paranoia and sensitivity are said to be common traits of highly successful business people - people for whom foreseeing possible future threats are a necessity of maintaining and building an enterprise.
********************
Today, another set of coincidences caused me to consider whether to apply the psychic's prescription of paying attention, or else to remember Arthur Miller and not waste time worrying.
The harbinger was a double-linking to today's Drudge Report:
Firstly, the news that Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol had been pelted with an ice cream pie at a public engagement.
Just under that heading, the item highlighting the heckling of Ann Coulter at Kansas University.
Stone the crows if I wasn't myself pelted with a raw egg while innocently hailing a taxi at Sydney's Bondi Beach late the other evening.
The incident stayed in my mind -just the thing the TV "psychic" had warned to watch out for.
Admittedly, this sticking in mind might have been related to the pain that stuck to my upper arm after being hit there, or else to the dribbly egg that stuck to my shirt for the duration of the taxi ride.
Dang kids, I thought at the time - though I did not see who was in the passed car from which the missile was launched. In my own youth I did idiotic things like that. Maybe it's karma.
Possibly that. Certainly: just a random incident.
The paranoid side of me couldn't help dwelling though, at least for an hour or so. Normally no-one, not even Mrs S, would hear my musings.
Such things are admitted only in the private-public blog of the 21st century.
I speculatively related the hooliganism to one of the distinct changes that beachside Bondi has seen since my own long-ago youth - its growing rowdiness, especially in the evenings. People from outside suburbs flock there now for entertainment.
Some of them seem to come there with "have-not" chips on their shoulders. Bondi is noted for being glitzy and touristy, frequented by "haves" and, famously amongst these, Jews. It's also a very, very multicultural area - but that doesn't change these other givens.
Amongst Bondi's visiting outsiders are a not-inconsiderable number - many of them with Lebanese or other Middle Eastern ethnic roots - who ostentatiously wear "Bulldogs" shirts and identificants.
The famous Canterbury Bulldogs are currently Australia's champion rugby league team. Their Canterbury headquarters is in a Sydney suburb far away from Bondi. Their broad support base includes a percentage of persons with Muslim and Arab heritage. One of the current team's star players is the brilliant Hazem El-Masri, proud muslim, national icon and one of the finest goal-kickers in the history of rugby league.
Bulldogs paraphernalia was much in evidence around Bondi in the days following the 2004 championship Grand Final. In that match, the Bulldogs triumphed over the Bondi-based Sydney Roosters.
Thrashed 'em.
So the parading of the Bulldogs shirts and hats and banners around Bondi Roosterville after that game was a bit like rubbing salt into wounds.
In a good-natured way, perhaps. Nobody really minded. The 'Dogs supporters were proud, and dersevedly so. Australian sport is about fun and enjoyment and good-natured rivalry, where everyone ribs each other and has a drink together afterwards.
Having said that, a slightly eery pallor has tainted Australian sport in recent years.
It was during 2004 that an in-season Bulldogs-Roosters match became embroiled in large-scale crowd violence. It was big news, and perhaps the first time in the history of traditional Australian sport that such a thing had ever occured.
Much has been done by rugby league authorities since that time to crack down on the psychotic behaviour of the minority of spectators who might be tempted to engage in violence at games, and their efforts have so far been successful. There has never been any overt hint of ethnicity or racial motivation inspiring such behaviour, nor have any such overtones affected or coloured the crackdown.
Nor should they. Paranoid joining of far-flung dots, as hinted at above, has no legitimate basis. The Miller prescriprtion defines the appropriate treatment here.
There are indeed minor - psychotic - groups that bear watching though, as underlined by the youth recently featured in Australian headlines after a video was found showing him making a suicide-bombing style threat against Australian military targets, Australian flag in the backdrop of a film piece otherwise notable for its Islamofascist style.
Let's hope patriotism and love of country runs deep with many of us, and that same does not become muddied with cancerous, violent ideas.
***************
Back to the egg, and the Kristol ice-cream pie, and the Coulter heckling. And one more item not yet mentioned: the hallucination offered March 29 by far-left guru Noam Chomsky, inter alia:
(T)he United States had to be brought kicking and screaming into accepting (Iraqi) elections. ...
(T)here has been a very powerful nonviolent resistance in Iraq - far more significant than suicide bombers and so on. And it simply compelled the United States step by step to back down. ...
Washington was compelled, very reluctantly, to accept elections. It tried in every way to undermine them. ...
(R)ight now there's a struggle going on, as to whether the United States will be able to subvert the elections that it reluctantly accepted. ... Of course once the United States was forced into accepting elections, the government and the media immediately pronounced that it was a great achievement of the United States. ...
In fact it's a major triumph of nonviolent resistance, and it should be understood as such....The last thing the United States wants is a democratic, sovereign Iraq.
He's a psychotic phenomenon, is Mr Chomsky, and possibly the prototype useful idiot of his generation. A Jewish-American academic of niche standing who disdains religion, and hates capitalist Israel and the United States, and a prolific activist regarding said hatreds. A gift-wrapped nasty for the murky ideologues of fanatical Islam in the crusade against common enemies.
We wouldn't accept someone like Chomsky in any kind of responsible mainstream position in western public affairs. Hence the same kind of ridiculous Bush-is-a-liar/America-hates-democracy allusion ascribed to Washington Post Managing Editor Bennett recently was roundly condemned, and I (and many, many others) have delineated its rank illogic.
That is not why the item caught my eye - save for the bald-faced intellectual dishonesty of Chomsky, a professor of linguistics, failing to distinguish between foreseeable concerns about radical elements taking advantage of Iraqi democratic processes, on the one hand, and outright opposition to democracy per se, on the other.
What caught my eye was the reference to "non-violent resistance". Was my bombardment with an egg some kind of spiritual or "psychic" alert to a new pattern? Does the Kristol ice cream pie battering and the Coulter heckling herald a new phase in leftist tactics?
I think not as to the psychic business, but possibly yes as to the new pattern.
Violent anti (-capitalist, -Israel, -US, take your pick) tactics - epitomised by the 9/11 cannibalism - have failed to overcome, overwhelmingly frighten, or galvanise high levels of sympathy for the far left or Islamofascists in western democracies. On the contrary.
Following the Bush re-election, his opponents of various stripes have been forced to navel-gaze. And the collective result may well be a mere change of tack, rather than deep-seated consideration of ideology.
Eggs instead of bombs - a more civilised proposition, but not an entirely civilised one, and not one that is likely to be perceived as fair or persuasive. And therefore a mistake, yet another one.
EDIT: April, 2007, and the egg-throwing phenomenon has taken off
Michelle Malkin, the presenter of this clip, has herself become a favourite target of racist left-wing assault.
