Category Archives: rights

Distressing to Whom?

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Scientists have zapped an electrical current to people’s brains to erase distressing memories, part of an ambitious quest to better treat ailments such as mental trauma, psychiatric disorders and drug addiction.

In an experiment, patients were first shown a troubling story, in words and pictures.  A week later they were reminded about it and given electroconvulsive therapy, formerly known as electroshock.  That completely wiped out their recall of the distressing narrative.

“It’s a pretty strong effect.  We observed it in every subject,” said Marijn Kroes, neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

And

The hope is that one day it may be possible to selectively eliminate a person’s unwanted memories or associations linked to smoking, drug-taking or emotional trauma.

This is an extremely promising tool for helping folks overcome serious troubles.  Like many powerful tools, though, it can be very dangerous.

“Distressing memories.”  Distressing for whom?  The individual? Or Government?  Rudimentary efforts have already been tried: the Soviet Union’s Gulag.  It’s been warned of for a long time: Clockwork Orange.

Now that this sort of thing is coming to fruition, the tool wants, badly, close monitoring and control, and not only by our government.

Compare and Contrast

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First, the VA strikes again; Todd Starnes has this sorry…tale.

A choir from the Alleluia Community School, a high school in Augusta, GA, was told—when they arrived to perform at the Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center, and not before—that they could sing about Frosty the Snowman.  They were explicitly barred from singing such offensive songs as “Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” because the American veterans there, all of whom had fought for our country and suffered the consequences of those fights, couldn’t bear the stress of hearing such carols.

Brian Rothwell, spokesman for the VA center, had this excuse:

It is out of respect for every faith that the Veterans Administration gives clear guidance on what “spiritual care” is to be given and who is to give it.

Second, a tale of a Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton in 1970, via Richard Goldstein in The New York Times:

As Christmas 1970 approached, 43 American prisoners of war in a large holding cell at the North Vietnamese camp known as the Hanoi Hilton sought to hold a brief church service.  Their guards stopped them, and so the seeds of rebellion were planted.

A few days later, Lt Cmdr Edwin A Shuman III, a downed Navy pilot, orchestrated the resistance, knowing he would be the first to face the consequences: a beating in a torture cell.

“Ned stepped forward and said, ‘Are we really committed to having church Sunday?  I want to know person by person,'” a fellow prisoner, Leo K Thorsness, recounted in a memoir.  “He went around the cell pointing to each of us individually,” Mr Thorsness continued.  “When the 42nd man said yes, it was unanimous.  At that instant, Ned knew he would end up in the torture cells.”

The following Sunday, Commander Shuman, who died on Dec 3 at 82, stepped forward to lead a prayer session and was quickly hustled away by guards.  The next four ranking officers did the same, and they, too, were taken away to be beaten. Meanwhile, as Mr. Thorsness told it, “the guards were now hitting POWs with gun butts and the cell was in chaos.”

And then, he remembered, the sixth-ranking senior officer began, “Gentlemen, the Lord’s Prayer.”

“And this time,” he added, “we finished it.”

Yet, the VA claims its policy is meant to welcome and respect all faiths while at the same time protecting them from “unwelcomed religious material.”  By disrespecting the Christian faith.  By defining the Christian faith as “unwelcomed.”  The faith for which those men in the Hanoi Hilton had fought, even in barbarous captivity.

How does any of this work, exactly, Brian?  A (very) belated Merry Christmas to you, too.

 

h/t Power Line

Who’s Excluding Whom?

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Todd Starnes has this sorry tale.

It seems a high school teacher in a Connecticut high school has decided to ban explicitly Christmas decorations from her classroom door, never minding that decorating the classroom door is a tradition at this school, and she’s the only one to ban the practice there this year.  A parent reported to Starnes that

[The teacher] said no reference to Christmas at all can be on the decorations on the door[.]

Greg Hatzis, the school’s…headmaster…proffered this rationale:

It is the policy of the Board of Education that no religious belief or non-belief will be promoted by the district or its employees and none will be disparaged.

Never mind that the teacher’s (apparent) non-belief is exactly what’s being promoted by her ban, or that a religious belief specifically is being disparaged.  Hatzis went on:

The difficulty is that we want everyone to feel a part of the school community.  Anytime there is a preponderance of any particular holiday, you don’t want people to feel excluded.  It’s really a lesson in respect.  It’s a lesson in community.

We want people to be able to have a chance to celebrate, but just in a way that is not exclusionary.

We don’t want somebody to be offended.  We try to make sure that everybody understands the need for respect and diversity.

But where is Hatzis’ or his teacher’s sense of community?  What “lesson in community” is being taught here—that the minority view gets to exclude the majority view?  If there’s a “preponderance of a particular holiday,” it’s because that community preponderantly celebrates that holiday.  By excluding Christmas decorations at Christmas, those who celebrate are being deliberately and carefully excluded.

There’s no sensitivity here, either: none at all toward those who celebrate Christmas.  The only sensitivity present is that of a few, who thereby are allowed to dominate the rest.

This is not “respect for diversity;” this is the hypocrisy of political correctness.

Rule…Law

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Christopher DeMuth, writing in The Weekly Standard, notes among other things that

Obamacare is introducing a new form of government​—​improvisational government, characterized by continuous ad hoc revisions of statutory law by executive decree. This is a reversion to a primitive form that long antedates our Constitution and rule-of-law traditions.

Indeed.  What DeMuth calls “continuous ad hoc revisions…by decree” is simply rule-by-law.  Something at which the People’s Republic of China has excelled for centuries.  President Barack Obama might well take some advice from those folks.

Free Speech, Progressive Style—Renewed

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The Wall Street Journal has the sordid tale.  A week and a half ago, Third Way Founder, Trustee, and Andrew Cuomo ex-aide Jon Cowan and Third Way Founder and Chuck Schumer ex-aide Jim Kessler wrote an opinion piece.  The Third Way is a think tank that thinks from the Left.

Maybe you remember the op-ed: Cowan and Kessler used it to suggest that Americans aren’t quite as liberal some might think based on New York City’s strong election of someone like Bill de Blasio as mayor, that Social Security is nearly bust, and that wealth redistribution actually is pretty unpopular with most of us.

Well.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, et al., demanded among other things, that Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz (D, PA), walk away from Third Way.  She’s a Third Way Honorary Co-Chair (along with other Progressive luminaries like Congressman James Clyburn (D, SC), Senator Chris Coons (D, DE), and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius), and she also wants to be governor of Pennsylvania.  Responding to her instructions, she denounced the op-ed, in the WSJ‘s words, “faster than you can say Reeducation Camp.”  (Although she’s still listed by Third Way as an Honorary Co-Chair.)

Not to be outdone, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) sent letters to six large banks which she regulates from her perch on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and in those letters she demanded those banks disclose all their donations to think tanks.

Don’t talk, PCCC and Warren are saying to these miscreants.  Just read from the script we’ve given you.  When we want your opinions, we’ll give them to you.