Dr. X's Free Associations

What the...

What do you think was behind this bizarre attack in the Chicago suburbs? War within the Irish Travellers? Really, I have no idea.

National Review's false accusation of plagiarism

Alex Pareene:

The National Review says Elizabeth Warren is guilty of the gravest crime a writer can commit: Plagiarism. Katrina Trinko compares passages from “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Money Lifetime Plan,” Warren’s book with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, with passages from “Getting on the Money Track,” a book by Rob Black. The passages line up perfectly. The wording and even the punctuation are identical. It’s plagiarism all right. Except it looks very much like Warren is actually the victim.

Trinko mistakenly compared the publication date of Warren's paperback edition to the earlier initial publication date of Black's book. But Warren's hardcover edition was actually published seven months before Black's book.

Pathologizing Normalcy and Overdiagnosing Pathology

Russell Blackford:

I get fed up with the constant attempts to treat people's legitimate choices as pathological. These proposed, guidelines would reclassify as alcoholics very large numbers of people (especially young people in university or college) who choose to get drunk now and then. Bloody ridiculous!

The longer term implication of these kinds of changes to diagnostic manuals could be very illiberal. Potentially, many choices could come to be regarded as illegitimate on the basis that someone making those choices must suffer from a mental disorder. A diagnostic manual of mental disorders can end up being used to do an end run around people's political freedom - all sorts of behavioral choices could be stigmatised as revealing mental disorder. It's not as if we lack historical experience with this. Think of how homosexuality has been treated in the past, not to mention any interest in sex on the part of women. If we're not careful "mental disorders" can become, as they sometimes have become in the past, mere political constructs.

True at one time and still true in some places, but in the US, at least, we're not in any such danger. Because of deinstitutionalization, tight state budgets and penny pinching insurers, the mental health and pharmaceutical industries are effectively turning mental disorders into economic constructs. The issue isn't government declaring someone sick; DSM diagnoses don't constitute legal grounds for commitment.

In the U.S, the DSM boils down to three critical issues: reimbursement, reimbursement and reimbursement.  It should be renamed the American Diagnostic and Reimbursement Manual, so that those who use it outside the U.S. better understand the influences behind it.

Mad Men

Time for another freestyle Mad Man analysis. I have scattered thoughts about the most recent episode, and once again I don't know where I'm going with this post, so I'll begin by getting my bearings with a quick recap of where we've been.

Last week, there was the ambivalence older people feel toward younger people. Ambivalence can be expressed in good wishes that contain hidden or implicit bad wishes (see: break a leg). There was also the related matter of fakery in the portrayal of reality. For example, there was the struggle over how to seduce consumers into forgetting that Cool Whip is not real whipped cream.

There was more on fakery this week as aspiring actor Megan showed Sally that she can cry on cue. Sally was blown away by that, but it came back to bite Megan when Sally confronted her about breaking a confidence. When Megan is about to cry, Sally sneers at her: so now you're going to fake crying.

CPD officers have thick skins

So says superintendent Garry McCarthy:

Chicago police have done a good job handling NATO-related demonstrations so far this week, even when protesters at one event tried to provoke confrontations, Superintendent Garry McCarthy said Wednesday.

I would really love to agree with him after the summit is over.

While we complain about our 15% tax rate, would you please further tax all the schlubs in Chicago to give us billionaires a $150 million gift?

Chicago Tribune:

The Ricketts family, owners of the Chicago Cubs, today moved to control the fallout from a now-disavowed plan to politically attack President Barack Obama reportedly funded by family patriarch.

The New York Times first reported that a plan was submitted to Joe Ricketts to use $10 million to fund Super PAC advertisements linking Obama to the controversial preaching of his onetime pastor,Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose teachings were perceived as a liability to the president when he ran in 2008.

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts, who has been pushing a plan to get government help in rebuilding Wrigley Field, issued a statement distancing himself and the organization from that plan.

“As chairman of the Chicago Cubs, I repudiate any return to racially divisive issues in this year’s presidential campaign or in any setting — like my father has,” Tom Ricketts said in the statement. “I shall have no further comment on this or any other election year political issue. My full-time focus is on making the Chicago Cubs a World Series champion preserving Wrigley Field and making the Chicago Cubs a great corporate citizen.”

Ricketts’ statement came as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, blasted the proposed political attack on the president as an insult to the nation.

“I don’t think that’s fitting in a campaign of any nature,” Emanuel said, cautioning that he does not have first-hand knowledge of the Ricketts effort. “You can have disagreements without being disagreeable.”

“America is too great a country with too great a future with the content they are talking about,” added the mayor. “And it’s insulting to the president, it’s insulting to the country.”

The Cubs are trying to work out a deal with the city that would involve using $150 million in city amusement taxes for a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field.

Tom Ricketts repudiates the campaign because his family (the founders of TD Ameritrade) got caught supporting racist smear tactics and that might interfere with enriching themselves off of us schlubs who don't make even a tiny fraction of what the Ricketts family makes. I've never felt any resentment or heard resentment expressed locally toward the Ricketts family or their wealth. That may change now.

Vintage Corporal: 1943

"A soldier sleeping on the way from Cincinnati, Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky on a Greyhound bus." Photo by Esther Bubley, Office of War Information.

The AA on the patch stands for anti-aircraft.

A Message to Washington

1963 or 2012? I heard a bit of this speech on television last night.

Let us send this message back to Washington by our representatives who are with us today . . that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man [...]

Use Reasonable Precautions when you sit on a park bench in New York

NY Times:

Lawsuits against New York over deaths and injuries caused by falling tree limbs open a window on the often combative way the city responds to injury claims. Investigators engaged in surveillance of a severely injured victim; the city claimed a grandmother had not suffered after her skull was cracked by a tree limb; and in one case, the parks department destroyed most of a decayed tree that might have been used as evidence.

The city has claimed that pedestrians and parkgoers “should have known” the risks that trees present, and that a woman seriously injured while sitting on a park bench was at fault for failing to use “reasonable safety devices” that it never specifically described.

Romney style

This Onion captures the essence of Romney's-style blunders.