Dr. X's Free Associations

Blogging Party Hacks

Found via: Ed Brayton

Commenting on blogger John Hinderaker who calls Obama “the most gaffe-prone politician in memory,” Radley Balko writes:

It is sorta' cute, though, to watch the right-wingers and longtime defenders of President Bush attack Obama for--of all things--his inability to speak articulately. The choreographed way in which several high-profile right-wing blogs picked up the gaffe meme strongly suggests hat there's already a coordinated effort afoot to push a narrative, here. "Barack's a doofus!" (You may remember similar memes, such as "Al Gore invented the Internet!" and "John Kerry's a Flip-Flopper!)

I know. The lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling. But I think it's calculated. This is a page right out of the Rovian playbook. Project your onto your opponents your own biggest weaknesses. So the Bush campaign ducks the National Guard issue by calling John Kerry a coward. Draft-dodging Saxby Chambliss attacks Max "I Left Three Limbs on the Battlefield" Cleland's patriotism. It's brilliant, really. Your opponents are so taken aback at the sheer audacity (sorry, it's the only word that fits, here) of the charge, they stagger, nonplussed. Then of course, you pounce.

Hence, the spectacle of a Bush sycophant like John Hinderaker taking aim at Barack Obama's eloquence.

These sorts of stories are useful, though. And I'm sure we'll see similar stories emerge from the left about McCain. The come out in every campaign. They're useful in that they let us see which bloggers and pundits are serious people with any semblance of intellectual honesty, and which are knee-jerk party hacks (emphasis mine).

Offhand, A few other tells:

Hacks regularly engage in rumor-mongering.

They regularly ignore or dismiss evidence when it contradicts their positions.

They rarely express admiration for anything about any opponent, unless they can do so in a dismissive or condescending way.

They never, under any circumstances, prefer an opponent's position on a particular issue.

With respect to opponents, they always articulate the most uncharitable interpretation of any situation that arises.  Even when a particularly nasty interpretation is far-fetched, they get it out there.  An army of blogging zealots will disseminate it as established truth.

Honor Among Thieves

Writing about reaction to Scott McClellan’s tell-all book, Gail Collins notices something interesting about McClellan’s critics:

The administration’s defenders have not really attacked the book’s thesis — really, what could you say? But they’ve been frothing at the mouth over McClellan’s lack of loyalty. “This will stand as the epitome, the ultimate breach of that code of honor,” said Mary Matalin.

Collins also quotes an email from indicted Giuliani pal Bernard Kerik:

“DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE...”

Honor among thieves means that you never rat out a fellow wrongdoer.  This is the Bush administration’s code of honor.

Don’t get me wrong.  There is a place for loyalty between good people, but context is everything.  It’s commendable when we stick with friends going through hard times.  And we can even stick with friends who do wrong and own up to their wrongdoing.  But, McClellan’s real crime, according to his critics, is that he violated the thieves' code.  He ratted out his unrepentant, wrongdoing friends.  Such is the friendship among thieves.

Psychology, Mind & Neuroscience Roundup for Friday

"Add the prefix neuro to a discipline and you get a new field with instant cred. But the science can be less than compelling." -- Psychiatrist Dan Carlat challenges the hype surrounding neuroimaging in WIRED.

Providentia reports on an epidemic of HIV-related dementia in Uganda.

The Corpus Callosum assesses progress and potential clinical applications for Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

Laura Freberg questions the conclusions of the American Association of University Women who say in a recently released report that schools are not handicapping boys to achieve advances for girls.

Tom at Mind Hacks reviews " Why the Mind Is Not a Computer: A Pocket Lexicon of Neuromythology"

John Grohol participated in a conference call with US Army officials to discuss the Army's reaction to recent reports of increasing suicide rates among active service members and vets.

As usual, there are several interesting items over at The Situationist:  They have a post about rising rates of anxiety in children, with a second piggybacked post discussing an inverse relationship between quantity of homework assigned and academic achievement scores.  They also have two posts for those interested in the fascinating field of moral psychology (here and here).

Dave Munger discusses Gestalt theory, offering some nice examples.

The Last Psychiatrist fisks a New Yorker article on power.

Spam Filters: "One of the easiest ways to tell a human from a machine is our perceptual system." Cognition and Language Lab discusses CAPTCHAs

Neurophilosopher believes that the widely reported monkey-with-a-robot-arm is a bit "overhyped."

Federal Prosecutors Squeeze Harder In Rezko Case

Tony Rezko's legal troubles continue to mount with news that Clark County, Nevada officials have issued a warrant for Rezko's arrest for passing bad checks to cover gambling debts owed to Las Vegas casino operators.  The debts date back to a 4-month period in 2006 when Rezko's business empire had already collapsed.

The warrant probably came as a surprise to Rezko who had a payment agreement in place through the civil court system in Nevada.  So, why issue an arrest warrant now?

Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois (Patrick Fitzgerald's district) are squeezing Rezko hard as they can in hopes that he'll rat out Rezko patron and Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich whose administration has kept up a tradition of corruption at the highest levels in Illinois politics.

Rezko has, so far, refused to turn on Blago.

Clark County prosecutors say that they have been in contact with the federal prosecutors in Illinois and that prosecutors here will make the arrest.

What Do Sharon Stone and Pastor John Hagee Have In Common?

Back in the 1960s, social psychologist Melvin Lerner coined the term "just world hypothesis" to describe the tendency to see the fortunate as deserving of good fortune while victims of misfortune are seen as deserving their fate.  Lerner summarized 15 years of research into this phenomenon in his 1980 book, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. In his book, Lerner offers considerable evidence that after initially experiencing pangs of sympathy for those who are suffering, there is a tendency to develop negative views of persons who are suffering.

What does this have to do with Sharon Stone and John Hagee?  They've both given us examples of attributions about victims of natural catastrophes based on the just world hypothesis.  Hagee claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for a planned "homosexual parade" in New Orleans and, now, Sharon Stone speculates that the victims of the recent Chinese earthquake could be experiencing the effects of karma.

"I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else," Stone said Thursday during a Cannes Film Festival red-carpet interview with Hong Kong's Cable Entertainment News. "And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma?  When you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"

Photo of the Day: 1944

Click photo to enlarge.

Carlton Chapman was a machine-gunner in an M-4 tank near Nancy, France (November 5, 1944).

Study Finds That Prenatal and Early Childhood Exposure To Lead Predict Adult Arrests and Violent Crime

The authors of a study that looked at adult crime and childhood exposure to lead concluded that "prenatal and childhood blood lead concentrations were predictors of adult arrests."

The study looked at arrests among 250 individuals ages 19-24. The 250 were among 376 who had been monitored for lead exposure beginning during the first trimester of pregnancy through age 6 1/2.  Maternal blood levels of lead were measured during pregnancy.

The researchers report that "the [rate ratio] for total arrests increased for each five micrograms per deciliter increment in blood lead concentration.”  They also said that higher incidence of arrest for violent crime was associated with higher blood concentrations of lead during early childhood.

The study was published by PLoS. (PDFavailable here.)

Photo of the Day: 1938

Coal miner's children in West Virginia (Russell Lee for the for Farm Security Administration).

More photos by Russell Lee: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5;

Children's Brains Aren't Just Adult Brains Under Construction

Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology has an excellent post that examines recent research on differences in the way adults versus young children process sensory information.  Downey looks at two recent studies suggesting that children "use only one sense at a time to judge the world around them, while adults integrate the sensory experience through as series of "compromises or syntheses."

Downey goes on to make another very interesting point.  He notes the "tendency to see child development in a teleological framework, that is, as an incomplete version of an adult system rather than as a deployment of the child’s distinctive neural resources."

Downey points out that this view can obscure our understanding of what is really occurring:

"[E]ven on the level of the individual organism’s development, we find that early stages are not determined by the ‘goal’ or ‘endpoint’ of development, but are rather configurations that make the best use of existing perceptual resources.

"In other words, kids’ perceptual systems are not just forerunners of adult systems, they are adaptations to the sensory situation of the child, including basic instabilities generated by growth or organic maturation themselves.

"As with evolutionary thinking, the pitfall of teleological thinking — assuming that ‘early stages are leading up to later ones’ — seems to threaten how we understand children’s sensory development. Perhaps this is one of the other dangers of not recognizing how the human nervous system (like other mammals’) is a dynamic system, achieving some sort of stability and predictability at each stage of development, rather than just an ‘adult under construction.’ Children come to different sorts of sensory solutions, not because they are becoming adults slowly, but because they are doing the best they can with the brains that they have."  Read the entire post...

Law School Commencement Addresses

Last week I posted Jerry Springer's commencement address to Northwestern Law, class of '08.   The address struck me as a masterpiece of moral evasion (Actually, I called it a masterpiece of ethical weaseldom).

This week, The Situationist posts an antidote to Springer's speech with Situationist contributor Dan Kahan's commencement address to the Yale Law class of '06.