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Notes -
And just in case someone is tempted to think "come on, this is just a throwaway line from a journalist musing about the nature of violence", here's a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association from doctors Ervin, Mark, and Sweet where they elaborate on that line of thought, although they are also more careful to hedge with "we totally don't want to minimize the social factors".
That letter is actually perfectly reasonable. Half of it isn't even about riots, but about studies conducted on convicted murderers in other countries.
I'd be interested in finding out whether anything came out of that line of research.
Sweet! I had the feeling someone on the Motte might want to defend the whole thing.
It's written in a reasonable tone, but that doesn't make the idea itself reasonable. I'd say trying to solve the problem of violence by messing around in people's heads is one of the most horrifying things you could come up with.
I'll be posting more about it in the future, as I make my way through the sources. The short answer is yes, and it's not very pretty. It hasn't struck you, that for some reason we are not routinely performing psychosurgery on violent criminals more than 50 years after the letter was published?
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