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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I appreciate the sources.

Addressing the letter to JAMA that you linked:

There is evidence from several sources, recently collated by the Neuro-Research Foundation, that brain dysfunction related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients.1'4 In¬ dividuals with electroencephalo¬ graphic abnormalities in the tem¬ poral region have been found to have a much greater frequency of behav¬ ioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, assaultiveness and psychosis) than is present in peo¬ ple with a normal brain wave pat¬ tern.' On the other hand, French and South African reports disclosed that persons arrested for murder had six to nine times the frequency of ab¬ normal brain waves as occur in the population at large.8'7 Delinquent psychopaths tested in a medical cen¬ ter for federal prisoners in the Unit¬ ed States had an almost equally high frequency of abnormal brain wave patterns.8 Stafford-Clark and Taylor9 divided 64 English priso¬ ners accused of murder into five cat¬ egories. They found only one of 11 prisoners guilty of killing in self- defense, or in the commission of an¬ other crime, with an abnormal brain wave. Four out of 16 murderers with a clear homicidal motive had elec¬ troencephalographic abnormalities, but an abnormal pattern was pres¬ ent in 11 of 15 prisoners who did not have a motive for committing murder. It would be of more than passing interest to find what per¬ centage of the attempted and com¬ pleted murders committed during the recent wave of riots were done without a motive. Finally, it is an unjustified dis¬ tortion to conclude that the urban rioter has a monopoly on violence. It pervades every social, ethnic, and racial stratum of our society. The real lesson of the urban rioting is that, besides the need to study the social fabric that creates the riot at¬ mosphere, we need intensive re¬ search and clinical studies of the in¬ dividuals committing the violence. The goal of such studies would be to pinpoint, diagnose, and treat those people with low violence thres¬ holds before they contribute to fur¬ ther tragedies.

Emphasis added. The letter was written in the context of sweeping race riots, but I do not see anything suggesting racist/discriminatory intent on the part of the authors. They specialize in neurological correlates to violence, there's an epidemic of ongoing violence, and they're urging further research into the topic and treatment of those who have predilections to indulge in it.

The identification of violent/anti-social individuals is still a routine matter in psychiatry, though the matter only extends to formal diagnosis of Anti-social Personality Disorder, which doesn't have any treatment. Consider it a more formal way of saying, yeah, this dude's an asshole.

There's nothing singling out black people, or suggesting they're uniquely prone to violence, the race riots were simply the most salient example.

Regarding the other evidence you've shared, I don't consider it particularly damning. If you wish to study violence, especially the aetiology, then you want to conduct your research in an area with a high amount of violence. Would you deny that high schools with majority black/hispanic students wouldn't on average be more violent? That's a factually true statement. Fund raising before Congress to make the most of a (quite relevant) Current Thing? Who wouldn't?

On the use of a military base:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike

As the sites were decommissioned they were first offered to federal agencies. Many were already on Army National Guard bases who continued to use the property. Others were offered to state and local governments while others were sold to school districts. The left-overs were offered to private individuals. Thus, many Nike sites are now municipal yards, communications and FAA facilities (the IFC areas), probation camps, and even renovated for use as Airsoft gaming and MilSim training complexes. Several were obliterated and turned into parks. Some are now private residences.

The Army was handing out now useless Nike silos, which were snapped up by everyone from schools to airsoft players. This is because they were moving out, not offering a timeshare program!

This isn't some kind of top-secret blacksite for MKULTRA redux, there was property being handed out to whoever asked, and if I was to organize a program that involves isolating violent patients (likely against their will), then "remote" and "secure" sounds like excellent ideas, regardless of what I do with them.

Well, you're the doctor, and no offense to neurosurgeons (they actually seem to try to do it right, as far a I can tell), but I was under the impression that they absolute pussies compared to psychosurgeons. Don't they go on and on about how dangerous it is, and how it's a last resort?

I have met plenty of psycho surgeons, no psychosurgeons, so I have no opinion on their personality and habits. They don't market themselves as such anyway, they call themselves neurosurgeons.

Sure, it wasn't shut down completely, but you said yourself the time period in question was the point of it's decline. The paper you linked to seems to confirm it.

Because it was obsolete, not because it was controversial (not by 2007, at the least). For a perfectly benign example, open cholecystectomies have long been replaced by laparoscopic cholecystectomies. They were never controversial. In the odd case where the destruction of a small portion of the brain is needed, we zap it with radiation, and that's a procedure that happens every day in my hospital, even if it's more for tumors than violence.

I find no conclusion to the case of Kille after looking, it seems the negative PR, especially after the association with Terminal Man came out, was sufficient to derail the psychosurgery division there. He was hardly the only patient, and others presented as case studies did much better. If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.

If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.

Sorry, I somehow missed you were just curious about the outcome. He lost the lawsuit, here's a contemporary NYT article about it. What I wanted to see is the juicy details, hence the FOIA.

Thanks for tracking that down!

There's nothing singling out black people, or suggesting they're uniquely prone to violence, the race riots were simply the most salient example.

Regarding the other evidence you've shared, I don't consider it particularly damning. If you wish to study violence, especially the aetiology, then you want to conduct your research in an area with a high amount of violence. Would you deny that high schools with majority black/hispanic students wouldn't on average be more violent?

I don't disagree with your description of their argument, but the problem is it doesn't matter. Taking another example, "redlining" is often brought up by progressives as an example of structural racism in America, even though it didn't explicitly target black people (in fact, that is perhaps the entire crux of the argument about "structural racism" to begin with). Being excluded from a mortgage sounds not quite as bad as being included into an involuntary brain surgery to me, so again a massive wikipedia page on one, and crickets on the other looks a little weird to me.

That's a factually true statement. Fund raising before Congress to make the most of a (quite relevant) Current Thing? Who wouldn't?

I mean... how many neurosurgery clinics said they can solve BLM if congress gives them a bit more money?

The Army was handing out now useless Nike silos, which were snapped up by everyone from schools to airsoft players. This is because they were moving out, not offering a timeshare program!

This isn't some kind of top-secret blacksite for MKULTRA redux, there was property being handed out to whoever asked, and if I was to organize a program that involves isolating violent patients (likely against their will), then "remote" and "secure" sounds like excellent ideas, regardless of what I do with them.

Checking the dates, it looked like they were asking for early access, before they were being handed out like candy. Either way the military still being there or leaving is not relevant to the argument, what caused the controversy stemmed from the center trying to setup camp somewhere where it couldn't be scrutinized by the public. And it was controversial, that letter did them in. It was leaked to the press, caused and uproar, and politicians withdrew the support / funding from the Center.

They did a bunch of other things that looked suspicious: they removed Ervin's name from later drafts of their project proposal, when too many people started asking "wait, isn't that that brain surgery guy from Boston?", and removed references to psychosurgery (which itself was being redefined to exclude placing electrodes, like what they did to Kille), and ended up renaming the Center to the "Project on Life-Threatening Behavior" to deemphasize the focus on violence (and thus contradicting the possible mundane reason for a remote and secure site you brought up).

All of this happened without the public even being aware of West's involvement with MKULTRA, which was declassified in the 2000's, I think.

Because it was obsolete, not because it was controversial

That would be "The advances of psychopharmacology..." from the abstract you linked, what did they mean by "along with the existent skepticism of the medical community in regards to psychosurgery"?

I find no conclusion to the case of Kille after looking, it seems the negative PR, especially after the association with Terminal Man came out, was sufficient to derail the psychosurgery division there. He was hardly the only patient, and others presented as case studies did much better. If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.

I wanted to send a FOIA request to the Boston court where the case took place, but never got around to it. I'm not sure how you get started with that sort of thing.

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