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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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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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