I recall an incident in Double Deuce, a hard boiled Boston detective novel by
Robert Spencer. The detective, a big, tough white guy named Spenser and his
big, tough, black colleague Hawk, have just had to fight a gang of teenage drug
dealers who live in a public housing complex called “the Deuce.” Spenser and
Hawk have won the fight, but Spenser is troubled. He asks Hawk, who is supposed
to have grown up in a similar place, “Why did they fight us? They knew they
would lose.” Hawk’s reply continues to impress me,
“We all need respect. Some of us get it for what we know. Some of us get it for
what we own. If you don’t know anything or own anything that others respect and
you back down from a fight, you are zero.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white
man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his
pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets
for you."
If that’s all he’s got and sees himself losing it......
P.S. Another good source related to social epidemiology:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/social-networks-and-health-9780195301014?cc=us&lang=en&;
John
Sent from my iPad
On Apr 7, 2019, at 16:18, adriano paolo shaul gershom palma
<palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
two suggestions:
the theories of epidemiology (e.g. atran, sperber, and others)
secondly, or in my own view, there is a tendency to understand violent
phenomena in terms of psychopaths.
One has only to look at Japan, Europe, and the US to see that many roots are
political.
There is now now internationalist project of any weight, after 1936-38 the
Comintern is virtually exterminated by what Conquest called the great terror
(e.g. the events that followed the fall from grace of Yagoda and the
Yezohvina that immediately took place against the military and the nkvd.) in
more recent times the choices by the american public and elites (the invasion
of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on "terror") are isolationist in nature.
Groups, like the Pound movement (Italy) the Hungarian government, Poland
maybe, the fighters of Donbass und so weiter, are the consequence of that.
The socalled lonewolf groups (exterminationists against christian churches,
jewish temples, mosques, or even peaceful gatherings of young leftists as in
Breivik's case that Lawrence Helm quotes) are not lonely. Consider T. Mcveigh
(I hope i recall the nam correctly) is part of a movement obsessed by the
Turner diaries etc.
It is most unfortunate that in the cultural areas (if one leaves out the
sciences, what remains is clowns of confused doctrines, the deconstruction,
the "Gelassenheit" the "signifier" etc.) are in the grip fo their own
idiocies. To quote a simple example, and to be short. Recently the Prague
scholar Ronell had to be fired by NYU (in NYC, NY) for harassing graduated
students. As in the worse traditions the usual cast signed a petition to
explain that she was not a case of imbecillic sexual harassment, but a great
scholar, and blah blah (letters by Zizek, Butler and scores of others.) Their
analytical capacities are zero point zero. The case is funny since the person
in question harassed, as a matter of record, both derrida and his son... I
say it only because I read the biography of Derrida by B. Peeters.
Short conclusion, Breivik et al. are political phenomena, the interesting
question is to see in the jungle of Bannon, the american politicians, M. Le
Pen, or Salvini what is not only the a product of the crisis of
internationalism.
best To Lawrence and all (I avoid the platitude that the cesspool of facebook
& the socalled social network, that appears to appeal to all of our
antisocial, anti cooperative instincts.)
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
palma, a paolo shaul םֹשׁ ְרֵגּ
Er selbst bevorzugte undurchdringlich Klarheit
On Sat, Apr 6, 2019 at 10:30 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I belong to a forum on Pentax DSLR cameras and one of its members asked a
series of questions hoping to discover a membership profile. The largest
number are old and retired, for example. One of his questions asked what
sort of work Pentax photographers had done. It seems that a high-percentage
are retired engineers. A relatively new member said he is a retired Social
Epidemiologist.
Never having heard of that specialty and knowing nothing more about it than
his title, I asked him if he worked on the Anders Breivik phenomenon. The
Moderator (whose forum name is the name of a shark) deleted my question and
some messages that followed it. Apparently my question resulted in an
argument which occurred after I had signed off and gone to sleep.
I invited the Social Epidemiologist to log onto Lit-Ideas for whatever
happens with this subject, but I don’t know if he will.
Subsequent to my asking my inflammatory question, I looked up “Psychiatric
Epidemiology” in Wikipedia. This specialty apparently explores “the
mechanisms behind how exposures to risk factors may impact psychological
problem and explore neuroanatomical substrate underlying psychiatric
disorders.”
“As an example, in an attempt to measure the prevalence of mental illness in
the United States, Lee Robins and Darrel A. Regier conducted a study called
the Epidemiological Catchment Area Project which surveyed samples of the
general population at five sites across America. In the study, it was found
that about a third of all Americans suffer from mental illness at some point
in their lives. This statistic is often referred to as lifetime prevalence.”
[from Wikipedia]
Apparently specialists work from statistics, that is the identification and
quantification of causes underlying psychiatric problems, but they are not
permitted to introduce stressors that might cause a psychiatric disorder,
but that is what I find most interesting. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young
Werther, for example, was a stressor in the rash of suicides that occurred
after the book’s publication in 1774.
And so, while I haven’t read anything that describes Anders Breivik’s
exploits as a symptom of a psychiatric epidemic, I did read of an Australian
who killed some people in Christchurch New Zealand. Journalists were
attempting to see Breivik as this fellow’s stressor: “Ranstorp told Swedish
radio Friday that the New Zealand shooter, who killed at least 49 people in
two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, claims to "have been in contact with
Breivik's sympathizers.” [From
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-15/nz-manifesto-resembles-norway-mass-murderer-s-text]
But whether or not Brenton Tarrant contacted Breivik’s followers isn’t
necessary in order to speculate that Breivik may have been the stressor to
Tarrant’s actions.
And then also, we might see a stressor, perhaps one that inspired Breivik in
the asymmetrical approach to warfare devised by the Islamists.
Does anyone have a better description of Social or psychiatric epidemiology?
Or a better explanation for the social pathology epitomized by Anders
Breivik?
Lawrence
