Well, you should read comment 1 in this thread, I'll tell you that much.
How do you expect me to follow your advice when you give it in the comments, which I don't read?
It'll be a miracle if this comment is on-topic—it must be how people with split brains feel.
I thought, understandably enough, that in comment 2 what you meant is that you aren't in the practice of reading the comments, but are nonetheless aware, via some means other than reading, of the information the comments on Unfogged contained. So my suggestion in comment 3 was meant, once you became aware of its content through other means, to induce you to stray from your general custom and actually read comment 1 rather than just absorbing it, as is your usual habit, through those other means hinted at above. I recommended reading it ecause I felt that you would take genuine and sublime pleasure in the physical act of reading such a well-formed and evocative comment as comment 1 is.
Please add a "b" in the appropriate place to my above comment.
I neither read the comments nor become aware of their contents through any other means (though I am of course nonobservationally aware of the contents of my own).
That I know of, anyway. That was the point of introducing the split-brain people, who maintain for instance that they do not see something but nevertheless correctly identify it.
Please add a "b" in the appropriate place to my above comment.
Now how do you expect me to do that?
Anyway, it turns out that I am aware of the information contained in the comments by other means—in this case the means was the Great Whatsit. What I was not aware of (understandably enough, since I don't read them) was that the information was contained in the comments.
Ben your grasp of neuropathology is troublingly vague.
Now how do you expect me to do that?
I don't. I wasn't talking to you.
What I was not aware of (understandably enough, since I don't read them) was that the information was contained in the comments.
The information is contained in the comments. Now you're aware. We will adjust our expectations accordingly going forward.
Well, for instance, you might cavalierly thrust a paring knife between the hemispheres of the brain of somebody with blindsight, assuming the corpus callosum to be long-since severed.
You're taking this awful hard, m/tch/ll.
Not cavalierly, no.
Is it at least the case that severed corpora collosa sometimes lead to blindsight, even if blindsight can occur otherwise, as well?
15: Hey, you're the one with split-brain syndrome induced, no doubt, by the trauma of being pwnd so damn hard.
The amazing thing is that in person M/tch is reserved and polite.
16: no. The pathology of split brain is somewhat different, and requires a specific experimental setup (splitting the visual field) for it to be observed. Damage to V1 is generally behind blindsight.
It is true that split brain patients will sometimes claim not to have seen something they've only seen with one eye.
It is true that split brain patients will sometimes claim not to have seen something they've only seen with one eye.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
18: I hired an actor to meet you, ben.
I fed the actor lines through a headset. I was afraid you would laugh at my long nose otherwise.
m/tch/ll
This, I assume, is short for Mai-tai-chi-chi-bitch has fallen down the well.
I was afraid you would laugh at my long nose
Speaking of Jews and jokes.
23: That's another reason I sent an actor: I was stuck in that damn well.
the other day i listened to the podcast which said that the mental events are not the brain activity only, but the whole body affair, like you feel cold and respond, without the skin you wouldn't feel cold therefore maybe become sad and then take actions to avoid cold etc
and their principle of the higher order of things being restricted by the lower ones where very similar to what i thought about chaos and order
they illustrated it like for example letters give unlimited number of words and words - unlimited number of sentences, but the sentences are restricted by words and words by finite number of letters
but if to listen longer to it, the podcast would maybe talk about creationism, and soul, because the podcaster said as if people studying only the brain are reductionist and materialists and something about body being the sit of soul, i didn't get it further
Nu, so you could give it an Ambien.
I thought, understbndably enough, that in bomment 2 what you meant is that you aren't in the bbactice of reabing thb commentb, bub are nonetheless aware, via some means other than reading, ob the information the comments on Bnfobged contained. So my suggestion in comment 3 was meant, once you became aware of its content tbrough other means, to bnduce you to stray from your general custom and actually read comment 1 rather than bust absorbing it, as is your usual habit, through those other means hinted at abobe. I recommended reading it ecause I felt that you bould tabe genuine and subbibe pleasure ib the phbsical act bf reading such a well-formed and evocative comment as comment 1 is.
Jesurgislac has a terrible cold at the moment.
He wab jubt foblowbng directionb.
I pasted the comment into a Word document and did a Find/Replace in order, replacing the first instance of a with b, he first instance of c following the first instance of a with b, and so on through the alphabet.
I had a bad cold in January.
I am not, in fact, male, even though I am nerdly weird and obsessive.
Is not Jesurgislac, in fact, a strange woman who lies in ponds?
Oops on the gender error. And I thought there might be a pattern.
35: Jes does indeed exhibit a robust pattern of not being male.
Based on what I know now, with all due respect, Jes is no basis for a system of government. Though I could be wrong.
Jes is no basis for a system of government.
Not in ordinary times. But these are plainly not ordinary times, John.
Are you saying that it's possible that it's she, and not Obama, who is The One?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
But our aquatic ceremony would be solemn.
"Farcical" is the wrong word. "Ironic" would be better. An ostranenie kinda thing.
I'd never heard "mumser" before. I sometimes suspect yiddish-speakers of making it up as they go.
I'd never heard "mumser" before
You mean "momzer"? Means bastard. That's pretty standard old-guy Yiddish.
The "no fuck in broccoli" joke is awesome.
I love yiddish; it is a language made for bitching. They must have 500 words for different varieties of jerks.
They must have 500 words for different varieties of jerks
The Whorfian interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.
I've never actually heard someone call someone else a schmendrick; only seen it written and heard the schmuck/schmendrick/schmeiel routine.But it's a great word, if I thought I could carry it off with aplomb I'd use it all the time.
Schmeckl is my very favorite yiddish word, learned from a quirky old judge who used it liberally in reference to certain lawyers appearing before her.
You want a scary fact? My (lowpaid, state government) office has a volunteer starting work next week. Some guy whose firm shut down, and he wants to keep working even if we're not going to pay him. It's really bad out there.
52. That is seriously scary, and also a bit weird. I mean, presumably he wants to work for your outfit for free so as to maintain his resume as a lawyer (Would you have otherwise hired a paid employee? If so, he's arguably scabbing.) But he can afford to do this? For how long? Most people would look forsomething that paid a pittance, or at least gave them lunch and tips, in these circumstances - they would have to.
Would you have otherwise hired a paid employee?
Nope, we've got a hiring freeze. But you're right about how very weird it is.
I have big moral qualms with 'hiring' people who work for free [lots of people do, I imagine].
From the link in 50: These guys make me question my opposition to the death penalty.
Likewise. That's why privatizing prisons is a horrible, horrible idea. Private prisons bribing judges to jail children? Jesus.
Holy shit, that is about as sleazy as it gets.
There are whole systems of government where employees are unpaid or paid only nominally and are expected to live on tips, bribes, and extortion. You people are being culturally insensitive.
In Oregon my union included the prison guards, who got the union to support a mandatory-minimum law. The union backed off on that, but in California the prison guards union is one of the strongest lobbies in the state. There also a system of setting up prisons (often for-profit) in white areas and filling them with black criminals.
I forgot to say, in California the prison guards' union is independent, whereas in Oregon prison guards were part of the general state employees union.
but in California the prison guards union is one of the strongest lobbies in the state.
It's funny what's shocking (and I'm not shocked in the sense of being surprised, I know this is true. I'm just continuously shocked.) The prison guards union has no conceivable legitimate interest in longer or harsher sentences -- they have legitimate interests in working conditions in prisons, but their only interest in longer sentences is to make work for themselves by putting other people in jail. I find it bizarre that a legislator would listen to such lobbying without saying "You want me to lock people up in prison to create jobs!?! Get out of my office." It just seems like a position that there's no figleaf for.
Well, clearly they're just concerned citizens interested in law and order.
Yeah. I could see law and order citizen's groups being funded behind the scenes by the prison guards' union, but doing it out in the open seems so shameful.
One reason for my inveterate darkness-cursing is that while we are fighting the Republicans over the things we fight about, this whole drug war / prison for profit / tough on crime / racism / civil liberties wad of issues is never even discussed at all in serious (powerful, influential) circles. And it's enormous. We've ended up being forced to set our goals so low that small victories seem big.
Well, you know, they see these scum day in and day out. Who would better know that society needs to be protected from them?
That android video is used to show the "uncanny valley" of fake humans who are so close to real that they give people the creeps. It also comes up in animation.
65, 66, 67: What we need to do is convince the prison unions to lobby for civil liberties because that is in their interests. Prison rape? They could better prevent that with more and better paid staff! Improved conditions? Hey, that costs money and gets someone paid!
72: This is as right as a very right thing. There's decent, humane self-interested lobbying the prison guard unions could be doing.
68: The problem is all about the structure of incentives and the broken campaign finance system. Every government function that gets privatized will, under our current arrangement, eventually grow. The privatization of the government monopoly on the legitimate use of force is terrifying. The prisons are the least of it - look for Blackwater and its buddies to lobby for outsourcing of actual police work. It'll start with privatizing the really dangerous stuff like SWAT. Eventually they'll be writing traffic tickets.
That's my little vision of the road to hell, anyway.
Prison guards do not necessarily think of prison rape as a bad thing. There's inevitably collaboration between the inmates at the top of the pecking order and the guards, with all kinds of corruption.
The Arkansas State prison was run mostly by inmates doing life without parole -- only nine free employees, IIRC. That's the one where as many as 200 bodies were found in unmarked graves. Winthrop Rockefeller tried to cover uo the story and fired the guy who discovered the cemetery.
I'm glad I just googled this because I had thought that Rockefeller was a good guy in this story.
Prison guards do not necessarily think of prison rape as a bad thing.
Oh, I'm sure they don't. But if they could be persuaded that there was money to be made in preventing it, I bet they'd feel differently. And I'd much rather spend taxpayer dollars maximizing people's rights than spend it locking as many poor saps up as possible. When I did criminal defense full time, the vast majority of our clients were small-time drug offenders, the poor schmuck dealing out of a Cheetos bag on the corner. Sure, drugs are bad, yada, yada, yada. But I don't think any of us got much value in exchange for the cost of locking these guys up for years on end.
Could we make it really, really lucrative to offer more and better treatment alternatives to sentencing? Because I'd feel like I was getting more value for my tax dollars that way .
It's really odd that little-government morons are so enthusiastic about contracting out. Military contracting has been a corruption scandal forever. If government can't do anything right, how could they contract out right? We've seen tons of evidence of that with Halliburton, though nobody seems to care much.
It's weird the way anti-government people who can't reduce federal spending are happy if they're able to reorganize things in such a way that the agent-principal incentives are perverse. Why should the federal taxing power be used to raise fund for state or local governments they don't control? Why should the federal government do business with fake shell companies set up by lobbyists -- that's what Halliburton and other started as. The shell companies are just a layer of rent-seekers in front of the people doing the actual work. I've seen stories where federal contracted-out money was immediately contract-out again once and even (I think) twice.
American conservativism is bankrupt in so many ways that all this begging for "Debate with Intelligent Conservatives" shit is ludicrous. The supposedly smart conservative don't even dare confront the stupid conservatives running the show.
An enormous factor in American political history is Southern hostility to the central government. It can be dressed up to look philosophical, but it's race. For example, one alternative to Social Security* wasn't job-based, it was general welfare, and the way it was written it was colorblind and would have given aid to black Americans. The law we have was customized to leave out as many black Americans as possible. The devolution to the states idea is for the same kind of purpose -- let Mississippi control federal money spent in Mississippi.
A civilized corrections system would mean fewer jobs, no matter how you cut it.
65: You want me to lock people up in prison to create jobs!?!
Remember, government never created a single job. A lot of potentially profitable partnerships out there if you are Milo Minderbinder a glibertarian.
Firefighters/sleazeball builders
Hospitals/tobacco companies, McDonalds
Policemen/you name it
Look to the proven successful defense industry/warmonger alliance as a model! (or comment 77 for the earnest version of all of this.)
The firefighter / arsonist link is historically pretty common.
75: Also prison guards aren't generally reform oriented types, to put it mildly. You become a prison guard if you have no other job options or if you like pushing people around. It's dangerous enough that it self selects for people who like the job, since people who are just looking for a paycheck will leave if they have an equally well paid alternative.
In Togolotopia there is a direct labor tax payable by two years service when you turn 21 and 6 months every five years or so up until age 65. One of the things this labor is used for is prison guards.
* The Lundeen Bill, introduced by Minnesota's almost-forgotten Farmer-Labor Senator Lundeen. Lundeen is Jonah Goldberg's dream, and if Goldberg weren't such an ignorant fuck would have appeared in Goldberg's recent book. Lundeen was accused of being a Communist agent 1932-4 or so, and a Nazi agent in 1940. He was an isolationist, a Keynesian, a supporter of civil rights and Hawaiian statehood, a Spanish Civil War veteran, a supporter of military aviation, and he helped field-test the M1 rifle. He died in a plane crash along with two federal agents and about 20 others -- the highest aviation death count up to that time.
82: And Lundeen started his career as a Republican.
When you have a prison in your area, you can count all the prisoners in your census, but they don't get to vote, so it's a good way to have more say in who your rep is and to bring in pork.
On the subject of volunteering, that's one of the ways that career counselors recommend that people get relevant experience when they want to transition jobs. A dental hygienist who wants to transition into social services needs to volunteer for a non-profit first.
When you have a prison in your area, you can count all the prisoners in your census
Really? Wow, that's fucked up.
they (prison guards) have legitimate interests in working conditions in prisons
I go into a local state (CA) prison on a volunteer basis. It strikes me that there's a inmate welfare issue in having a higher CO/inmate ratio (guards is a word they don't like) If they're short on staff (and they seem like they are, on a regular basis), they don't let the fellas have time in the yard, etc. That can boil over.
It just seems like a position that there's no figleaf for.
If the US didn't completely give up on some such fig leaves under Reagan, it wasn't much later.
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