Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2011

“Medicalizing” bad behaviour to avoid guilt

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Frank Furedi looks at a disturbing ongoing phenomenon in western society: the “medicalization” of bad behaviour:

The rebranding of promiscuity as sex addiction is not confined to Britain. Throughout Europe and the US the numbers of sex addicts is said to be on the rise. Anthony Weiner has recently been diagnosed — by the media and self-styled experts at least — as a ‘sex addict’. Following the revelation that he sent rude pictures of himself to various women online, Weiner has been widely depicted as a sick man. ‘He needs treatment’, one expert told the Associated Press, because apparently, without help, ‘sex addicts’ can go ‘completely out of control and destroy their lives’.

[. . .]

Lust, infidelity, betrayal and the drive for sexual domination have always presented a challenge to a society’s grammar of morality. However, the contemporary conflation of a bad habit with a medical problem is symptomatic of the difficulty that Western societies now have in making moral judgments about human behaviour. Sometimes, even people who claim to possess religious convictions find it difficult to ascribe guilt to immoral behaviour. That is why behaviour that was once denounced as sinful is now increasingly discussed through the language of therapy rather than the language of morality.

[. . .]

The problem with this recycling of bad habits and degrading behaviour as medical problems is not simply that it fails to hold people to account for the choices they make and the consequences that their actions have. Yes, a lot of people — including celebrities such as Keith Urban, Tiger Woods, Michael Douglas and Lindsay Lohan — can present themselves as victims of an addiction rather than as lecherous and self-regarding individuals.

But the real problem is the message that this diseasing of human behaviour sends to all of us. The fashionable label of ‘addictive personality’ encourages people to acquiesce to their worst instincts in a quite fatalistic way. Addicts are portrayed as victims of circumstances beyond their control: they are literally counselled to accept powerlessness as the defining feature of their existences. Sexaholics Anonymous mimics the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step that a sex addict takes on the road to sexual sobriety is to admit that ‘we were powerless over lust’.

What is a balance-sheet recession?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Stephen Gordon has some really nasty looking diagrams explaining just what a balance sheet recession looks like:

I had never heard the expression “balance-sheet recession” before this recent episode, and it’s time I got around to a comparison of the household balance sheets of the US and Canada. Of all my “Canada is not the US” posts, this is the one that makes me most grateful.

The quarterly data goes back to 1990, and it’s good to put the last few years in context. I’ve scaled all the series by price (the consumption spending deflator) and population. Here is the net worth series:

There’s been talk of a Japan-like ‘lost decade’ in the US; that seems optimistic. US real per capita net worth is back to what it was back in 1999.

More (and somewhat scarier) diagrams at the original post. It doesn’t even finish on a high note:

The US data go back to 1952, so I was able to check the last time the real, per capita value of US housing equity was at its current level. Even after looking at all of these graphs, the answer astonished me: 1978. Nineteen seventy-freaking-eight.

QotD: Who’s more smug than Bono? The “Bono Pay Up” protesters

Filed under: Africa, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

[T]he Bono Pay Up lobby, far from challenging Bono’s gobsmackingly paternalistic attitude towards Africa, is encouraging him to put his money where his mouth is. Its message is effectively: Stop talking about saving Africa and go out and actually save it! The campaign group claims that it is because of individuals like Bono, who export bits of their business overseas in order to avoid paying high taxes at home, that Africa is a mess. Some of that tax could be used for the foreign aid budget, you see. Not only is this a spectacularly naïve view of the massive structural problems facing underdeveloped nations in the Third World — as if their woes could be magically fixed by Bono and others stumping up a bit more tax — but it also suggests, explicitly, that it is up to rich white men to save downtrodden Africa.

According to Bono Pay Up, if Bono paid his taxes in a more “ethical” fashion, he could help to alleviate “suffering in the developing world”. Unless the protesters succeed in shifting Bono’s personal habits, “the poor will always be with us”, they claim. In short, all it takes for the poor to be lifted up from their empty-stomached, teary-eyed existences is for a few good men — white ones, naturally — to behave more ethically and caringly. It’s the White Tax Man’s Burden. In focusing on Bono’s alleged hypocrisy, the protesters are actually trying to bridge the gap between the Bono persona (saviour of Africa) and the Bono reality (he pays his taxes in a weird way). That is, they want him to become what he claims to be — the Moral Viceroy of Africa — and to show the Dark Continent how to reach the light. A plague on both their houses. If there are any African bands playing at Glastonbury I hope they lay into the Bono Pay Up lobby, and then use its silly placards to wallop Bono.

Brendan O’Neill, “The ‘Bono Pay Up’ protesters have achieved the remarkable feat of being even more smug than Bono”, The Telegraph, 2011-06-22

Carr: LulzSec versus the CIA

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Paul Carr is somewhat dismissive of the hacking exploits of the LulzSec group:

For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group’s targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: “we’re doing it for laughs”, or, to put it in internet parlance, “lulz”.

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic — a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a mentally subnormal monkey could launch a DDoS attack — except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

Salmon: Just how much alcohol is in that wine?

Filed under: Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:37

This is an interesting news snippet: for several years, many winemakers have been under-reporting the alcohol levels of their wine:

Essentially, people like to think of themselves as sophisticates who go to art-house movies, even if in reality they’re much more likely to sit slack-jawed in front of some reality TV show. In the case of wine, they like the idea of buying something grown-up, with a relatively modest amount of alcohol; when it comes to drinking what’s inside, however, the more heat the better. So wine labels consistently show lower alcohol content than what’s inside.

This is especially true in the new world. Out of 43,908 tested new world wines, 24,561 under-reported their alcohol content, with the reds averaging 14.1% alcohol while claiming just 13.6%, and the whiles averaging 13.5% while claiming to be 13.1%.

Interestingly, the smaller number of wines which either over-reported their alcohol content or got it exactly right all reported pretty much the same levels of alcohol: 13.1% or 13.2% for whites, and 13.6% or 13.7% for reds. On average, it seems, wine will just say that it’s 13% if it’s white and 13.5% if it’s red, but in reality it’s likely to be higher than that.

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