Is Evil Impotent or Virile?

[BaalChatzaf]

Whether they profit from their enterprise or not, criminals (killers, bank robbers, slave-owners, mafia bosses, et. al.) are the most miserable people on earth.

How do you know how they feel? Can you tap into their brain activity (other than observing their external behavior)?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

My take on Rand's statement is that 1. It dismisses the basic Judaeo-Christian concept of evil and good as omnipresent entities fighting for man's soul 2. It posits evil as an anomaly, not as man's rightful and proper state 3. As a result, evil has little chance of success, IF we don't fear it, or 'over-respect' it.

Psychologically, once we fear something, we have already accepted it. (As I read it.)

Rather, one should be realistically aware of its potential, respect its danger only sufficiently, and confront it uncompromisingly in its most innocuous early stages - often, at a one-on-one level.

'Moral judgement', iow - and its most effective and realistic outlet is to candidly and tirelessly judge the ideas, not the individual holding them. (As I have to remind myself, at times!)

For the rest, I agree, rather live for the good, and constructive, instead of against the evil and destructive: the example rubs off on people (and Nations) around one.

Complicity (as Dennis writes) and complacency (Michael) are the symptoms of compromise and wilful unawareness, which both bear out evil's essential impotence - for largely rational people.

Tony

[Brant Gaede]

Brant,

As I said (or maybe implied), the "metaphysically there" frame is Rand's not mine. She made evil "metaphysically there" so it could be virile or impotent, then called it impotent. How can anything be impotent if it isn't "metaphysically there"?

I usually don't think in such terms anymore. Now, good and evil to me are essential parts of morality, which I derive from human nature. Nothing less, but nothing more. And I agree with Rand that morality is "a code of values to guide man's choices." Principles. Good and evil are the end points of a degree scale for measuring values--with man's nature as the standard. They will be with us as long as morality is with us, which means as long as humans have a specific nature.

Good and evil are not actual metaphysical forces that can be virile or impotent.

But let's look at your disagreement with "my" proposition (when I use Rand's framework).

Will you use the same standard for Rand? In other words, does this mean you believe the expression "evil is impotent" is basically meaningless?

Michael

Can you give me the reference for "metaphysically there"? I'd like to read it before saying anything more.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

It's a conceptual presumtion. When you say a person walked to the store, you presume he has legs.

When you say that evil is impotent, you presume it exists.

If it didn't exist, it couldn't be potent or impotent.

That makes it "metaphysically there."

(I'm just doing the logic. I'm not saying I agree with evil as some kind of force.)

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Brant,

It's a conceptual presumtion. When you say a person walked to the store, you presume he has legs.

When you say that evil is impotent, you presume it exists.

If it didn't exist, it couldn't be potent or impotent.

That makes it "metaphysically there."

(I'm just doing the logic. I'm not saying I agree with evil as some kind of force.)

Michael

Taken literally "evil is impotent" makes no sense for it's just a shortcut way of speaking actually meaning people who do evil are impotent. Evil is not metaphysically there like a dark force waiting to descend and destroy us all for lack of virtue and righteousness such as was depicted in The Fifth Element or that Star Trek movie where they had to save the whale to save the world.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For tyrants to sustain their domination of their people for very long they need either outside help or the complicity of their victims.

Dennis,

I agree with this, but I do not find it to be a fundamental component of good and evil. If it were, you would not be able to turn it around and apply it to good. For example:

For producers to sustain their domination of their people for very long they need either outside help or the complicity of their customers.

That's true, too. Both need other people. So while your statement is true, it is not a distinguishing characteristic of evil, like destruction is. (I.e., you can't destroy something and produce it at the same time. But you can destroy something simply to destroy it as an evil act. This makes it a distinguishing characteristic from good.)

Anyway, once again, I do not believe evil or good exist in a vacuum. Evil always comes with good and the possibility of more good around it, and good always comes with evil and the possibility of more evil around it. We have volition so we can choose which we prefer at the time. We use moral principles to help in that choice.

If there were no possibility for an evil choice, there would be no morality.

... slavery was made possible by the willingness of a lot of otherwise intelligent, productive people, such as statesmen and lawmakers, who were willing to support it or look the other way. Without their support and complicity, it could not have lasted as long as it did.

This is an example of presentism (applying modern standards to ancient thinking). When you say "slavery," you are talking about the vast majority of human history.

For centuries and centuries, people simply didn't think slavery was bad. So they had nothing to "look the other way" about. They didn't see slavery as you and I do.

It's not like they thought, "Slavery is bad, but I get so many economic benefits from it, I will not think about the moral implications." They looked at slaves and thought, "This is the way things are."

Slavery in ancient times was merely the extension of "rulers and the ruled" metaphysics that comes as an outgrowth of our tribal primate nature. (I call this midbrain or neomammalian brain morality.) Valuing the individual as an end in himself (or as an equally loved child of God for the thinking of yesteryear and the religious folks today) is a very recent phenomenon in human history.

Notice that even at the historical start of this notion (individualism), the "rulers and the ruled" metaphysics was the default. The ancient Jews considered themselves as "the chosen people" and slavery was the norm back then.

Individualism is a neocortex thing and it had to evolve just as the neocortex itself did.

A leash is a hangman’s rope with a noose at both ends, as Ayn Rand said. Coercion does not create a properly human mode of existence, and destroys the lives, well-being and happiness of all those involved in it. That is the sense in which it is inherently destructive.

Whether they profit from their enterprise or not, criminals (killers, bank robbers, slave-owners, mafia bosses, et. al.) are the most miserable people on earth.

I would love to believe this, but I have lived among the ones you call "the most miserable people on earth." When I came out of drugs, I did a spell in the underworld. I'm not proud of that, but that's what I did.

My experience--what I saw with my own two eyes--did not reflect the "miserable people" notion at all.

It's true that I did see some miserable people, but I also saw other people persuing power to the point of killing and plundering others to get it, and basking in it like lizard on a sunny afternoon once they got it.

You couldn't find happier people.

So I can either go with a romatic notion about how they should have been miserable, or I can go with my own two eyes and call them rotten SOB's who had no moral right to the happiness they exhibited.

I'll go with my eyes.

I do believe that morality plays a role in psychology, but I don't believe it causes happiness and unhappiness to the degree Rand's romantic notion of what should be implies.

Michael

[anthony]

Brant,

Reminds me of my English master marking my essays : "Too flowery, Garland!"

(guess he thought he was very punny.)

Yes, Rand mixed a lot of art into her philosophy, and philosophy into her art.

Impotent is metaphorical as you indicate.

[Brant Gaede]

Apropos what Dennis said, Rand said, "A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends." The Fountainhead.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Apropos what Dennis said, Rand said, "A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends." The Fountainhead.

Brant,

Let's look into this.

One of the places I have seen this phrase used is with prison guards at Nazi concentration camps. Most became miserable. Many became alcoholics. This is all documented.

But my question is the following. Were they miserable because they held a leash and the evil caused their unhappiness, or was it because they knew that what they were doing to other human beings was evil and this conflicted with another value they held as the good (the Nazi philosophy and organization)?

Here's another facet with another question. Primates do a great deal by imitation. When you are around people who are screaming in agony for long stretches at a time, isn't it possible that some of your misery comes from the imitation impulse and not good versus evil?

Paul Ekman was a scientist who mapped facial muscles to emotions. (His work is used not only used by other scientists, it is very popular in Hollywood.) One of the ways he mapped the muscles was learning how to contract isolated muscles in his own face and watching himself in a mirror. As there are a lot of muscles in the face, this took a long time to get right.

He reported that for him and the people involved in doing this, whenever they worked on "happy" muscles, they had great days. Whenever they worked on negative emotion muscles, they felt lousy for hours on end after work.

We have mirror neurons, so when we see misery--especially the facial muscles in others expressing misery, we feel down. Notice how laughter is contagious and how a loudmouthed hostile jerk can destroy the good vibes at a gathering in an instant. These are all examples of mirror neurons working.

So isn't it more correct to say that being around misery, not necessarily being at one end of a leash, is one of the main causes for the noose Rand talked about?

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Factually I can only say to this, Michael, is the story of an Argentina torturer. To torture people sadism is not the orientation, simply doing your job is, which probably has a lot to do with obedience to authority. The essence of such obedience is that any moral issue resides in the authority figure.

When I was in the army, interrogation was demonstrated using three subjects in simulated POW conditions. Electricity was used. This was in front of scores and scores of trainee witnesses. The interrogated could not see the audience. They thought they were alone with the interrogator in a rather large room. They were actually on a stage. So we watched these interrogations and the trainees were suffering real pain. Finally, the last guy got really pissed off and ripped himself out of his restraints and started destroying the apparatus. When he came down into the audience we all cheered. We had been "POWs" for a little too long for our taste and we loved the payback.

The reason I tell this tale is to illustrate that as a young man I would have been unable to do what Milgram's subjects did by ratcheting up the juice but another type of obedience to authority experiment would have caught me up. Just out of the army I was very vulnerable to obedience to authority and had to train myself out it. One of the aids to doing that was reading about Milgram. Today I am almost completely invulnerable to it. I say "almost" because I want to always be on guard because you never know when one of these authority guys will show up or in what guise.

Now the story first alluded to: This torturer tortured his way through victim after victim until the day came and he found out the next subject was an acquaintance of his. That made him think and realize about what was really going on and he stopped being a torturer. I don't give him much credit for that, but like critical thinking--not taught in schools--disobedience to authority is also not taught in schools. It all starts with doing what Mom and Dad then the teacher then what most adults are about relative to you. I think a lot of kids intuitively recognize this and start in with various delinquent behaviors.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

To torture people sadism is not the orientation, simply doing your job is, which probably has a lot to do with obedience to authority. The essence of such obedience is that any moral issue resides in the authority figure.

Brant,

Bingo.

But there is a moral part that belongs to the person following the authority figure. You, yourself mentioned you trained yourself to resist and now keep viligent. That's a moral posture.

But exercising full in-focus choice, especially under stress, is a lot harder--sometimes a hell of a lot harder--for the follower than the leader. This means the follower is a lot more vulnerable to manipulation than the authority figure is.

This is something I believe we should teach our children as part of their moral learning.

I, also, believe this kind of focus is highly effective and has much more to do with reality than attributing impotence to evil. You can test it. You can break it down into steps and teach it and grade the learning. And you can change it in yourself gradually like all higher cognitive learning has to be--instead of accepting the demand that you have a good/evil on/off switch that makes you feel guilty as all hell when you can't keep it on.

(Shades of Ben Franklin with his little lists and dots!)

Rand's way of giving her villains a secondary role and making the main drama between clashing interests/understandings of heroes makes for great and interesting literature because you find this in life, too. And nobody does it in fiction. You can use this plot configuration even to illustrate a controversial theme like "evil is impotent," i.e., as a focus on a universal human condition permeating the story. But I don't see the mere use of this device proving that "evil is impotent." Atlas Shrugged certainly didn't prove it to me.

If you do use "evil is impotent" as a structural theme for how you plot your work, though (like Rand did), you can make it really interesting by examining the theme from different angles. I get this impression from AS much more for the "evil is impotent" theme than Rand making a solid case. She makes you think about it, question long-held notions, and open your mind to seeing stuff about evil you didn't see before.

(btw - That's a valid way to use a theme and aspiring writers who want to write Objectivist type fiction would do well to ponder this instead of going for raw in-your-face preaching all the time, or presenting one-dimensional characters who do nothing but one-dimensional acts.)

Different angles is how I see Rand did it and that's good enough for me. (I know she said she did it differently, but I see what I see.) That's plenty, actually. That's much more than I get from most fiction works by other authors. I don't need--and could not agree with--a come-to-Jesus-and-convert moment for that theme. Not from reading AS. Not in light of what I have seen in life. And not from Rand's later asseverations (a word I learned from you).

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

For the record, I don't let any torturer morally off the hook because of obedience to authority.

--Brant

[Peter]

Brant wrote:

disobedience to authority is also not taught in schools.

end quote

That is insightful Brant. Or should I say incite-ful? Should it be taught in schools? I think it should. Another word for it could be patriotism, or love of “the rational and good.”

Michael wrote:

But exercising full in-focus choice, especially under stress, is a lot harder--sometimes a hell of a lot harder--for the follower than the leader. This means the follower is a lot more vulnerable to manipulation than the authority figure is. This is something I believe we should teach our children as part of their moral learning.

end quote

Amen. Applaud the person who stands up for what is right. Congratulate the man who thinks twice, and risks his life, before shooting through the hostage to get the bank robber.

Peter

[Dennis Hardin]

For tyrants to sustain their domination of their people for very long they need either outside help or the complicity of their victims.

Dennis,

I agree with this, but I do not find it to be a fundamental component of good and evil. If it were, you would not be able to turn it around and apply it to good. For example:

For producers to sustain their domination of their people for very long they need either outside help or the complicity of their customers.

That's true, too. Both need other people. So while your statement is true, it is not a distinguishing characteristic of evil, like destruction is. (I.e., you can't destroy something and produce it at the same time. But you can destroy something simply to destroy it as an evil act. This makes it a distinguishing characteristic from good.)

Michael,

It is a fundamental component in the sense that a free nation could very easily survive without outside assistance and does not “victimize” its citizens. A free nation needs citizens—but it does not need “foreign aid” in the form of money and it does not need the people it is “dominating” to cooperate—because it does not “dominate” them.

... slavery was made possible by the willingness of a lot of otherwise intelligent, productive people, such as statesmen and lawmakers, who were willing to support it or look the other way. Without their support and complicity, it could not have lasted as long as it did.

This is an example of presentism (applying modern standards to ancient thinking). When you say "slavery," you are talking about the vast majority of human history.

For centuries and centuries, people simply didn't think slavery was bad. So they had nothing to "look the other way" about.

I was specifically addressing slavery in America, which a great many people did recognize as immoral at the time and which a great many political leaders wanted to abolish. I agree with you that what I said would not apply to the era before the industrial revolution, but I was not speaking of earlier times.

A leash is a hangman’s rope with a noose at both ends, as Ayn Rand said. Coercion does not create a properly human mode of existence, and destroys the lives, well-being and happiness of all those involved in it. That is the sense in which it is inherently destructive.

Whether they profit from their enterprise or not, criminals (killers, bank robbers, slave-owners, mafia bosses, et. al.) are the most miserable people on earth.

I would love to believe this, but I have lived among the ones you call "the most miserable people on earth." When I came out of drugs, I did a spell in the underworld. I'm not proud of that, but that's what I did.

My experience--what I saw with my own two eyes--did not reflect the "miserable people" notion at all.

It's true that I did see some miserable people, but I also saw other people persuing power to the point of killing and plundering others to get it, and basking in it like lizard on a sunny afternoon once they got it.

You couldn't find happier people.

Michael

I’m a little surprised you would say that.

You have lived among them. I have sat next to them as they bared their souls.

As a professional therapist, I can tell you that people may appear happy on the surface when they are, in fact, absolutely miserable. Also, people have a remarkable ability to hypnotize themselves into thinking everything is hunky-dory—and will tell you so--when any real inspection of their lives reveals the exact opposite. They compartmentalize their suffering, in effect.

Neither one of us can prove our case here, because we are both talking about personal experience. But your reference to your prior experience with drugs is quite significant. Statistics reveal that most criminals are also abusers of drugs. They absolutely abhor living in and dealing with reality. That fact alone tells you that these people are miserable. And you will not find any professional therapist or drug counselor on the face of the earth who would say otherwise.

[Brant Gaede]

Maybe a case for the impotence of evil (ideology) with a lot of black swans (empiricism).

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

You have lived among them. I have sat next to them as they bared their souls.

Dennis,

I suspect we have known very different kinds of people. I presume that those who end up on a therapist's couch are seeking help. The ones I have known were perfectly happy with who they were and what they did for a living. Not all, of course. I have a few specific individuals in mind when I say this.

Statistics reveal that most criminals are also abusers of drugs. They absolutely abhor living in and dealing with reality. That fact alone tells you that these people are miserable.

Most criminals?

What statistics?

And how on earth does one poll criminals who are not in jail? From what I have seen, most criminals have not been caught. How do you identify those folks with enough precision to know they are criminals so you can poll them? And even if you can do that, how do you get them agree to be polled?

In the underworld I saw, druggies were considered as losers and pushed away from the real criminals. Druggies were often called jailbait--or customers. (Except I rarely heard that last one because I stayed away from drug dealers for obvious reasons. I was getting clean.)*

Hell, even when I was a serious drug user at my craziest, I knew enough to NEVER buy off of dealers used drugs. That was a sure fire way to get ripped off.

Besides, the dealers I saw who used drugs didn't last long. I should call them aspiring criminals, not the real deal. They either died or went to jail before much time passed.

Michael

* As an exception, there is an interesting drug dealer I did get to know back then. He was a very dangerous man--a major player--who had killed many in people in protecting his turf. We were going to write a book together. They said back then that you couldn't stop using crack once you started. They also said you couldn't walk away from being a major drug dealer once you were in. We were going to do a book that proved you get out of both.

And the only reason this guy wanted to stop wasn't because he was "miserable." He wanted to find something else to do because he became a famous gangster and this made him a favorite target of the police. His business was going down the tubes.

We never did the book. The reason was kind of funny, too. He quit the project, not me. I got attracted to a pyramid scheme and tried to get him into it--as an investment opportunity.

What on earth was I thinking? If that dude had gotten in and lost his money, I wouldn't be here. I know that for a fact.

But things obviously worked out. When he saw I actually believed in the con (I wasn't the smartest soul riding on the back of the turnip truck at that time since my brains were still a bit fried), he lost respect for me and moved on.

Whew!

Looking from where I'm at now, I was blessed to be so dumb during that phase.

[Dennis Hardin]

Michael,

I’m very glad that you survived that phase in your life. I don’t have to tell you how many people never overcome their drug dependency and eventually die from an overdose or wind up with their lives in ruins.

Stanton Samenow, a well-known expert and researcher on the criminal personality, demonstrates clearly the extent to which criminals rely upon drugs to get them through life in Inside the Criminal Mind. He explains how drugs help criminals to maintain their irresponsible lifestyles and shows how this lifelong behavior pattern develops from childhood. Throughout his decades of research he has found drug use among criminals to be the rule, not the exception.

Here is a citation from the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse:

Abstract

The present study investigated the relationship between crime and substance abuse in a sample of 133 consecutively evaluated male prisoners. Using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R, we assessed the prevalence of various forms of substance abuse in this population and attempted to judge whether substance abuse played a role in the index crime which has led to the present incarceration... Among the 133 prisoners, 95% obtained a diagnosis of dependence on one or more substances. Fifty-eight percent of the inmates reported that they were acutely intoxicated with one or more substances at the time they committed the index crime. . .

Kouri, Elena M, Drug use history and criminal behavior among 133 incarcerated men

And another citation from the National Institute on Drug Abuse:

In its 1997 survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that about 70 percent of State and 57 percent of Federal prisoners used drugs regularly prior to incarceration (Mumola, 1999).

There are plenty of other studies that show that a very high percentage of criminals abuse drugs. These are just not happy people.

They also do not typically seek treatment, because their anti-social personalities resist any sort of genuine therapeutic interaction. They go to therapists either because they are court-ordered to do so or because they hope that attending therapy will convnce the world they have reformed. So the statistics are not skewed based on the individual criminal's unique level of discontent.

The criminal mentality is able to enjoy mindless, range-of-the-moment "pleasures"--the sort of mind-numbing activities that enable him to escape his chronic sense of futility and self-doubt. But he can achieve nothing remotely resembling a satisfying life.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dennis,

Thanks for the Samenow reference. I looked him up and I am getting some of his books.

I wasn't too convinced by your statistics, though. Especially the 57% of prinsoners who had used drugs prior to conviction. From what I have lived, it seems like about 57% of all people have experimented with drugs at one time or another. That's a far cry from being a drug abuser. So attributing that statistic to criminals as something that distinguishes criminals from non-criminals doesn't convince me. I could say that 100% of all criminals are people, too, but that doesn't tell me much about criminals.

In the other statistic you quoted, 58% were severely intoxicated at the time they committed the crime. Is it any wonder they were caught?

I have two "for the records":

1. Just to be clear, I have been writing openly about my passages through addiction and the underworld since 2005. I suddenly don't know if you are aware of that because I get the impression that this is new to you. But in what little public name I have, I am known by this theme in some of my writing.

2. I am not defending criminals in any way. I am merely reporting what I have seen. I have discovered the hard way the consequences of ignoring the evidence of my own eyes. I refuse to do that anymore. This has been part of my trouble here in O-Land.

Getting back to criminals, I have known people totally without a conscience. The popular terms for them are psychopaths and sociopaths. But I don't like these terms because they hint at mental disturbance. The ones I have known, including some who were criminals, were not disturbed in the slightest. They were simply missing a moral compass and any sense of guilt for harming others.

One of my ex-girlfriends characterized one of them with the following phrase right after she met him. She said, pretending to be him and pretending like she was swaggering, "I'm corrupt and I'm happy."

I cracked up because it was so spot on it was undeniable, and I had not seen it up to that point. At the time, I operated under the conviction that morally corrupt people had to be miserable underneath (and I was watching out for that in myself). They just had to be. But this guy enjoyed great health, slept like a baby, was always laughing and joking, did not use drugs and rarely drank alcohol, and erected an entire building from scratch based on an idea in his head and I don't believe one centavo of honest money went into paying for it.

Do I think one should become that way? Obviously not. What's more, these are terrible people to be around, especially if you do have a conscience. They hurt people all the time and it's hard to look at that.

But do I believe that they will be unhappier of I sit back and say they are miserable? Nope. Not that guy nor the people like him I've known. They give every indication of being perfectly fine and happy with the way they are.

And most of the ones I knew--including the criminals--did not use drugs in the manner you described. They would do things like have a couple of beers while watching a soccer match. And that's about as far as they would go.

There is one thing on which I believe we will agree. I was attracted to the underworld in coming out of drugs because those were the kinds of people I had to deal with to get drugs when I was an active user. And I always had in the back of my mind the "noble bandit" of Ayn Rand like Guts Regan. So I went looking for him. I looked and I looked and I looked and I did not find him. I did find people who would sell out their own mothers, though. For cheap at that (including the dude I mentioned above). I believe that is a general characteristic of criminals. But I'm only basing this on my own experience.

Who knows? Maybe the noble bandit is out there. I know I don't care anymore. I'm no longer willing to swim in a sewer to find a diamond.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Michael, there may be compartmentalization going on with the bad guys who you've just described, plus learned behavior re-enforcing itself. I mean if they cared about anybody, in an affectionate loving way, that could be a clue to that.

Dennis: There doesn't seem to be a control group respecting your referred to statistics nor was there too much critical examination of the data--see Michael above--in your representation to us. I understand how some simplification could be desirable for the transliteration.

--Brant

[Dennis Hardin]

Dennis: There doesn't seem to be a control group respecting your referred to statistics nor was there too much critical examination of the data--see Michael above--in your representation to us. I understand how some simplification could be desirable for the transliteration.

--Brant

Brant--So sorry my post did not meet your rigorous standards.

I should have known better than to try to put one over on you.

[Brant Gaede]

Dennis: There doesn't seem to be a control group respecting your referred to statistics nor was there too much critical examination of the data--see Michael above--in your representation to us. I understand how some simplification could be desirable for the transliteration.

--Brant

Brant--So sorry my post did not meet your rigorous standards.

I should have known better than to try to put one over on you.

I don't appreciate nor did I deserve the sarcasm. Please stop.

--Brant

[Dennis Hardin]

Dennis: There doesn't seem to be a control group respecting your referred to statistics nor was there too much critical examination of the data--see Michael above--in your representation to us. I understand how some simplification could be desirable for the transliteration.

--Brant

Brant--So sorry my post did not meet your rigorous standards.

I should have known better than to try to put one over on you.

I don't appreciate nor did I deserve the sarcasm. Please stop.

--Brant

I thought it was a lame comment, Brant.

"There doesn't seem to be a control group respecting your referred to statistics nor was there too much critical examination of the data"

I'm sorry I didn't have the time to break down the data for you in intricate detail. I gave you the links so you could do it for yourself. I'll be sure not to submit any stats where there is no control group from now on.

Give me a freakin' break.

Is that non-sarcastic enough for you?

[Brant Gaede]

I wasn't impressed with the links.

Drug companies have myriad links to not worthless studies (to them) to benefit their salesmen selling possibly worthless if not dangerous drugs like Lipitor to incompetent doctors.

Where are the comparative statistics for people NOT incarcerated? The double-blind studies?

Who paid for what studies? Where were they published? Was that "Journal" a refereed publication?

How many of the 133 prisoners were recidivists? Maybe many first-timers were driven to drugs by prison?

--Brant

etc., etc., etc.

[Selene]

Brant asks the proper questions to evaluate any "study" that is offered as proof, or evidence, to support an argument.

I would stress this in my courses on rhetoric, argumentation, or, debate until I even got sick of hearing me say it.

Folks are much too sloppy in accepting a "study," or a report of a study, without investigating the internals. the methodological model, the statistical methodology employed and the funding sources of the study, or, report.

Adam

[Brant Gaede]

Thank you, Adam.

--Brant