Soxy

Quantom Leap--hands down no questions...I miss that show every damn day. *sigh* (yes, I was nerdly even as a child.)

I am going to be at that game! I am very excited to see Neal pitch--and I hope he does well. Should be interesting and exciting!

Playa, I didn't know you were so wild for a man in uniform!

I'm very sorry for your loss--and sorry that your company isn't respectful of the grieving process. Take care of yourself.

Or is it a hoax? Hoax? And as mentioned in one of the articles--there is no Annette Spargas at UC-Berkeley, much less in their NOW chapter.

Have a fabulous day!

Happy birthday BeGood--you're last birthday in high school! HURRAY! Have a good one!, and Be Good!

I alternate between soda and pop--and when I am feeling super wild and crazy I call it soda-pop.

Shoot lots of places do "Cow Bingo" honestly, it's not that crazy...

0, but I'm going to 3 this weekend (Fri-Sun)...

My last post on this topic: The statement that pedophiles use pornography does not PROVE that makes them pedophiles. Are men heterosexual because they look at "straight" porn or do they look at straight porn because they are heterosexual? This question is silly because while you might get correlation (like heterosexual men liking to see naked ladies) you will never prove causation (heterosexual men are heterosexual BECAUSE they look at naked ladies). Any inference to the contrary is bad science.

DSM IV infor on diagnosis This adds to Ghost's links on how to diagnosis (properly) pedophilia. The DSM IV is the MOST authoritative source on how professionals properly diagnose a pedophile.

One of my best friends and I went and saw Mean Girls today--oh my gosh! We were laughing the whole time and grabbing each other and saying, "So true!" It was a really great kinda fluff, kinda point movie. Oh man, I almost laughed my pants off. Anyone seen any good movies they want to recommend?

That was the most confusing and frightening thing I have ever seen.

Here's an interesting article that goes and talks about that--it's an interview with a prof from West Point, the Psychologist who did the Stanford Prisoners study and some other guy. It's pretty interesting. Intersting (but disturbing) Article

Interesting question: This word was used in middle/moddern English and in middle/early English the suffix for past tense was ide--which became more regulized to ed. I would imagine that we simply didn't switch over. In fact in Old English it was often written "singed," so I would guess sing was regulated and hang was not. I would be in another 50 or 100 years hung will have become the regular past tnese very here. (Source: Oxford English Dictionary)

My current play list is: Superstition--Stevie Wonder Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)--Big & Rich Better things to do--Terri Clark All the Things she said--TaTu Sweet Caroline--Neil Diamond Girls Just Wanna Have Fun--Cyndi Lauper Toxic--Britney Spears California Love--Tupac, Dr. Dre, et al. Manic Monday--The Bangles The Real Slim Shady--Eminem With You--Jessica Simpson Lose Yourself--Eminem Cecilia--Simon and Garfunkel Crazy in Love--Beyonce None of Yo Business--Salt-N-Peppa

I posted this in another thread and thought it would be applicable here...I am in no way shape or form condeming our military personnel (nor am I condoning what happened), but this is very interesting about "regular" people in similiar situations actually quite the same way. Experiments in 1971 foreshadow abuses Situations drove subjects to do horrible things By John Schwartz New York Times News Service Published May 13, 2004 In 1971, researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks. Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts. The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things--like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. What is the distance between "normal" and "monster?" Can anyone become a torturer? Such questions have been explored over the decades by philosophers and social scientists, and they come up anew whenever shocking cases of abuse burst upon the national consciousness--whether in the interrogation room, the police station or the high school locker room. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe the averageness of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Social psychologists pursued the question more systematically, doing experiments that demonstrated the power of situations to determine human behavior. `Not surprised' Philip Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened." "I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said. At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary sex joke to humiliate them. Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day, more than a week earlier than planned. Prisons, where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards' base impulses, he said. At Stanford and in Iraq, he added, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches." To the extent that the Abu Ghraib guards acted, as some have argued, at the request of intelligence officers, other studies, performed 40 years ago by Stanley Milgram, then a psychology professor at Yale University, can also offer some explanation, researchers said. In a famous series of experiments, Milgram told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment. The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student." Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but got progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity--up to a huge 450 volts. The shock machine was a fake, however, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects, the experience was all too real. Most exhibited great anguish as they carried out the instructions. But a stunning 65 percent of the participants obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX." Emotions of war Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the prison guards in Iraq might feel that the emotions of war and the threat of terrorism gave them permission to dehumanize the prisoners. "There has been a serious, seismic change in attitude after 9/11 in the country in its attitude about torture," Strozier said, a shift that is evident in polling and in public debate. In the minds of many Americans, he said, "It's OK to torture now, to get information that will save us from terrorism." Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the lead researchers in the Stanford experiment, said prison abuses can be prevented. "The basic message of the study is that prisons are, basically, destructive environments that have to be guarded against at all times," Haney said. He added that regular training and discipline can keep prisons from degenerating into pits of abuse, but the vigilance must be constant, with outside monitoring as well. Without outsiders watching, Haney said, "what's regarded as appropriate treatment can shift over time" so "they don't realize how badly they're behaving and, as in this case, they take pictures of it. "If anything, the smiling faces in those pictures suggest a total loss of perspective--a drift in the standard of humane treatment." Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers think they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress--four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns--that the experiments are unethical.

Here's a pretty interesting article from the Trib today. It relates to this topic, and I didn't want to start a new thread: Experiments in 1971 foreshadow abuses Situations drove subjects to do horrible things By John Schwartz New York Times News Service Published May 13, 2004 In 1971, researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks. Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts. The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things--like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. What is the distance between "normal" and "monster?" Can anyone become a torturer? Such questions have been explored over the decades by philosophers and social scientists, and they come up anew whenever shocking cases of abuse burst upon the national consciousness--whether in the interrogation room, the police station or the high school locker room. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe the averageness of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Social psychologists pursued the question more systematically, doing experiments that demonstrated the power of situations to determine human behavior. `Not surprised' Philip Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened." "I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said. At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary sex joke to humiliate them. Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day, more than a week earlier than planned. Prisons, where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards' base impulses, he said. At Stanford and in Iraq, he added, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches." To the extent that the Abu Ghraib guards acted, as some have argued, at the request of intelligence officers, other studies, performed 40 years ago by Stanley Milgram, then a psychology professor at Yale University, can also offer some explanation, researchers said. In a famous series of experiments, Milgram told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment. The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student." Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but got progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity--up to a huge 450 volts. The shock machine was a fake, however, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects, the experience was all too real. Most exhibited great anguish as they carried out the instructions. But a stunning 65 percent of the participants obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX." Emotions of war Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the prison guards in Iraq might feel that the emotions of war and the threat of terrorism gave them permission to dehumanize the prisoners. "There has been a serious, seismic change in attitude after 9/11 in the country in its attitude about torture," Strozier said, a shift that is evident in polling and in public debate. In the minds of many Americans, he said, "It's OK to torture now, to get information that will save us from terrorism." Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the lead researchers in the Stanford experiment, said prison abuses can be prevented. "The basic message of the study is that prisons are, basically, destructive environments that have to be guarded against at all times," Haney said. He added that regular training and discipline can keep prisons from degenerating into pits of abuse, but the vigilance must be constant, with outside monitoring as well. Without outsiders watching, Haney said, "what's regarded as appropriate treatment can shift over time" so "they don't realize how badly they're behaving and, as in this case, they take pictures of it. "If anything, the smiling faces in those pictures suggest a total loss of perspective--a drift in the standard of humane treatment." Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers think they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress--four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns--that the experiments are unethical.

Oh, oh! I've thought of another one. She goes to my school and is really good. It's borderline Christian music (I would describe it as like thoughtful and moral). But she's really good and super nice. http://www.kristengraves.com/

They're my fave regional act: Alva Star--they might jump at the chance to get some awareness elsewhere in the States. http://www.alvastar.com/ I also know they've given similar interviews as well--and they like to play small places; plus they have a new cd coming out. Hurray! Brenda Weiler is also a really good singer also out of Minneapolis. Here's her site http://www.brendaweiler.com/indexFlash.html So, they're my pick.

*yawn* My post most certainly did not indicate that I did not understand the concept of hedonism--one of my favorite morality tales is of course, The Story of Dorian Gray. You're picking arguments just for the sake of it--and haven't added anything constructive (i.e. other than a mean retort with a morally superior attitude) and you have been quite rude to some of my favorite posters here. If those are the values that the Christian church esposes then, well, I was wrong about the Christian church. Yep, that's everything I have to say to you.

If they are teaching it along with using condoms and dental dams then STDs won't be a huge worry (still a worry, but you can have safe oral sex).

Okay, so is someone a a hedonist if I do not possess the societal view about the importance of possessions in this society and if s/he strive to live more like Jesus by rejecting those sort of norms? Or am I a hedonist for opposing the death penalty because I don't believe in retributive justice--nor its value to society? So I oppose that norm--that makes me a hedonist? You don't seem to understand the fundamental nature of personal morality or valid morality that goes against cultural norms here. If no one ever opposed the sanctioned norms and morals of a culture America would still be segregated, have slaves, and be a British colony...Morality often times means being willing to find something that you believe is right and that is often diametrically opposed to social norms.

I'm looking forward to the re-release of The Life of Brian and seeing that in the theatres....