One thing to note about Weinstein: his downfall came after the release of this movie "Tulip Fever," which was a running joke in Hollywood for being in post-production hell for like four years. He'd stopped being an awards/hit maker, and that's when they hung him out to dry. #MeToo, like so many other things, was in large part a thinly-veiled jobs-creation/turnover program.
Yes. He was getting old and the hits weren’t coming anymore. If he was still killing it at the box office and with people’s careers, he would have been fine, that’s the crazy part to me.
Horribly bad take from Meghan, suggesting that maybe it's better to shoot a puppy (out of mostly malice in this case), than to re-home it. Yes, there are absolutely cases where there are very valid arguments to be made for euthanasia for pets. This is NOT one of those examples. Noem didn't even TRY to re-home the dog, she just murdered it, then was having so much fun she decided to also kill a goat for smelling bad (btw, yeah adult male goats pee on themselves during mating season). I know plenty of rural/farm people, and most of them would NEVER do what she did to that puppy! This whole "we can't possibly understand life on a ranch" is total bullshit.
I was so disgusted by that argument - both morally and intellectually, that I turned off the rest of the podcast. (Usually I just listen along and argue/agree out loud with Meghan and Sarah.)
There's absolutely no correlation between prey drive in dogs and human aggression. Dogs have been domesticated for what at least appears to be thousands of years to not be human aggressive. (That doesn't mean there's no such thing a human-aggressive dog. But a drive to go after small animals like chickens or squirrels is in absolutely no way correlated with that.)
1. Animal shelters will warn you about that. For my last dog I had to sign papers acknowledging my dog had behavioral problems.
2. If no one adopts, they will euthanize it.
I grew up on a farm with dogs and chickens, and we had a dog that killed a couple of chickens. In fact, it was a hunting dog (pointer). We trained it not to.
When that dog got old, lame, blind and in pain, my father shot it. He did that one other time, a puppy that had been horibly injured in a fight with another dog.
I find it interesting that Meghan is more charitable towards Harvey Weinstein and Brock Turner than I am, as someone who’s actually advocated on the Hill regarding false accusations. At least in Weinstein’s case, my impression is that the way the other witnesses were used against him is an egregious due process violation, but that he is being retried and can still be convicted even if the prosecutors don’t cheat. Maybe I’m just like Sarah and I don’t want to fight on this one.
The lesson to me from this case, which still holds true, is that the whole notion that the criminal justice system was biased against female victims is absurd. Even though this guy was rich and powerful and the people who accused him were basically nobodies, the prosecution still was overzealous in pursuing the case against him to the point that they broke the rules to nail the guy. The media all immediately took the women’s side too. There is bias here, it is gender-based, and of course the biased people can still be right and Weinstein can be a terrible person and a rapist. But all the social media traffic I see around this issue is still, to this day, talking as if there was some kind of bias against women here.
They kind of breezed through this, but it is worth noting that Fournier’s gangrene is fundamentally the same gangrene that people get in their limbs. The reason we cut limbs off is that by the time they have gangrene, the limb is already dead and is constantly seeping bacteria into the remaining healthy body. I had someone die of gangrene on me because she declined amputation. Gangrene is really bad, and even with modern medical treatment there is a significant risk of fatality. Fournier’s gangrene generally starts in the perineum (the space between genitalia and anus), which is a lot harder to surgically clear out than a limb that you can live without. This is a life-threatening illness, and having this grotesque surgical repair is actually a relatively best-case outcome. Also notable that Fournier’s is strongly associated with obesity, making it example #1001 about how being healthy at any size is nonsense.
Found the animal discussion too long winded. Culture war analysis is what we need, not animal ethics discourse.
When Sarah said at 40:45 that "she likes knowing what's going on in her world", I couldn't help thinking back to a prior episode where Sarah advocated for not keeping up with the news, because it doesn't really matter to one's life. It's a bit of a contradiction, no? How exactly can you claim to like knowing what's going on if you don't think it's worth reading the news?
A tip of the cap to Meghan this week for her honesty in trying to understand Noem’s account.
The wide gab in how farming/rural communities perceive animals as opposed to the not rural folk is not something that is easily understood if you’ve not lived it.
This gap in perception is seen even within the community sometimes.
A story to illustrate. As a farmer in the field, mice are pests and problematic. Some people in cities keep them as pets. When I tell you that the number of mice I have personally disposed of is large, it is not an exaggeration. Growing up with this mindset left me absolutely flabbergasted when at a graduation party where there was a bonfire, I caught and disposed of a mouse that ran by my feet and that action really upset a couple people there. On some level I still don’t understand why that chick was so mad at me-it was just a mouse.
I have seen feral cats/dogs handled in the same way when there is no will to round them up or call animal control. Filling up the local shelter with animals that hate people is often just kicking the problem down the road and it leads to a more expensive and less efficient euthanizing of the animal.
Pretty much no one is happy about killing animals that are seen as pets. That said, there is a detachment from the subject when circumstances dictate a decision. It’s uncomfortable, but often the best choice.
I don’t understand Meghan’s seemingly extreme sensitivity to animals, but I applaud her realism on the subject.
I get that perspective, but my effete, urbane, and lifelong vegetarian perspective offers two counterpoints:
One, I don't see any hard distinction between human and nonhuman animals, so a sort of pragmatic utilitarian perspective can very quickly get to some dark places in my view.
Two, for me I'm apparently not a pure utilitarian because I have more of a Kantian view of this kind of subject. The concern for me is what the act of killing does to the killer. From a medical perspective, I can very easily get to a point where I think someone is suffering too much to live, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea of us "do no harm" people taking direct action to end a life.
We’re just going to disagree on whether or not there’s a hard distinction between human and non human animals. That’s fine with me. In my mind there is respect for both, but they are not the same. I’ll confess befuddlement at the idea of a mouse and a human being even remotely on the same level, but your brain and heart are yours to control.
On your second point, there is direct influence from the first. I don’t see the life of a human and the life of a non human as the same. As a direct result, the second part of your statement carries little weight for me. The first part does. If your intent in killing is the enjoyment of it, then I’m with you. That is very rarely the intent though. So again, the point falls flat for me.
I think you're picking a typical human/animal example, but if you take some of the more challenging cases, comparing a human with some severe developmental disability or brain damage to a highly intelligent and functional nonhuman animal does not create nearly the sort of obvious distinction to me. It's hard to quantify, but some intelligence researchers place an adult octopus as having comparable intelligence to a four-year old human. It's not clear to me that there is zero overlap between a pet animal and a human. This is prime Peter Singer territory.
The second part again I think you're ignoring the harder version of the problem. I'm not necessarily talking about sadistic glee. I'm just talking about the psychological process involved in an acceptance of causing death. If you get healthcare professionals thinking that causing death is normal, Canada is showing us that the slope can be very slippery as to the circumstances under which this occurs.
It still does to me. A brain dead human, raises all sorts of ethical pull-the-plug questions for me. You can pick any animal you want, human life is still of higher importance. Notably, there are exceptions to this in the form of murderers, people who are obviously sadistic in their approach to life and do evil in conscious knowledge of it.
Healthcare professionals are already uncomfortable with it. Nearly every medicine and care practice can, in the wrong hands, do harm. That’s the why behind the “first, do no harm” practice. Your Canadian example is all too relevant. I would say that they are definitively not following the aforementioned admonition.
The acceptance of causing death might hit at the core of difference in how rural people see this issue. It is certainly a responsibility, and a moment, and one that is difficult for many people. This drives at the point that noem was trying to make. Just because it’s a difficult thing , does not necessarily make it wrong. It takes some personal fortitude to weigh that life in your hands for sure. Killing needlessly is frowned upon for pretty much anyone, but it does depend on the animal.
Not entirely clear to me what your basis would be for valuing the life of a human with a flatline EEG over, say, a nonhuman primate. Although I know that some people do hold this position, I never understood why. I also find drawing distinctions about sadistic humans very challenging given how extreme language about how evil some people supposedly are is just casually thrown around now.
And I do tend to agree that context likely matters, and that someone in a rural area is likely much more sanguine about violence than I am ever likely to be. I might live my life as a vegetarian, but if you put me in a plane crash in Argentina with no help in sight, I might well find myself gnawing on somebody else's corpse.
For the people who object to the story this episode was talking about, part of it is that they don't think the situation was really all that dire.
My point was in fact that a flatlined human is also possibly unethical to keep alive. There are grey areas all over in this particular debate, which means it makes much more sense to argue at the meat of the bell curve rather than at the tails. At some point, these things cross over from sympathy to selfishness in not being able to let go.
I also agree with the really slippery slope of extreme language that we seem to be on.
My personal bar for that “evil person” is extremely high. Needs verifiable proof etc.
I think a couple things are true with regards to her situation.
It was stupid to use this story the way she did. We don’t know the dog or the situation half as well as she does or did.
The last one is going to sting some people…I think people are using animals far too much as a proxy for social lives and a family. As a result they(animals) have a warped sense of importance in the culture of today. This is not to say that animals aren’t wonderful and important, but that their importance in the game of life for many people has become inflated to a possibly unhealthy(on a societal level) degree.
Meghan's comments on the whole dogs issue resonated with me.
Disclosure: no pets, grew up with and loved cats, feared dogs; later came to greatly appreciate dogs via my friends who had them.
Further: my childhood cats were all eventually euthanized -- they had diseases that could not be treated; they were clearly in pain or disabled; it was the obvious thing to do. Not fun, but a lesson, to my teen-age self.
Much later in life I had adult friends who had a Yellow Lab who had been part of their family for "forever". He developed a disability that required the use of a sling for his rear legs, as Meghan mentioned, just to go outside. It was heartbreaking. They eventually put him down in the most loving manner possible, by themselves, and buried him under/near a favored apple tree.
They got a new puppy. I played a role in his delivery to them, as I met his flight at the airport and provided his transportation to his connecting flight. (this was an international transfer, US-Canada, I was happy to be in a position to help out). I had him for an hour or two, the cutest puppy ever.)
Well, he was cute, but wow, did he turn out difficult. My friends are dog people; they have had dogs for decades, they knew dogs. This one did not work out. Eventually they gave up; turns out there was some kind of ranch/farm/something that had a pack of dogs (many years ago, not remembering the details) where they could donate him. Last I heard he was happy there. We're all glad that worked out. As Meghan noted, this would be the ideal situation but this doesn't always happen -- there are some dogs that just simply can't be around people, or on a farm, for that matter.
My friends later got another dog that worked out super well. (and they got a couple of cats, too, but that's another story.)
So when I heard the Kristy Noem story, I thought, okay, that's completely plausible. And I've never lived on a farm, but that resonated with me.
Thank you, good discussion,
--Mark
P.S. The Smoke 'Em discussion mentioned here on the Weinstein thing is excellent.
I'm a Type Nine on the Enneagram,. A Type 9 with a One wing. Learn about "wings" if you are so inclined. It's useful to know your Enneagram to understand your defects and faulty coping mechanisms. You can only be one type.
Some may say the Enneagram is bunk, but I find it interesting and more true to real psychology, whatever that means. I do not subscribe to astrology, tarot cards, or even Myers-Briggs. The Enneagram is not necessarily "spiritual," although it's been adopted by New Age communities and Christian churches.
If you hear that the Enneagram is ancient, this is also not true. Like Meghan mentioned, it was developed in the 1950s by Oscar Ichazo. If you hear that it reveals your strengths, this is not necessarily true either. Ichazo used it to describe maladaptive coping mechanisms. It's not a positive, sunny thing; it shows how we learned to cope early in childhood in order to protect ourselves from real or perceived threats (to our safety, to our ego, to our connection to others).
Of course, it's true that all personality types acquire positive attributes in order to cope. For instance, I'm the Peacemaker, Type Nine. https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-9/ My fear is disconnection. It only makes sense that I am a recovering people-pleaser. I'm interested in the comfort of others so I can remain comfortable, and so I can stay connected to others. Because of this, I'm affable and accommodating. All things that could be deemed as positive by others, but occasionally do not serve me well if the situation calls for assertiveness or standing up for myself, and people-pleasing and not stating your needs can result in disconnection. We all do things in order to protect our psyches but end up not serving us well. Use the Enneagram to show your "copes."
Use the left-hand margin to see what each teacher says about your type.
If you don't know your type, and you're interested in these type of things take a few tests. Be honest of course. Read the descriptions and see what closely resonates. When I first learned my type, there was some mourning involved, but ultimately it was a growth tool because it allowed me to see how some of my behaviors were not serving me.
The problem with astrology is it postulates a relationship between personality and the movement of heavenly bodies, which is obvious hokum. Enneagram and Myers-Briggs aren’t like that. They’re just questionnaires, like more sophisticated versions of the Hogwarts house test. I’m not saying they’re hard science, but dismissing them as “astrology-lite” misses the mark.
I think they are worse than astrology. Astrology is honest in its woo; it doesn’t pretend to be science. These personality assessments consistently fail tests of validity, but they nonetheless wear the cloak of science. Pseudoscience is worse than honest religion.
I don't know about Enneagram, but MBTI is a categorization tool for problem-solving styles (NOT personality at large). I know it serves a purpose because I've personally seen it has active predictive value - if I work with someone (preferably in person) for a months, I can generally predict within a letter or so (usually the last of the four is least reliable) what he or she has or will score when they take the test. None of the attributes it categorizes by strike me as controversial - they are things that you would naturally pick up on if you (unsurprisingly) worked with someone for a few months (the key there being that you're working together specifically to solve problems).
What it will NOT do is tell you if someone is depressed, or has a personality disorder, or is alcoholic, or what kind of music or movies they like. So it's weird to call it a "personality" survey. It's really just a tool for analyzing cognitive styles.
There are those who take it rather far beyond that, and that's where you start getting into more murky territory. A lot of that is questionable, or outright bunk. But some of it, while hard to objectively analyze, results from people who share a cognitive style looking at and discussing common inner experiences. If certain patterns emerge, there may indeed be something going on, even if there is no scientific rigor at work. The truth is, *very little* of life does or even can involve scientific rigor. I believe my car is blue, despite having done no peer-reviewed spectral analysis of its albedo. One can get a reliable sense of how a child or spouse will react to something without running a parallel control with which to compare results.
So if I find myself in a weird, compulsive behavior pattern, and read a Substack piece about the NiFi Loop, and what it describes clicks, and doing what's recommended helps me break the behavior pattern, there very well might be something real going on. That doesn't mean it's understood (it's not) or that it's even subject to scientific study (it probably isn't, at present). Similarly, it doesn't mean it's pseudo-science or just some nonsense that makes one feel better (these are themselves factual assertions, and have themselves not been subjected to the rigors of scientific process). It just means - as is the case when dealing with most mental phenomenon - the subject matter is poorly understood.
I agree. I don't think the enneagram and astrology should be grouped in the same category. Also, I don't think Ichazo's work or theories were intended to be questionnaires but these tests or questionnaires are helpful in pinpointing your type or fixations.
For a leadership program I did, we had a DISC personality assessment, which stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance apparently. Sounds awfully S&M.
I think most of these personality tests have very little scientific validity. I’m kind of okay with them as long as they’re not presented as anything like hard science. It’s a sort of highbrow icebreaker. I also think that conceptualizing people in terms of personality tests tends to suggest that you should accept that there are some aspects of you that are not going to change, which is actually very countercultural given the blank slate foundation of a lot of academia. And these things are generally supposed to be nonjudgmental, such that there is not a presumptively “correct” way to be, which imparts a useful lesson about real diversity.
The DISC test IS S&M! It doesn’t sound like it, it really is it. It was the proud creation of William Moulton Marston, whose other proud creation was Wonder Woman. Which, in its early days, featured a lot of tying up and spanking. Seriously, the dude was totally into that, and he had psychological theories that made sense of the whole thing. (He was also an early polyamorist, and was in a long term relationship with two women, who stayed together after his death.) There’s a semi-accurate movie about him called “Dr Marston and the Wonder Women.”)
And yet my vision of it is a bunch of young doctors (chief residents) standing in a circle corresponding to where their score is on the various scales. In a rather socially conservative environment. It's a strange juxtaposition.
I want to take the DISC test. I have never taken it.
I am okay with the Enneagram because it's basically a grouping of tendencies, characteristics, or descriptors that vary in degree depending on the psychological 'health' of the individual. Traditional psychology also has little scientific validity in the ways that human behavior, emotions, and thoughts are subjective and hard to measure objectively.
I also don't think it's particularly useful to characterize a complex human being into a personality category. I think it can be useful in understanding what motivates a person to behave in certain ways. Mostly, it should be used to understand yourself or increase self-awareness. I know this all sounds borderline woo.
I think some aspects of personality are very difficult to change and probably will not change. If you look back on your life since you were an adolescent, can you see certain patterns of behavior, certain coping mechanisms, or ways of relating? I can, and some of those things will be very difficult, if not impossible, to change.
There is an active debate in psychology/psychiatry about personality categories versus dimensions. Of course, the numbers that some systems give are still obviously reductive, but it gives more nuance. Clinically, in the extreme case of personality disorders, I do see it helpful sometimes to be able to slap a label on a person, but part of me also hopes that we get beyond that.
I see clear dispositional tendencies that I can trace back as far as I’m aware of. I also think that stability of personality can be a virtue, given how many public figures have had sudden and dramatic changes in their public personas over the past few years.
I find American trials yield a verdict that the public (read: mob) want, and then - if you have the resources - it gets overturned 1 to 2 years later when the attention has died down. this is in contrast to here in Canada where our media creep, Jian Gomeshi, was (correctly) found not-guilty. his accusers were found to be in contact with each other when they had been specifically warned not to. everyone was so upset at the verdict, but legally, it was the correct result. same with the disastrous colton boushie shooting. the witnesses told one story to the police and an entirely different one at trial. the rcmp were terrible (and quite possibly racist) when they left the crime scene (a truck) exposed to rain and washed away important evidence. with no proof, the verdict had to be not-guilty.
those parents that have been found criminally responsible for their son doing a school shooting? if they have the money for an appeal, they will get it overturned in 18 months.
You guys completely missed the point of the Noem story. It's not that she killed the dog, but that she thinks this is what the MAGA base wants to hear. If you listen to the Focus Group podcast, you'll often hear Trump voters -- including women -- say they wouldn't vote for Nikki Haley because they don't think women are tough enough.
As for your bad dog owner friends, I wouldn't want them to be vice president either.
Finally, I grew up on a farm with dogs and chickens, including a pointer that killed a couple of the chickens. My dad trained it not to. And he *did* have to shoot a couple of our dogs. One was old, lame and blind, like Meghan was concerned about. The other was a puppy that was horrifically injured in a fight with one of the older dogs. I still remember looking at his torn up face and watching him howl in pain.
Meghan, what's the deal with the picture of the newspaper clipping (?) over your left shoulder, and why is it hung with the writing sideways? (I've been wondering this for a while.) My possible explanations are (1) you like it better that way, (2) you don't have the wall-space to hang it longitudinally, (3) people in LA don't read anyway so who cares. (jk LA, 🍻.)
Oh very cool. ...And the person who had given it to you had hung it sideways on your wall on purpose, and you wanted to respect their gift by not re-hanging it longitudinally, I see. Also very cool. (I'm kidding.)
I tried looking it up on the google machine but I'm not an LA Times subscriber. But I'm imagining your column's name was something like: Dishing with Daum, or like, Daumiciliary. Eleven years is a heck of a long time to have a regular column; it must have been a challenge to come up with new stuff to write about after a certain point.
The column didn't have a name. It was on the opinion page. And it ran vertically down the side of the page, hence the layout of the framing. The Los Angeles Times logo was laid alongside it vertically. Not sure why, but obviously a lot of thought went into it, so I'm sure there was a reason.
I'm sorry, I'll stop messing with you, I appreciate your patience - I'm sure it's quite meaningful to you. It's just hard to see the details of the picture clearly from this side of the screen, so it seems as though 𝘺𝘰𝘶, Meghan, could simply rotate the frame to make it "correct", i.e., so that it appears how it would have appeared to someone reading it in the physical newspaper. But if I understand you correctly, within the frame, the logo and the text are not actually connected but are laid side by side.
Anyway it's not important. That's very cool. Thanks for explaining it to me slowly. (The itch in my brain is gone!)
(I'm sure the editors would have loved 'Daumiciliary'. (I'm kidding.))
One thing to note about Weinstein: his downfall came after the release of this movie "Tulip Fever," which was a running joke in Hollywood for being in post-production hell for like four years. He'd stopped being an awards/hit maker, and that's when they hung him out to dry. #MeToo, like so many other things, was in large part a thinly-veiled jobs-creation/turnover program.
And what a terrible movie it was!!
Check out this damage control piece he wrote: https://deadline.com/2017/08/harvey-weinstein-on-the-challenge-of-growing-tulip-fever-guest-column-1202158947/amp/
Wonder if he knew his career would be fully in in just over a month
Yes. He was getting old and the hits weren’t coming anymore. If he was still killing it at the box office and with people’s careers, he would have been fine, that’s the crazy part to me.
Horribly bad take from Meghan, suggesting that maybe it's better to shoot a puppy (out of mostly malice in this case), than to re-home it. Yes, there are absolutely cases where there are very valid arguments to be made for euthanasia for pets. This is NOT one of those examples. Noem didn't even TRY to re-home the dog, she just murdered it, then was having so much fun she decided to also kill a goat for smelling bad (btw, yeah adult male goats pee on themselves during mating season). I know plenty of rural/farm people, and most of them would NEVER do what she did to that puppy! This whole "we can't possibly understand life on a ranch" is total bullshit.
I was so disgusted by that argument - both morally and intellectually, that I turned off the rest of the podcast. (Usually I just listen along and argue/agree out loud with Meghan and Sarah.)
Did you listen to what I said?
It would appear not….
What if they rehome Cricket, and Cricket decides to do the chicken crunch thing on a family cat? Or gets aggressive with a five-year-old?
Sorry, Cricket had to die.
There's absolutely no correlation between prey drive in dogs and human aggression. Dogs have been domesticated for what at least appears to be thousands of years to not be human aggressive. (That doesn't mean there's no such thing a human-aggressive dog. But a drive to go after small animals like chickens or squirrels is in absolutely no way correlated with that.)
1. Animal shelters will warn you about that. For my last dog I had to sign papers acknowledging my dog had behavioral problems.
2. If no one adopts, they will euthanize it.
I grew up on a farm with dogs and chickens, and we had a dog that killed a couple of chickens. In fact, it was a hunting dog (pointer). We trained it not to.
When that dog got old, lame, blind and in pain, my father shot it. He did that one other time, a puppy that had been horibly injured in a fight with another dog.
I find it interesting that Meghan is more charitable towards Harvey Weinstein and Brock Turner than I am, as someone who’s actually advocated on the Hill regarding false accusations. At least in Weinstein’s case, my impression is that the way the other witnesses were used against him is an egregious due process violation, but that he is being retried and can still be convicted even if the prosecutors don’t cheat. Maybe I’m just like Sarah and I don’t want to fight on this one.
The lesson to me from this case, which still holds true, is that the whole notion that the criminal justice system was biased against female victims is absurd. Even though this guy was rich and powerful and the people who accused him were basically nobodies, the prosecution still was overzealous in pursuing the case against him to the point that they broke the rules to nail the guy. The media all immediately took the women’s side too. There is bias here, it is gender-based, and of course the biased people can still be right and Weinstein can be a terrible person and a rapist. But all the social media traffic I see around this issue is still, to this day, talking as if there was some kind of bias against women here.
They kind of breezed through this, but it is worth noting that Fournier’s gangrene is fundamentally the same gangrene that people get in their limbs. The reason we cut limbs off is that by the time they have gangrene, the limb is already dead and is constantly seeping bacteria into the remaining healthy body. I had someone die of gangrene on me because she declined amputation. Gangrene is really bad, and even with modern medical treatment there is a significant risk of fatality. Fournier’s gangrene generally starts in the perineum (the space between genitalia and anus), which is a lot harder to surgically clear out than a limb that you can live without. This is a life-threatening illness, and having this grotesque surgical repair is actually a relatively best-case outcome. Also notable that Fournier’s is strongly associated with obesity, making it example #1001 about how being healthy at any size is nonsense.
Found the animal discussion too long winded. Culture war analysis is what we need, not animal ethics discourse.
When Sarah said at 40:45 that "she likes knowing what's going on in her world", I couldn't help thinking back to a prior episode where Sarah advocated for not keeping up with the news, because it doesn't really matter to one's life. It's a bit of a contradiction, no? How exactly can you claim to like knowing what's going on if you don't think it's worth reading the news?
Is it contradictory?
I think the news is largely useless and often misleading— if it was largely useful and accurate that would be different!
But if you find the news largely useless and often misleading then why do you care to keep up with the news?
Where’d our beloved theme song/intro go?
Did they mention this?
That makes me a sad panda 🐼😭
First!
It just occurs to me that Mitt Romney is saying “I got hammered for strapping the dog to the top of the car. At least I didn’t shoot it!”
A tip of the cap to Meghan this week for her honesty in trying to understand Noem’s account.
The wide gab in how farming/rural communities perceive animals as opposed to the not rural folk is not something that is easily understood if you’ve not lived it.
This gap in perception is seen even within the community sometimes.
A story to illustrate. As a farmer in the field, mice are pests and problematic. Some people in cities keep them as pets. When I tell you that the number of mice I have personally disposed of is large, it is not an exaggeration. Growing up with this mindset left me absolutely flabbergasted when at a graduation party where there was a bonfire, I caught and disposed of a mouse that ran by my feet and that action really upset a couple people there. On some level I still don’t understand why that chick was so mad at me-it was just a mouse.
I have seen feral cats/dogs handled in the same way when there is no will to round them up or call animal control. Filling up the local shelter with animals that hate people is often just kicking the problem down the road and it leads to a more expensive and less efficient euthanizing of the animal.
Pretty much no one is happy about killing animals that are seen as pets. That said, there is a detachment from the subject when circumstances dictate a decision. It’s uncomfortable, but often the best choice.
I don’t understand Meghan’s seemingly extreme sensitivity to animals, but I applaud her realism on the subject.
Having read the entire thread (and as a member of the not-rural folk) I think you've said this well.
I get that perspective, but my effete, urbane, and lifelong vegetarian perspective offers two counterpoints:
One, I don't see any hard distinction between human and nonhuman animals, so a sort of pragmatic utilitarian perspective can very quickly get to some dark places in my view.
Two, for me I'm apparently not a pure utilitarian because I have more of a Kantian view of this kind of subject. The concern for me is what the act of killing does to the killer. From a medical perspective, I can very easily get to a point where I think someone is suffering too much to live, but I am very uncomfortable with the idea of us "do no harm" people taking direct action to end a life.
We’re just going to disagree on whether or not there’s a hard distinction between human and non human animals. That’s fine with me. In my mind there is respect for both, but they are not the same. I’ll confess befuddlement at the idea of a mouse and a human being even remotely on the same level, but your brain and heart are yours to control.
On your second point, there is direct influence from the first. I don’t see the life of a human and the life of a non human as the same. As a direct result, the second part of your statement carries little weight for me. The first part does. If your intent in killing is the enjoyment of it, then I’m with you. That is very rarely the intent though. So again, the point falls flat for me.
I think you're picking a typical human/animal example, but if you take some of the more challenging cases, comparing a human with some severe developmental disability or brain damage to a highly intelligent and functional nonhuman animal does not create nearly the sort of obvious distinction to me. It's hard to quantify, but some intelligence researchers place an adult octopus as having comparable intelligence to a four-year old human. It's not clear to me that there is zero overlap between a pet animal and a human. This is prime Peter Singer territory.
The second part again I think you're ignoring the harder version of the problem. I'm not necessarily talking about sadistic glee. I'm just talking about the psychological process involved in an acceptance of causing death. If you get healthcare professionals thinking that causing death is normal, Canada is showing us that the slope can be very slippery as to the circumstances under which this occurs.
It still does to me. A brain dead human, raises all sorts of ethical pull-the-plug questions for me. You can pick any animal you want, human life is still of higher importance. Notably, there are exceptions to this in the form of murderers, people who are obviously sadistic in their approach to life and do evil in conscious knowledge of it.
Healthcare professionals are already uncomfortable with it. Nearly every medicine and care practice can, in the wrong hands, do harm. That’s the why behind the “first, do no harm” practice. Your Canadian example is all too relevant. I would say that they are definitively not following the aforementioned admonition.
The acceptance of causing death might hit at the core of difference in how rural people see this issue. It is certainly a responsibility, and a moment, and one that is difficult for many people. This drives at the point that noem was trying to make. Just because it’s a difficult thing , does not necessarily make it wrong. It takes some personal fortitude to weigh that life in your hands for sure. Killing needlessly is frowned upon for pretty much anyone, but it does depend on the animal.
Not entirely clear to me what your basis would be for valuing the life of a human with a flatline EEG over, say, a nonhuman primate. Although I know that some people do hold this position, I never understood why. I also find drawing distinctions about sadistic humans very challenging given how extreme language about how evil some people supposedly are is just casually thrown around now.
And I do tend to agree that context likely matters, and that someone in a rural area is likely much more sanguine about violence than I am ever likely to be. I might live my life as a vegetarian, but if you put me in a plane crash in Argentina with no help in sight, I might well find myself gnawing on somebody else's corpse.
For the people who object to the story this episode was talking about, part of it is that they don't think the situation was really all that dire.
My point was in fact that a flatlined human is also possibly unethical to keep alive. There are grey areas all over in this particular debate, which means it makes much more sense to argue at the meat of the bell curve rather than at the tails. At some point, these things cross over from sympathy to selfishness in not being able to let go.
I also agree with the really slippery slope of extreme language that we seem to be on.
My personal bar for that “evil person” is extremely high. Needs verifiable proof etc.
I think a couple things are true with regards to her situation.
It was stupid to use this story the way she did. We don’t know the dog or the situation half as well as she does or did.
The last one is going to sting some people…I think people are using animals far too much as a proxy for social lives and a family. As a result they(animals) have a warped sense of importance in the culture of today. This is not to say that animals aren’t wonderful and important, but that their importance in the game of life for many people has become inflated to a possibly unhealthy(on a societal level) degree.
Meghan's comments on the whole dogs issue resonated with me.
Disclosure: no pets, grew up with and loved cats, feared dogs; later came to greatly appreciate dogs via my friends who had them.
Further: my childhood cats were all eventually euthanized -- they had diseases that could not be treated; they were clearly in pain or disabled; it was the obvious thing to do. Not fun, but a lesson, to my teen-age self.
Much later in life I had adult friends who had a Yellow Lab who had been part of their family for "forever". He developed a disability that required the use of a sling for his rear legs, as Meghan mentioned, just to go outside. It was heartbreaking. They eventually put him down in the most loving manner possible, by themselves, and buried him under/near a favored apple tree.
They got a new puppy. I played a role in his delivery to them, as I met his flight at the airport and provided his transportation to his connecting flight. (this was an international transfer, US-Canada, I was happy to be in a position to help out). I had him for an hour or two, the cutest puppy ever.)
Well, he was cute, but wow, did he turn out difficult. My friends are dog people; they have had dogs for decades, they knew dogs. This one did not work out. Eventually they gave up; turns out there was some kind of ranch/farm/something that had a pack of dogs (many years ago, not remembering the details) where they could donate him. Last I heard he was happy there. We're all glad that worked out. As Meghan noted, this would be the ideal situation but this doesn't always happen -- there are some dogs that just simply can't be around people, or on a farm, for that matter.
My friends later got another dog that worked out super well. (and they got a couple of cats, too, but that's another story.)
So when I heard the Kristy Noem story, I thought, okay, that's completely plausible. And I've never lived on a farm, but that resonated with me.
Thank you, good discussion,
--Mark
P.S. The Smoke 'Em discussion mentioned here on the Weinstein thing is excellent.
I'm a Type Nine on the Enneagram,. A Type 9 with a One wing. Learn about "wings" if you are so inclined. It's useful to know your Enneagram to understand your defects and faulty coping mechanisms. You can only be one type.
Some may say the Enneagram is bunk, but I find it interesting and more true to real psychology, whatever that means. I do not subscribe to astrology, tarot cards, or even Myers-Briggs. The Enneagram is not necessarily "spiritual," although it's been adopted by New Age communities and Christian churches.
If you hear that the Enneagram is ancient, this is also not true. Like Meghan mentioned, it was developed in the 1950s by Oscar Ichazo. If you hear that it reveals your strengths, this is not necessarily true either. Ichazo used it to describe maladaptive coping mechanisms. It's not a positive, sunny thing; it shows how we learned to cope early in childhood in order to protect ourselves from real or perceived threats (to our safety, to our ego, to our connection to others).
Of course, it's true that all personality types acquire positive attributes in order to cope. For instance, I'm the Peacemaker, Type Nine. https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-9/ My fear is disconnection. It only makes sense that I am a recovering people-pleaser. I'm interested in the comfort of others so I can remain comfortable, and so I can stay connected to others. Because of this, I'm affable and accommodating. All things that could be deemed as positive by others, but occasionally do not serve me well if the situation calls for assertiveness or standing up for myself, and people-pleasing and not stating your needs can result in disconnection. We all do things in order to protect our psyches but end up not serving us well. Use the Enneagram to show your "copes."
If you know your type, use this site to explore: https://www.9types.com/descr/?type=5
Use the left-hand margin to see what each teacher says about your type.
If you don't know your type, and you're interested in these type of things take a few tests. Be honest of course. Read the descriptions and see what closely resonates. When I first learned my type, there was some mourning involved, but ultimately it was a growth tool because it allowed me to see how some of my behaviors were not serving me.
The problem with astrology is it postulates a relationship between personality and the movement of heavenly bodies, which is obvious hokum. Enneagram and Myers-Briggs aren’t like that. They’re just questionnaires, like more sophisticated versions of the Hogwarts house test. I’m not saying they’re hard science, but dismissing them as “astrology-lite” misses the mark.
I think they are worse than astrology. Astrology is honest in its woo; it doesn’t pretend to be science. These personality assessments consistently fail tests of validity, but they nonetheless wear the cloak of science. Pseudoscience is worse than honest religion.
I don't know about Enneagram, but MBTI is a categorization tool for problem-solving styles (NOT personality at large). I know it serves a purpose because I've personally seen it has active predictive value - if I work with someone (preferably in person) for a months, I can generally predict within a letter or so (usually the last of the four is least reliable) what he or she has or will score when they take the test. None of the attributes it categorizes by strike me as controversial - they are things that you would naturally pick up on if you (unsurprisingly) worked with someone for a few months (the key there being that you're working together specifically to solve problems).
What it will NOT do is tell you if someone is depressed, or has a personality disorder, or is alcoholic, or what kind of music or movies they like. So it's weird to call it a "personality" survey. It's really just a tool for analyzing cognitive styles.
There are those who take it rather far beyond that, and that's where you start getting into more murky territory. A lot of that is questionable, or outright bunk. But some of it, while hard to objectively analyze, results from people who share a cognitive style looking at and discussing common inner experiences. If certain patterns emerge, there may indeed be something going on, even if there is no scientific rigor at work. The truth is, *very little* of life does or even can involve scientific rigor. I believe my car is blue, despite having done no peer-reviewed spectral analysis of its albedo. One can get a reliable sense of how a child or spouse will react to something without running a parallel control with which to compare results.
So if I find myself in a weird, compulsive behavior pattern, and read a Substack piece about the NiFi Loop, and what it describes clicks, and doing what's recommended helps me break the behavior pattern, there very well might be something real going on. That doesn't mean it's understood (it's not) or that it's even subject to scientific study (it probably isn't, at present). Similarly, it doesn't mean it's pseudo-science or just some nonsense that makes one feel better (these are themselves factual assertions, and have themselves not been subjected to the rigors of scientific process). It just means - as is the case when dealing with most mental phenomenon - the subject matter is poorly understood.
I agree. I don't think the enneagram and astrology should be grouped in the same category. Also, I don't think Ichazo's work or theories were intended to be questionnaires but these tests or questionnaires are helpful in pinpointing your type or fixations.
For a leadership program I did, we had a DISC personality assessment, which stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance apparently. Sounds awfully S&M.
I think most of these personality tests have very little scientific validity. I’m kind of okay with them as long as they’re not presented as anything like hard science. It’s a sort of highbrow icebreaker. I also think that conceptualizing people in terms of personality tests tends to suggest that you should accept that there are some aspects of you that are not going to change, which is actually very countercultural given the blank slate foundation of a lot of academia. And these things are generally supposed to be nonjudgmental, such that there is not a presumptively “correct” way to be, which imparts a useful lesson about real diversity.
The DISC test IS S&M! It doesn’t sound like it, it really is it. It was the proud creation of William Moulton Marston, whose other proud creation was Wonder Woman. Which, in its early days, featured a lot of tying up and spanking. Seriously, the dude was totally into that, and he had psychological theories that made sense of the whole thing. (He was also an early polyamorist, and was in a long term relationship with two women, who stayed together after his death.) There’s a semi-accurate movie about him called “Dr Marston and the Wonder Women.”)
Also Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience.
And yet my vision of it is a bunch of young doctors (chief residents) standing in a circle corresponding to where their score is on the various scales. In a rather socially conservative environment. It's a strange juxtaposition.
I want to take the DISC test. I have never taken it.
I am okay with the Enneagram because it's basically a grouping of tendencies, characteristics, or descriptors that vary in degree depending on the psychological 'health' of the individual. Traditional psychology also has little scientific validity in the ways that human behavior, emotions, and thoughts are subjective and hard to measure objectively.
I also don't think it's particularly useful to characterize a complex human being into a personality category. I think it can be useful in understanding what motivates a person to behave in certain ways. Mostly, it should be used to understand yourself or increase self-awareness. I know this all sounds borderline woo.
I think some aspects of personality are very difficult to change and probably will not change. If you look back on your life since you were an adolescent, can you see certain patterns of behavior, certain coping mechanisms, or ways of relating? I can, and some of those things will be very difficult, if not impossible, to change.
There is an active debate in psychology/psychiatry about personality categories versus dimensions. Of course, the numbers that some systems give are still obviously reductive, but it gives more nuance. Clinically, in the extreme case of personality disorders, I do see it helpful sometimes to be able to slap a label on a person, but part of me also hopes that we get beyond that.
I see clear dispositional tendencies that I can trace back as far as I’m aware of. I also think that stability of personality can be a virtue, given how many public figures have had sudden and dramatic changes in their public personas over the past few years.
I find American trials yield a verdict that the public (read: mob) want, and then - if you have the resources - it gets overturned 1 to 2 years later when the attention has died down. this is in contrast to here in Canada where our media creep, Jian Gomeshi, was (correctly) found not-guilty. his accusers were found to be in contact with each other when they had been specifically warned not to. everyone was so upset at the verdict, but legally, it was the correct result. same with the disastrous colton boushie shooting. the witnesses told one story to the police and an entirely different one at trial. the rcmp were terrible (and quite possibly racist) when they left the crime scene (a truck) exposed to rain and washed away important evidence. with no proof, the verdict had to be not-guilty.
those parents that have been found criminally responsible for their son doing a school shooting? if they have the money for an appeal, they will get it overturned in 18 months.
JoAnn Wypijewski's book What We Don't Talk About... has been on my radar for some years now - time to finally get hold of a copy & read it!
Read Wypijewski's article on pedophile priests. Talk about passively accepting the story from the newspapers!
You guys completely missed the point of the Noem story. It's not that she killed the dog, but that she thinks this is what the MAGA base wants to hear. If you listen to the Focus Group podcast, you'll often hear Trump voters -- including women -- say they wouldn't vote for Nikki Haley because they don't think women are tough enough.
As for your bad dog owner friends, I wouldn't want them to be vice president either.
Finally, I grew up on a farm with dogs and chickens, including a pointer that killed a couple of the chickens. My dad trained it not to. And he *did* have to shoot a couple of our dogs. One was old, lame and blind, like Meghan was concerned about. The other was a puppy that was horrifically injured in a fight with one of the older dogs. I still remember looking at his torn up face and watching him howl in pain.
Meghan, what's the deal with the picture of the newspaper clipping (?) over your left shoulder, and why is it hung with the writing sideways? (I've been wondering this for a while.) My possible explanations are (1) you like it better that way, (2) you don't have the wall-space to hang it longitudinally, (3) people in LA don't read anyway so who cares. (jk LA, 🍻.)
It's my first-ever Los Angeles Times column (from 2005), clipped, mounted and framed. Was given to me as a gift.
Oh very cool. ...And the person who had given it to you had hung it sideways on your wall on purpose, and you wanted to respect their gift by not re-hanging it longitudinally, I see. Also very cool. (I'm kidding.)
I tried looking it up on the google machine but I'm not an LA Times subscriber. But I'm imagining your column's name was something like: Dishing with Daum, or like, Daumiciliary. Eleven years is a heck of a long time to have a regular column; it must have been a challenge to come up with new stuff to write about after a certain point.
The column didn't have a name. It was on the opinion page. And it ran vertically down the side of the page, hence the layout of the framing. The Los Angeles Times logo was laid alongside it vertically. Not sure why, but obviously a lot of thought went into it, so I'm sure there was a reason.
I'm sorry, I'll stop messing with you, I appreciate your patience - I'm sure it's quite meaningful to you. It's just hard to see the details of the picture clearly from this side of the screen, so it seems as though 𝘺𝘰𝘶, Meghan, could simply rotate the frame to make it "correct", i.e., so that it appears how it would have appeared to someone reading it in the physical newspaper. But if I understand you correctly, within the frame, the logo and the text are not actually connected but are laid side by side.
Anyway it's not important. That's very cool. Thanks for explaining it to me slowly. (The itch in my brain is gone!)
(I'm sure the editors would have loved 'Daumiciliary'. (I'm kidding.))