When I read the Rush Limbaugh diatribe I posted Monday [hippies caused the financial crisis and TARP… ], I didn’t exactly know what to say at the time. The notion that the financial crisis was "not an accident" implies that that it was created by someone – presumably the "hippies," "Clintons," etc. that he berates in the article. How the fact that it happened in September 2008 could link it to his hated "hippies" wasn’t specified. But then he said the same thing about TARP – Bush’s trillion dollar bailout of the Banks – again by implication, caused by the "hippies." That makes even less sense. Moving from this completely absurd notion of causation, Limbaugh moves on to motive – to enlarge government and expand the Welfare State. It’s even more, they don’t want us to recover, they want us to plunge into a Depression so they can create a Welfare State. The reason? It’s because they are "big statists," "socialists," "fascists," "radicals," "on the fringe of American thought and belief." And it goes on like this, paragraph after paragraph…
-
private logic — The logic of his argument does not follow the simplest rules of argument. Limbaugh claims that they caused the financial crash at a time when they had no power to do so; that they pushed TARP [a program introduced by President Bush].
-
pseudocommunity — The people he’s attacking, his they, are not actually connected. They include Obama, the Clintons, Bill Ayers, the hippies of the late 1960’s, black americans [implied], "big statists," "socialists," "fascists," "radicals, etc.. The only thing that unites this group of people is that Limbaugh doesn’t like them. Many of the categories ["socialists" – "fascists"] are actually mutually exclusive.
-
‘evil’ motives — In paranoid ideas, the motivation of the pseudocommunity is uniformly to cause havoc and to destroy. If you ask "why?" the paranoid person has no answer. In fact they get annoyed. The enemies do such things simply because they are bad. They are sadists who are not coming clean with their real raison d’être – destruction. They’re the "bad guys"of our action films.
-
delusions — Essentially, a delusion is a fixed, false belief – meaning it is impervious to logic or reality. A person who believes that there’s a CIA transmitter in a tooth filling is unconvinced by having the tooth extracted. "Now it’s down in my jaw," or "It’s in another tooth," or "I swallowed it." Paranoid ideas transcend proof.
But there’s a bit of paranoia in the best of us. It’s a tempting way to think. When we don’t like how things are going, it’s easy to think that they are destroying our way of life. I could lump Karl Rove, Fox News people, Dick Cheney, most Republicans, the Religious Right, Sarah Palin together as a pseudocommunity. I could say that they have ‘evil’ motives. I could sound pretty paranoid in looking for the hidden agenda in everything they do or say. Simplifying people on the other side as "all bad" is unfortunately a regular quality of political thought and political discourse. When I watch an "action flick," I can feel great joy when the "bad guys" get hauled away in the end of the movie. And there are lots of us that have relatively fixed political ideas – myself included. So how does one distinguish between the fixity of the mental contents of the paranoid person, and the political intransigence of a ‘regular person?’
In the emergency room, it’s not very hard. When a guy tells you his mother is trying to poison him and that the FBI is helping her, and that maybe you’re part of the plot, it’s not too hard to see that the person is captured in a drama of his/her own creation. But what of a person who has concluded that the problems of the entire country are being caused by a single, evil group working behind the scenes to destroy things? That happened seventy years ago. Adolph Hitler, a deeply paranoid man, concluded that the Jews were destroying Germany and set out to exterminate them. He convinced a whole nation that he was right.
This economic disaster and the slush fund to fix it, the TARP fund, these are not accidents. These are purposeful steps, and I don’t believe that these people really do believe it’s going to revive an economy. That’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to show their compassion, they’re trying to enlarge government. These are big statists. These are socialists, fascists, or whoever. They’re radicals. They’re on the fringe of American thought and belief…
They wanted a new depression to get back and expand the safety net, restore things to the status before Reagan and the Reagan Revolution. Reagan trimmed the welfare rolls, slowed the growth of the welfare state, and they didn’t like that. These people are all about expanding the welfare state, getting as many people as possible on the welfare state. They need to give us a new depression, and they’re in the process of doing it. Don’t doubt me…
-
conspiracy theories — Just as paranoid people lump their enemies into pseudocommunities, they believe that they are working together with a secret, unified plan with evil intent, and that everything that happens is part of that plot.
I posit that Fat-Boy has been crazy from the git-go, abused strong medicine for a long time and fits the definition of a drug addict person, i.e., evidence of drug-seeking behavior (he had his housemaids out chasing scrips) and became crazier and crazier and is now cognitively impaired on top of that. At least he now has an organic component excuse. Not to say that he hasn’t already – many times – gone too far, but don’t you imagine that he will some one of these days, go altogether TOO far and self-destruct in his craziness? The bigger problem seems more in line with Ralph’s concern about the 100s of thousands (maybe more) who listen to this clown and buy his line of crazy jive talkin not realizing that they are being played for fools.
Staci A. Gruber1, Marisa M. Silveri1 and Deborah A. Yurgelun-Todd1
(1) Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478, USA
Received: 11 April 2007 Accepted: 6 July 2007 Published online: 10 August 2007
Abstract Approximately 3.7 million individuals have used heroin and other opiate substances in their lifetime. Despite increasing knowledge of the effects of heroin, it remains the most abused opiate and use among adults has recently increased. The empirical literature examining the neurocognitive effects of acute and chronic opioid use remains limited; however, findings to date suggest that the use of opiates has both acute and long-term effects on cognitive performance. Neuropsychological data indicate deficits in attention, concentration, recall, visuospatial skills and psychomotor speed with both acute and chronic opioid use. The long-term effects of opiate use appear to have the greatest impact on executive functions, including the ability to shift cognitive set and inhibit inappropriate response tendencies. (emphasis=fcm) Factors that contribute to addiction and recovery are also discussed, as it is difficult to disentangle the effects of opiate use on cognitive performance from other factors that may affect neurobehavioral measures.
J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 19:242-248, August 2007
doi: 10.1176/appi.neuropsych.19.3.242
© 2007 American Neuropsychiatric Association
Is Opiate Addiction Associated With Longstanding Neurobiological Changes?
Michele Martin, M.D., Robin A. Hurley, M.D. and Katherine H. Taber, Ph.D.
“Previous research has provided evidence of performance impairment and impulsivity in substance abusers. In particular, performance may be impaired on cognitive tasks that require decision-making that involves balancing short-term rewards and long-term consequences.”
“Poor behavioral regulation may stand at the core of substance abuse, and understanding its neural basis could provide important advances in the treatment of addiction. Several recent studies have compared error-related brain activation patterns between opiate users and healthy subjects during tasks requiring behavioralregulation (e.g., go/no go) that activate the anterior cingulate cortex in normal healthy individuals.5,6,68 All three studies found absent or diminished error-related activation in the anterior cingulate cortex in opiate users. The two that also surveyed other areas of the brain found increased activation in parietal and temporal areas, suggesting compensatory recruitment in order to perform the task (Figure 2). As noted by many researchers, differentiating preexisting traits or findings from effectsof drug dependence is often very challenging. Determining whether differences in brain morphometry, task-related brain activation, and behavioral regulation are predisposing conditions that increase the risk of dependence is critical to understanding the devastating effects of addiction. Study of other addictive conditions thatdo not involve substance abuse, such as pathological gambling, may help to resolve this important question.” (redacted – fcm)
Didn’t Rush lose most of his hearing because of his prescription drug use several years ago? I know that he has a cochlear implant implanted in back of at least one of his ears. He really does act as if he is possessed. I don’t like using the word possessed but he looks as if there is some force moving his whole body and mouth when he’s being taped during his radio show.
Carl, I take your point. It does seem organic.
Joy, possessed isn’t a bad choice of words. In fact, the term “possessed” in antiquity probably came into use because psychotic people seem possessed – owned – by something else. But it’s not evil spirits, it’s by whatever the term “insanity” means.
Carl, “… but don’t you imagine that he will some one of these days, go altogether TOO far and self-destruct in his craziness?” is the reason I keep following him, hoping to be there the day the system blows…