violence
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
jstemwedel | February 23, 2010I need to share with you a situation that is infuriating.
It's infuriating to me, and I believe it should be infuriating to anyone who values a civil society worth the name.
Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We're talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe.
Since then,…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2009tags: religion, violence, genocide, sexism, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video
The story of Adam and Eve is full of nonsense that shows the Biblical god to be unfair, sadistic, sexist. He creates women for man's use. He ordains man to rule over women. He cursed women to have painful child birth and damned all humanity to pain and suffering on Earth as well as in Hell, because Adam and Eve did something he considered wrong, even though they had no knowledge of good and evil, as described in the story. How cruel.
If we can all accept this as a myth, the story would be entertaining,…
grrlscientist | September 13, 2009tags: religion, violence, genocide, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video
This is the third in a series of videos that address some of the violent, absurd and atrocious Bible stories being taught to children in Sunday School around the world today. This video discusses the Sunday School Bible story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is an extremely popular children's story worldwide. It talks about how God became so fed up of his Creation that he decided to kill it all. It sort of makes you wonder why he would have created it in the first place since he is supposed to be omniscient. […
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: religion, violence, genocide, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video
This is the second in a series of videos that address some of the violent, absurd and atrocious Bible stories being taught to children in Sunday School around the world today. This video discusses the Sunday School Bible story Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. This story describes how God ordained the extermination of the people of Jericho, a disgusting and unethical practice known as genocide.
Teaching this to children is designed to teach them to have faith in God. However, it is an excellent example of how…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009tags: religion, violence, mental illness, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video
This is the first in a series of videos that address some of the violent, absurd and atrocious Bible stories being taught to children in Sunday School around the world today. This video discusses how Abraham almost murdered his son because he heard god telling him to do so. And people wonder why fundamentalists of all Abrahamic religions are so violent?
This story is about Abraham and Isaac. In the Bible, God wanted to test Abraham's faith by commanding him to murder his son as a sacrifice. Abraham was…
grrlscientist | July 21, 2009tags: TEDTalks, medicine, Psychopathic Killers, epigenetics, brain damage, psychology, MAOA gene, serotonin, Jim Fallon, streaming video
Psychopathic killers are the basis for some must-watch TV, but what really makes them tick? Neuroscientist Jim Fallon talks about brain scans and genetic analysis that may uncover the rotten wiring in the nature (and nurture) of murderers. In a too-strange-for-fiction twist, he shares a fascinating family history that makes his work chillingly personal [4:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference,…
bioephemera | June 10, 2009One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…
bioephemera | June 1, 2009
A sexual violence victim recovers in Goma, Congo
photo by Endre Vestvik
A few weeks ago, the NYT published a horrifying account by Nicholas Kristof of the pervasive sexual violence left over from Liberia's civil war. A major survey in Liberia found that 75% of Liberian women had been raped - most gang-raped. And many of the victims are children:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes…
edyong | March 16, 2009The effect that violent films and games have on our minds, and the implications for their place in society, has been a source of much heated debate. Now, a new study looks set to fan the flames even further. Several studies have found that violent media can desensitise people to real acts of violence, but Brad Bushman from the University of Michigan and Craig Anderson from Iowa State University have produced the first evidence that this can actually change a person's behaviour, affecting their decisions to help others in need.
Using professional actors, they found that after 20 minutes of…
purepedantry | March 10, 2009Did you catch this story? A man in Illinois walks into a church and shoots the pastor. After killing the pastor, his gun jams, he grabs a knife and starts stabbing himself. At which point, he is tackled by two guys and remanded into custody.
Now his lawyer is claiming that his mental status was impaired because he had Lyme disease. (And, shocker: this interpretation of the story is being pushed over at Huffington Post.)
Listen, this guy may be crazy. In fact, he undoubtedly has severe emotional and neurological problems. But Lyme disease isn't why.
Lyme disease is caused by a…
edyong | January 19, 2009People seem inordinately keen to pit nature and nurture as imagined adversaries, but this naive view glosses over the far more interesting interactions between the two. These interactions between genes and environment lie at the heart of a new study by Rose McDermott from Brown University, which elegantly fuses two of my favourite topics - genetic influences on behaviour and the psychology of punishment.
three previous pieces on punishment. Each was based on a study that used clever psychological games to investigate how people behave when they are given a choice to cooperate with, cheat, or…
purepedantry | December 11, 2007Last week, in response to a multiple homicide shooting in an Omaha mall, I wrote a post showing the mental illness is actually a pretty weak indicator of violent behavior. I made an argument in passing that this would imply that using it as an exclusionary factor for gun ownership, therefore, would be unlikely to limit gun violence.
I want to clarify that a little bit. Most attempts to limit gun access -- as I understand it -- fall into two categories. You can try and limit guns as a blanket policy to everyone, or you can try and limit gun access to key risk groups.
Taking the second one…
purepedantry | December 6, 2007I was distressed to wake up this morning to coverage of another shooting, this time in a mall in Omaha. A teenager named Robert Hawkins went into the mall and shot 12 people, killing 8 thus far, and then shot himself. The scene resembled the Virginia Tech shooting in several regards, particularly because there is some indication that the shooter in both cases was mentally ill.
The BBC had this coverage:
Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people then himself on a gun rampage through a Nebraska mall, had "lots of emotional problems", says the woman who took him in after he left home.
Debora…