Joe Lieberman on censoring pop culture and reporting "troublesome" young people.

On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace got Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, specifically the question of violence in video games, movies and TV. Lieberman said violence in popular culture "does cause vulnerable young men, particularly, to be more violent," and "We’ve got to ask the entertainment industry, what are you going to do to try to tone that down."

Wallace asked whether this would be voluntary, and Lieberman said:

In our society we try to do it voluntarily. But I think we’ve come to a point where we have to say, if not, maybe there are some things we can do to tone it down.

So, in other words, not voluntary! Having let his authoritarian side show, Lieberman shifts to talking about "the mental health system" and says:

I think we really have got to ask ourselves, first, off, this is like the slogan that we use in Homeland Security -- see something, say something.

See something... like what?

We’ve got to ask parents, friends, school officials, if you see a child, a young person, that really looks like they are potentially... real troublesome, get them mental health help and we have to ask ourselves, as a society, is there enough mental health help available for these kids?

Troublesome! He should have said troubled, if he meant to talk about mental illness, and he paused before he said the word. A fascinating slip. Troubling!

Mayor Bloomberg: "Well, I don’t know that-- you keep saying control. I think that’s a-- a bad word. What about regulations?"

Funny the way the word "control" troubles the proponents of gun control!

That was on "Meet the Press" this morning, where I also notice this remark by David Brooks:

Can-- can I just say one thing about the-- the debate we need to have?  This has become-- one of the problems for this debate is it’s become a values war.  It’s perceived as urban versus rural... And frankly, it’s perceived as an attack on the lifestyle of rural people by urban people.  And I admire Mayor Bloomberg enormously--there’s probably no politician I agree with more but it’s counterproductive to have him as the spokesperson for the gun law movement.  There has to be more respect and more people frankly from rural and Red America who are-- who are participants in this.

"Sometimes conduct is speech (think of burning a flag) and sometimes speech is not 'speech,' as strange as that sounds."

"In this instance, for example, the speech involved in talk therapy is, for all practical purposes, analogous to electric-shock therapy. It is a method of therapy, and it is the method, not the speech as such, that is being regulated. This is a common phenomenon. The state can regulate bribery, threats, conspiracy, and many other forms of 'speech' because, in context, what is being regulated is not the speech as such, but the underlying course of conduct, of which the speech is but a part."

Says lawprof Geoffrey R. Stone, cautioning against a "too literal... understanding of the constitutional guarantee of 'the freedom of speech."

"I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother.

"I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness."

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime....

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people.

"Sopranos! In the OED!"

Researching "midget," in the comments to this post, I find one of the illustrative quotes is from a 1998 "Sopranos" script":

Tony: I was thinkin maybe... you're depressed?
Christopher: Me? I'm no fuckin mental midget.

Surprising to find "fuckin" in the OED, just casually dropped in there to help us understand the second part of the third definition of "midget," which is "A person notably deficient in the quality or ability indicated by the preceding adjective."

(Sorry, I can't provide links that go into the OED, but you could buy it: here.)

ADDED: Fascinatingly, the word "fuckin" — according to the OED — predates "fuck" as an English word. It appears in 1528, written in a margin: "O d fuckin Abbot." ("O d" is presumed to mean "damned.") Now that I've looked up "fuck," I like some of these other quotes:

1598   J. Florio Worlde of Wordes,   Fottere, to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.

Occupy!

c1650   in J. W. Hales & F. J. Furnivall Bishop Percy's Folio MS: Loose & Humorous Songs (1867) 90   Which made him to haue a mighty mind To clipp, kisse, & to ffuck.

Love the double ff. It's so exuberant.

a1749   A. Robertson Poems (?1751) 256   But she gave Proof that she could f—k....
1865   ‘Philocomus’ Love Feast ii. 17   That night I never shall forget; We fucked and fucked, and fucked and sweat....
1776   Frisky Songster (new ed.) 36   O, says the breeches, I shall be duck'd, Aye, says the petticoat, I shall be f—d.
1931   H. Miller Let. 16 June in Lett. to Emil (1989) 133   Tell her to go fuck a duck!
1955   M. Brando in T. Williams Five O'Clock Angel (1991) Epil. 122,   I feel like a bucket of stork shit for having fucked things around so.

Okay, enough of that for now.

The m-word!

"You know, everybody knows what the N-word is. We don't say the N-word. We refer to that word as the N-word. I had never heard of the M-word. Through my discovery, just within the last 12 hours or so, I have found that the use of the midget — excuse me, the use of the M-word — is no longer socially acceptable."

ADDED: What about Midge? "Midge was the first same-size friend of Barbie ever sold, and was created to oppose... controversies aimed at Barbie. She had a fuller, gentler face mold that was less sexually intimidating, although her body proportions were the same as Barbie...."

Josh Marshall holy craps.

Kinda skittish, isn't he?

Lower left-hand corner of a magazine is a monument to things not being anywhere nearly as good as they are said to be.

AND: This seems to be the post where I should remind you to use my Amazon portal, and let me just recommend: "Betsey Johnson Women's Flirty Faux Fur Slipper Boot." What's up with calling everything "flirty"? This is a strange fashion-writing tic. There's no way that slipper boot is flirting with anyone. It's quite the opposite. I mean, it's like those "In the mood/Not in the mood" pillows, with those slippers being the "not in the mood." [These can be your "in the mood" slippers.]

But... I know... the craze for "flirty" started with skirts, because of the rhyme "flirty skirts." And "flirty" is an alternative to "sexy," when you've already written "sexy" somewhere else on the page and "slutty," "sultry," "seductive," etc. etc. — all those other words on your women's magazine editor list — are not quite right.

"Canadian photographer François Brunelle is fascinated with the human face and the question of whether everyone has a doppelganger..."

"For years now, he has been working on a project called I’m Not a Look-Alike!, which features portraits of people who look like identical twins but aren’t actually related at all."

"The great Arthur Miller sent his NYU 1L Civ Pro class the exam instruction sheet. Except… he sent us the whole exam. Lulz."

There may be a couple of solutions, but one is obviously the best, and that's what Miller did. The students got some "lulz," other profs experienced twinges of vicarious pain, and Miller got to teach the world 2 more lessons — what not to do and what to do.

Identifying the woman...

... in the iconic photograph.

She's the sister of the woman we were talking about here.

Quiet Santa.

For children with special needs.

"UW law professor Michael Scott has looked at the psychological profiles of the gunman in these mass shootings."

"By Scott’s count, there have been about 75 mass shootings in the United States since the University of Texas killings in the 1960s."

He qualifies most as "disturbed" in one way or another, with a number of them seeking vengeance for some perceived alienation from society.

"Predicting future activity and future dangerousness is inherently difficult, but nonetheless, we can identify people who are in some form of mental crisis and try to intervene early on," Scott explained....

Scott said part of the solution is paying more attention to mental health and helping these individuals before their actions turn deadly....

Can we do a better job of noticing future killers?  Mass murderers make a spectacle of themselves. There's no hiding, no evasion of responsibility. These are young men who choose to flame out. There's nothing complicated about dealing with them. We brand as evil monsters, and if they haven't already killed themselves, we suppress them forever, executing or imprisoning them for life.

What is difficult is finding those who will act in the future, but here, not only are we uncertain who will end up where in the future, but there's a limit to how much you can intervene with someone who has not yet committed a crime.

And yet, there must be many things that we as a community can do for kids who become alienated and vengeful. At any school, the majority of children form circles of popularity, identifying normality in each other, and defining some as outsiders. This is a natural dynamic, but maybe, for our own protection, we should become more conscious and wary of it.

It's also natural for the weird kid to withdraw, to have his mother as an ally as he retreats into home-schooling, video games, and solitude. The "normal" kids are relieved to have him removed from their presence, and they don't know if he's off somewhere, hating them and plotting their murder.

I realize there's a risk of overreacting anyone who is introverted or awkward, but there must be ways to become more generous and inclusive toward the young outsider — ways that don't display fear or demand conformity.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker talks with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters for an hour.

The first 10 minutes have Walker saying that he won't pursue right-to-work legislation and that he doesn't want anything that will stir up the the kind of passion and protest we saw here in 2011. This has obvious political value for him, but the main idea is that businesses want calm and certainty. Those who've protested Walker should see that they've successfully inhibited him from taking further steps in the direction they oppose.

Susan Rice.

Contrasting cartoons.

"Jacob coolly followed school protocol, blocking the library entrance with a file cabinet before steering the youngsters into the supply closet."

"The kids, following her directions, walked inside in short order. They remained in the closet for about an hour, even as an eerie postshooting silence descended on the building before police arrived."