G.Anderson, you sure seem to be working furiously at honing your skills in self-immolation. To wit, you wrote “a very large percentage of young men and especially young women, see no value in sexual restraint, or monogamy.” “Especially” young women? On what do you base that, pray tell? And if young women are indeed whoring around, with whom are they whoring other than men (for the most part, anyway)??? I’ve been following your running battles re child abuse by each sex in another of Ellen’s column’s threads, and sometimes you do take the cake.

Ellen, you wrote, “If Hester Prynne were around, she wouldn’t be the subject of a novel, she’d be the author of a tell-all memoir with cell phone pictures of a buff Arthur Dimmesdale.” You couldn’t be more right. (And that’s a brilliant line, by the way; that story was part of my master’s thesis, so this line really caught my eye.) Later, you wrote about “shaming sentences,” such as a scarlet letter in another age.

While I like the idea of shaming sentences, it behooves us to keep in mind people such as Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joseph M. “Joe” Arpaio, who manages to excite great passions, both pro and con, every time he opens his mouth or does something. Such sentences need to be made with great care.

Let me use a related example that only indirectly involves sentencing.

Some years ago there was an unusual case of a couple in which the husband was the homemaker and the wife the breadwinner divorcing. Quite rightfully, given the husband had worked only a little at teenage-type jobs before marrying, and given that his wife had some high-flying career, the wife was ordered to make child-support payments.

She either fell behind or refused to pay; I forget which. Anyway, in that state the injured party could, after some established point, ask the authorities to put up billboards with a picture of the laggard and text identifying him—always before, a “him”—as a person refusing to pay child support.

So, the man asked the authorities to put up a sign about his wife. They refused. It just wasn’t heard of. And they were stunned he got child custody anyway; whoever heard of that?

He took them to court—and won.

Or so the story goes, anyway.

My point, however, is that sometimes this sort of approach backfires. Why should the offending person’s gender in the above case matter at all? Further, what if the offending person is genuinely offending due to no fault of his—or her—own? (Inability to obtain employment; being disabled, etc.)

Making a Good Ol’ Boy from Maricopa County wear bright pink clothing may well be a very effective tool. (I happen to believe it is, by the way.) But in some cultures, the shame that brings is so great that it well may cause the person to commit suicide. Do we *really* want a petty thief, a shoplifter, to *kill* himself? Yes, yes—some say, “Hang ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out!” but, thankfully, the ranks of such people may be thinning (I hope).

Then there’s the practice of police notifying people when a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood. this is a really, really tough call. Such an offender certainly invites zero sympathy—but to announce his presence is to invite murder. How to handle it? I don’t know. There is no perfect answer that I can discern. I don’t have any children—but if I did, I certainly would want to know about such offenders near my home. But I’m not the sort of guy to launch a preemptive strike, shooting the guy before he had a chance to harm anyone.

You sure do write provocative columns, Ma’am—and I mean that as a compliment.

Call her what you will folks, personally, I feel she is a business woman with credentials. Mighty nice credentials at that. Seriously, I would rather take advice from her than Mr. Spitzer or any other clients who might have paid for her services. Let her scribe her columns first before she is judged. If there is shame, it is not anymore hers than those who won’t give it a chance. I can’t wait to hear her perspective.

All the Murdoch-owned media was already known as “Rupert Murdoch’s Whorehouse” long before they hired any woman-who-gets-paid-for-it.  Who are all these newsreaders who recite all the garbage put under their nose, serve as the frontmen for the Ministry of Propaganda, promote hatred, lies and violence, do their best to tear our country apart and divide the people against each other?  If they’re not prostitutes, then what are they? 

I find a working woman to be much less offensive than the male prostitutes who work at Rupert Murdoch’s Whorehouse and pretend that they are “journalists.”  Yeah sure, and I’m the Queen of England.

G.Anderson-

I agree with your list of symptoms, and would add lack of civility, and mindless
competition. 

All of these are the result of losing the ability to employ our higher intellectual
capabilities associated with the mammalian part of the brain.  Humans, under
stress, dwell in that part of brain function called reptilian, it evolved earlier and
manages our fight/flight processing.  Creative thought does not occur there,
only reactionary responses are available.  And the more stress we create the
more our physiology shunts resources away from the higher brain functions to
the lower.  Check out heartmath.org for some real science in this area.

And the reason we have all this stress is that our society has been allowed to
be bent to the service of the Corporation instead of the Citizen.  We work too
many hours, spend too much time on overhead functions, and are experiencing
an overload of sensory input, it all adds up to stress.  There is hardly a public
place to rest one’s eyes anymore.  If you attend a sporting event to relax, you
have an advertising message, scientifically designed to invade your attention in
every available viewing angle.

The corporations have been using real science based on the ever increasing
understanding of human brain function to manipulate us.  When you hear NLP,
you should know that this translates to manipulation of humans through
emotional levers.  This manipulation is more powerful than physical coercion
and more insidious too, because it bypasses your critical thinking capability
completely and grabs you by your emotions.  It’s basically the evolution of
advertising.  The corporations are not evil it is just that they are not human,
and by their measurement capacity, profit/loss, there is no way to even
consider the support of Truth Beauty or Justice.

The Republicans have caught on to this since the early 70’s.  One example of
that is the clever way the Republicans have been describing issues, for instance
the Patriot Act is an abrogation of what our founding fathers shed their blood
to provide.  But when it’s called “Patriot” it creates an emotional response
making it easier to control us.  The Defense of Marriage Act, really does
nothing to build more effective marriages, or to prevent their dissolution, it’s
really the Disapproval of the Gay Lifestyle Act, but that isn’t as compelling a
label.  Change we can believe in is another example - corporatist Democrats
are catching on.

In computer terms, the human psyche is like a computer system with a back-
door programmed in that can be exploited by hackers.  NLP is the tool of those
hackers.  Corporations and smart politicians are those hackers and we don’t yet
have a robust firewall, and stress totally disables it.

We need to redirect our society back to the enabling of meaningful, fulfilling
and productive human existence, because that us the only core value that is
true.  To do that, the pro human side needs to become educated as to the
weapons employed by our oppressors.  Right now we aren’t even participating
in the battle that is defeating us

Unfortunately, our world is fast losing it’s sense of “shame”...hence, we perish.

Ms. Dupre Is Now a Member of the Reverse Pied Pipers..

No not the singing group from the 1930’s that played back-up for Tommy Dorsey. 

Ms. Dupre is now a rep which includes Mr. Spitzer for 21st Century Reverse Pied Pipers. The voices of melody reviving and reversing the rats from the river to gnaw at your intelligence and logic.  Thereby, totally distracting and diverting attention from the Reverse Robin Hoods Merry Men bureaucratic and media apparatus propgandizing the global mindset.

http://21stcenturyreversepyramid.blogspot.com/2009/11/american-mythology-pavlovs-dogs.html

Why would the bankers appear at the WH? Barak has no experience in economics and never held a job so what would they discuss the price of tea in China??
Barak needs to understand that he may control the state run media but other than that his IQ is suspect.
As for shame and the press they haven’t exhibited any shame for their biased coverage since the 60’s.

The non- violent pervert rather than the family man has become the new
American idol. Women are furious at the change in values. They need a schmuck
to watch the kiddies on weekends while they shop at the mall. The pervert would
rather spend his time with an affordable hooker. Why buy a cow when all a man
needs is the milk.

DaveZx3, December 17 at 12:36 pm #

Another scarce moment when I can completely agree with ardee.

Reason enough to rethink my own position…:-)

Oh, how sad that people are losing the puritan/calvinist, hateful religious shame and punishing morality, as if someone else’s marriage was either inside your realm of knowledge, or your buisness.  And yes, death to the conservative, abusive, child-beating, repressive, hypocritical “american family.”  And goodbye to pathetic shame in people’s personal lives.

By ardee, December 17 at 9:52 am #

“As if Ms. Dupre was the only whore in journalism!
She should run for Congress as she would be right at home there as well”.

Another scarce moment when I can completely agree with ardee.

When Ms. Dupre sold herself no one was killed or mutilated. No orphans were driven wailing into the streets. Billions were not siphoned from the public coffers to enrich the MIC.

Where is the public “shame” for these famous “professionals”?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/talking-head-like-a-hole/

ardee—I feel that you’re being unfair to whores.  It is true that prostitution and other forms of commercial sex work generally involve a good deal of illusion and entertainment, but the customer knows this and in fact it’s what he’s paying for.  People who write for the newspapers are generally supposed to seek out and report the truth, and of course do not, so they are not up to the level of whores.  And as for politicians, there are very few of them indeed who come up to the standards of the average whore.  But I guess that’s what people in general ask for.  After all, Ellen Goodman took the trouble to even notice this story.  Otherwise I would have no idea who was writing for the Post.

As if Ms. Dupre was the only whore in journalism!
She should run for Congress as she would be right at home there as well.

Three words… Panem et Circensus…. Nuff said….

The New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch. That tells you everything. 

Murdoch sells sex, scandals, and right-wing fantasy lies to forward the march to a fascist state.  His part in the march is to destroy our faith in the news and he has destroyed real papers across the US and the UK, including the once-prestigious Times of London.  His “page 3 girls” are common in Britain—topless or naked women on page 3 of the UK tabs.

The Post once a real, evening tabloid-sized newspaper that my dad read every day on the train home. It’s also the oldest continuous-running paper in NYC, started by, I believe, Alexander Hamilton.

Yeah, our msm and readers prefer the sex to the credit default swap scandals because they UNDERSTAND sex and cheating on your spouse.  Who understands anything about credit default swaps except that the bankers make killings and ordinary people lose their homes and jobs?

Seems like your looking for an answer, yet your ideology keeps you from seeing them.

It should be well understood by now, that we are living in a post family United states.

The family used to be the place where children, learned how to act, and to function as adults. Where values and codes of conduct were taught, where children learned the difference between right and wrong.

Then the family became the battle ground for competing ideologies who wanted to destroy it.
Yet those ideologies needed a mechanism with which to put their ideologies in place.

The legal profession was only to happy to oblige, and they have enriched themselves by extracting every penny possible during marital breakups.

These two allies have set the stage for what we have now. A society with T.V., as parent. 

So now, a very large percentage of young men and especially young women, see no value in sexual restraint, or monogamy. They often become attention junkies, because they have no identity, and can only know who they are by looking into the eyes of the crowd. 

When you’ve never had a family, or witnessed a long marriage or partnership, then you have no role models to base your own expecations on.

The carnival of Tiger Woods is just beginning, his divorce will probably cost him 50 million dollars, then there will be child support awards of many millions of dollars on top of that.

It’s just a short put, from using marriage as a cash cow, to just taking the cash.

The courts enforce divorce, but they never enforce marriage.