Reality Check?
The elephant in the room is making enough noise to be heard, but nobody seems to be listening.
As Jonn noted here one Senator is convinced that PTS(D) should preclude many vets from owning guns, but we may have a sitting senator who, in every way, could be pictured along side the very definition of the thing.
John McCain is a bona fide American Hero. However, the very events that make him a hero would make him suspect in some eyes. Anyone doubt he could buy any gun he fancied?
Please set aside his current behaviors because my point concerns a much broader dichotomy.
The DSM is evolving tool. And there is a rather lengthy history of defining any opposition as mentally ill.
Calling a Senator or two a “Wacko Bird” is one thing, but where will it end for the rest of us?
Category: "Teh Stoopid", Geezer Alert!, Guns, Reality Check
Dude is in his late 70’s, well past the age most of us would have retired and headed to Florida, Arizona, or wherever.
Again, he can pretend there’s civility in politics, but the other side seems to be unencumbered by such policies. Calling out your own for doing what you don’t have the balls to do yourself isn’t exactly an endearing trait.
The mental health issue could well be our undoing when it comes to 2A. Reason? Current beliefs about personal responsibility. Drop back, oh, about 150 years. You were either responsible for your actions, or you were crazy. Those were the two choices everyone had. But now? Mental health has a sliding scale. You can have a laundry list of dx, and be a functioning member of society today, only to turn around the next week and end up in a locked ward for a “mental health crisis.” How do you quantify that kind of thing?
You gotta feel there is professional jealousy involved…a young rising star fellow GOP Senator grabbing the media spotlight and who might very well be President one day. Meanwhile, McCain’s dream of the Presidency is over. He struck out in the bruising 2000 Republican primaries and in the 2008 General election…now he is just too old and its eating away at him. Oh, and McCain is no longer the maverick of the Senate…just to rub the salt in.
My issue with DiFi’s posturing is that it makes the leap that all service members suffer PTSD when in reality the worst thing many of them may have witnessed is a bad papercut filling out a leave form. She pre-supposes that all vets suffer PTSD. That logic could apply to cops, firemen, first responders, ER nurses {insert profession here which deals with the seamy underside of society]
I saw my first person shot to death in my teens, long before I entered the service. My most traumatic childhood memory is coming upon a motorcycle wreck in which one of the riders had his upper leg sliced wide open revealing the bone. My military service left me with no such memories. Well mostly.
By her way of thinking I was suffering PTSD long before I entered the service. PTSD is nothing more then the body’s response to a traumatic event or series of events. I could diagnosis 99% of all living humans with it in one form or another.
#3 I think you are on to something. The night of the filibuster highlighted the rift in the Republican party. You had the old guard wining and dining on Obama’s dime and then you had the opposite standing guard on the Senate floor. Something shifted that night and McCain and Graham felt their power slipping away. They are throwing tantrums now, but the only people who agree with them are people who will never vote for them-Dems.
@#5, Melle, you’re right. Grahamnesty and McLame are “republicans” that dems love, after they serve their purpose. Then they hate them. And like the slow kid in the sixth grade, they never learn.
Where will it all end? Many possibilities.
One historical example: certain totalitarian states (USSR) used phoney diagnoses of “psychiatric illness” as a way to muzzle critics and political dissidents (see Sakharov, Andrei).
I’ll leave the implications of that fact in this context as one of those proverbial “exercises for the reader”.
You have to remember that anyone who goes into the psych business (as oppposed to psychic business, where you actually read minds) — and I mean anyone — quickly learns to lose his sense of humor, his understanding of nuances, his ability to empathize, and his compassion. Anything you say can be misconstrued just because you said it.
These people have to justify their existence, especially in civil service, which is what the VA is, and do so by labeling people who would otherwise be able to do quite well without them, and giving them pills instead of help.
If you ask someone who has the Physician’s Desk Reference (you can buy that yourself), prescriptions are chemical compounds that should really not be put together in the same test tube. Some of them are so toxic that prolonged use will destroy your kidneys, your liver and eventually, the rest of you, and the side effects are seldom taken into consideration.
They don’t improve anything, and in fact, since I saw this happening with my father and his prescriptions for heart disease, I can confirm that they cause more harm than good in the long run.
Aside from that, the idea that you have to squelch yourself to be an acceptable human being is ludicrous. Are we all to become bland, beige, and boring, just because someone else says so?
You know, paranoia can be fun if you let it, but there is such a thing as making a full-sized elephant out of a one-inch toy.
Besides, people who stifle their emotions are sick.
@8 I can’t agree with you about the psych business. The people I work with are tremedously caring, have amazing senses of humor, and use more empathy and compassion in an hour than most people are capable of in a lifetime.
I don’t work for the VA.
I do agree with you about modern drugs. I lean toward herbal rememdies, although I know when to go to the doctor. While western medicine is great for trauma/acute care, it is really lousy with chronic illnesses. I currently use herbs for high blood pressure. My doctor opposes this, but he can’t argue with my current BP readings, either.
Being a colorful individualist is one thing; being batshit crazy and being allowed to run free until you hurt someone is another. What we haven’t figured out is how to distinguish one from another.
“…to distinguish one from THE OTHER.” Sorry.
Senator McCain is one unique piece of work. Back before he was candidate for President, McCain was known for 3 things:
1. McCain never missed a chance to exact revenge on his allies and fellow party-members. The Gang of 7 was McCain’s primary tool of revenge.
2. Negotiating to switch parties to the Democrats, until lured back to the GOP with the promise to be the GOP’s nominee for POTUS in 2008.
3. McCain is the John Kerry of the GOP: trades one wife to marry up, spends her money to stay elected, and who’s only signature legislation, McCain-Feingold, was ruled unconstitutional, and was ignored anyway.
Senator Paul won a very important concession from Obama by this filibuster: Americans have the right to know when their government may put them to death. This is applicable in a number of laws on the books.
McCain, as he won’t survive his next primary, is seeking continuing comfort by seeking exemptions from Obamacare and other laws for his wife’s family businesses.
I live in Arizona. I did not vote for McLame, But… There are people here who will continue to elect him long after he is dead. He is already long past his expiration date. Benedict Arnold was also once an American war hero. I do believe McLame is mentally ill. He will hang onto the senate seat until dead then request they prop him in his chair in the senate, across the aisle of course…
Years ago I read a book about the tyranny of psychiatry. It was pretty scary stuff. Hmmm.
The main problem with this, as with so many other things, is that it all depends upon who is defining things and who is in control of the mechanisms to control the population.
@#3, #5, you’re right on the money, McCain IS way past his expiration date, he’s been part of the “DC Country Club” for decades now, and he’s as out of touch as the rest of that clique. I don’t think he has anything left other than bile and bitterness over his 2008 defeat, and he wants to exact revenge by cowing up to B. Hussein 0bama & Co.!
“He is already long past his expiration date.” Nice line.
Looks like the Colorado Dems are taking notes from DiFi and refusing a mag limit for vets because they “caught the PTSD”:
http://twitchy.com/2013/03/09/shameful-colo-dem-lawmaker-no-veterans-should-have-high-capacity-mags-because-some-are-mentally-ill/