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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1175
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 05, 2004 - 2:55 pm: |       |
Predators or prey, Burgho?
Nice to see you around by the way.
I know sometimes you see a circle when I see a square, but it is my honest contention that serial killers are created by forces at work in society and these forces have it very much in mind to glamorise and perpetuate the killing of women in the name of the Freudian monster that stalks this planet.
These hapless killers are the prey of the super-senators of crime, the profilers and the writers, who are throwing gasoline on the fire as fast as they can, and then sitting back in pubs whilst the soldiers rip the throats and wombs out of women in a direct reaction to the words they have written and promoted as a basic truth: that men kill women for sex.
Radka is a fuel thrower. He likes that fire to burn.
You see, they make money out of it, and gain power over the troops.
There is no point in naming the Jack, apart from accolade and cash in the bank… I should like to see more discussion and understanding of what he did, not who the hell he was.
If you got cockroaches in your garage you should get yourself a couple of shrews. They know how to tame the cockroach.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, July 04, 2004 - 8:34 pm: | |
John Omlor wrote: “You needn't worry about missing anything. Just as there's not really anything "epistemological" about David's "epistemological center," there's nothing very Platonic, and certainly nothing having to do with the category of forms to be found in any of this.”
>>Whatever do you mean, Mr. Om? Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders, as we’ve indicated. The case is what it is because of psychopathy, and psychopathy is psychopathy. People of this type have existed for thousands of years, one of the most notable was Socrates’ own friend and confidant Alcibiades, a questionable figure of the Peloponnesian War as I’m sure you know.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, July 04, 2004 - 8:31 pm: | |
Mephisto wrote: “(I wouldn't rely too much on "RJ" for critical support, he seems to think that substituting variables should equal the same conclusion, i.e., 3+3=2 instead of 1+1).”
Mr. Palmer answered: “This is foolishness, and is beneath you. Radka himself --addressing the selfsame observation ---admitted that I was in fact describing a "strength" of his system and even gave the alarming fact that he had come up with 100+ other solutions using the "case evidence." Meditate on that awhile, Plato. (But you've already given your answer; I need not be alarmed at all, for truth is 'subjective.')”
>>My response: Wait a minute, here. Mr. Palmer is exaggerating. I am not going around solving the case 100 times all differently, as if I were some kind of demented metaphysician working out how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. What I said was the solution of the case is determined by the center chosen. If you went down the line choosing 100 different centers you might get 100 different solutions of the case evidence. I didn’t say all of those solutions would be satisfying, or exhaust the case evidence, or control subjectivity adequately. Only the one that solves the case would do that, I think.
My Palmer continues: “In parting, I would remind you of the sober fact that the last time this sort of metaphysical tomfoolery crept into criminal matters was when they burnt witches in Scotland by the dozen. A white-haired, sun-burnt Yankee in a deceptively simple line said "the earth is the right place for love." Perhaps you know it? Well, consider the same concept in a different context: criminal matters are the right place for empiricism. There's just no substitute for having something in your briefcase, old man. ---I'll leave you now, to dream your golden dreams. Cheers, RP”
>>My response: I am neither a demented religionist, nor a paranoiac, nor an Orwellian nut! I’m not looking to use tomfoolery to do anything! I’m not putting anybody on trial! All I’m doing is asking questions in a unified manner about a certain subject. What we are in danger of here is maybe making a mistake, or maybe on the other hand of learning something. Isn’t that a reasonable risk/reward equation?
What a nutty post, Mr. Palmer. Way out there.
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John V. Omlor
Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 407
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 8:10 am: | |
Somewhere in all this stuff above, I was asked, concerning my reassuring everyone that the "philosophy" in all this is not only not all that Platonic but is in fact merely window dressing (or the make-up on the whore, as I put it in another post that explained this in more detail):
"Whatever do you mean, Mr. Om? Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders, as we’ve indicated. The case is what it is because of psychopathy, and psychopathy is psychopathy."
Now then, let's stop for a moment and just look at the grammar of these sentences, shall we?
We begin with a sentence that claims that A is "the truth of the study" of B. And David is asking ME what I mean? I know he thinks he's invoking some sort of Platonic category of forms here, but since there's no way to see why he thinks he can claim that his particular interest is the perfect form of Ripper Studies and since that claim itself can be easily dismissed as ego run amuck, all we really have here is a badly written sentence.
But he concludes, as if he were further enlightening his readers, by reassuring us that "psychopathy is psycopathy."
See, now it's claims like this that will one day place Mr. Radka in the pantheon of Modern Philosophers.
If you want a true appreciation of the seriousness and the complexity and the brilliance of this man's theory and his writing here, you need only and always remember that one single claim.
"Psychopathy is psychopathy."
What could be simpler, and yet more elegant, more beautiful, more insightful, more profound?
It's a wonder that we don't shut this site down right now and declare the mystery solved for all time.
Meanwhile, David also writes somewhere in the mess above:
"Nowadays when readers get hold of deep questions it’s called deconstruction."
This is just wrong. I hope David didn't pay a lot to whoever taught him contemporary philosophy. Because he obviously got short changed.
"Deep questions" nowadays are still, as they have always been, engaged in all sorts of philosophical disciplines and intellectual venues, they are still engaged by theology and ontology and epistemology and ethics and aesthetics and all the rest and in all of them in many different and important ways, including analytic ways and phenomenological ways and dialectic ways and Socratic ways and yes even deconstructive ways. The latter is just one of many philosophical projects that continue to pursue what we euphemistically call "deep questions." What David has just written here is simply incorrect.
I don't know very much about genuine psychopathy and I don't know very much about the psychology of the Ripper (I don't even know if the same guy killed all these women). But I do know one thing, if David Radka is as ill-informed about these topics as he obviously is about deconstructions (the word, Derrida has suggested, is more appropriately written in the plural), if the things he is saying about them are as simply and completely wrong as the few small things he has said here about deconstructions, the one topic I do know a lot about, then this whole thread is a complete waste of time.
But of course I must remember that "psychopahty is psychopathy" and that it is "the truth of the study of the Whitechapel murders."
Then again, we all know what Nietzsche said about Plato's "truth," don't we?
And there's a passage in that essay that could give this thread its appropriate title:
"History of an Error"
--John |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 424
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 2:21 am: | |
I don’t think I very much care for this new watered-down version of Radka.
R.P.: “He is, in fact, stating that the theoretical is argued so brilliantly that it creates it's own critical mass and becomes true without empirical support.”
>>I have no such position. I’ve stated MANY times on this thread that my account of the case depends on and is justified by the empirical case evidence. Like Mr. Norder and Mr. Omlor, you use dishonesty in misrepresenting my positions here..”
Hmm. Let me revisit an old conversation:
"And you never did answer whether there is any proof either that Levy was related to Aaron, or that Levy was Anderson's witness. One of these must be proven to proceed."--Submitted by Ally.
>>In two simple words: Proof, schmoof. If you go about trying to solve the Whitechapel murders by looking for empirical data to back up every single point you make, you will wind up in the same place a great many otherwise rational people wound up: Believing your own BS----David Radka, April 30th, 2:54 PM.
[Editor’s note: And if you DON’T look for empirical data to back up your points you’re even MORE LIKELY TO BELIEVE a bunch of B.S. And that, I reckon, is the bottom line...]
But to continue... Ally repeats the question.
Mr. Radka: >>These oppositions are logical, not empirical in nature. “ etc. etc.
Now: consider the following, from A?R. Item #1:
"We become able to determine what elements are related, and what unrelated, by their logical relation to the center. The case reaches solution as predication of all the evidence under psychopathy attains an adequate, critically appraisable holism. "
But the "evidence" hasn't been comprised of empirically verified data--it is only referenced back on itself---'the idea.' Levy isn't shown to have any relationship to Lubnowski---no, nothing so bland; rather, the smoke in Mary Kelly's chimney and the Lusk letter suggests this fact. [Holism=Solution]
So, dreary me, my objection remains. Radka can water it down now, if he wishes. But he’s stated clearly many times that he doesn’t concern himself with backing up his claims with “Empirical data.” It only ‘ham-strings him.” Fine, if he wishes to play that parlour game. But his solution as clearly stated in A?R Part #1 is determined when these loose free-flowing hamstringy theories reach a satisfying whole. And that's why I talk about alchemy and razzle-dazzle and critical mass and good ol' English Law. If by "critical appraisable" Mr. Radka means anything other showing that Levy was Anderson’s witness, then I simple don't buy his arguments: I'll merely condemn him to that special circle in Limbo reserved for unabashed Theorists.
But most of my criticism was stated before I realized Radka was a Solipsist. We really no longer have any common ground to discuss matters, as I don't even really exist independent from Radka's mind. He does seem to be now admitting that he has, afterall, only a unified theory, and it needs some empircal data to back up some of it’s wilder claims. So there it is. Hey, I have no problem with that and we can call it a wrap. Good-night. RP |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 425
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 10:23 pm: | |
Mephisto: I give you Mr. Radka:
“>>The method I lay down is dynamical in nature. By it, anyone can arrange the case evidence around psychopathy in a different way than I have and get a different solution. In fact there may be an infinity of ways to do this that would give an infinity of solutions. Further, anyone could select any of an infinity of different centers other than psychopathy, and solve the case in an infinity of entirely different ways based on those. You could have Druitt doing it, Mutters Ostrognac, Queen Victoria, anything that could be shown to make some sense I guess. Part of finding the truth is playfulness, openness, asking questions, trying many different things until the best one is found. You find what you look for, but learning what one should be looking for is a part of the experience too. What I present as A?R is my journey in working all these things out for myself. I ran 100 different programs before I found the one that worked--the Summary presents only that one. The ultimate value of it all is logical satisfaction.” - David Radka--April 30, 4:34 P.M.
* * *
“Mr. Palmer answered: “Radka himself --addressing the selfsame observation ---admitted that I was in fact describing a "strength" of his system and even gave the alarming fact that he had come up with 100+ other solutions using the "case evidence." Meditate on that awhile, Plato. (But you've already given your answer; I need not be alarmed at all, for truth is 'subjective.')”
>>Mr Radka’s response: Wait a minute, here. Mr. Palmer is exaggerating. I am not going around solving the case 100 times all differently, as if I were some kind of demented metaphysician working out how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. What I said was the solution of the case is determined by the center chosen. If you went down the line choosing 100 different centers you might get 100 different solutions of the case evidence. I didn’t say all of those solutions would be satisfying, or exhaust the case evidence, or control subjectivity adequately. Only the one that solves the case would do that, I think. “
Commentary. “An infinity of solutions?” I can only gather that Radka and I have radically different notions of what constitutes a meaningful case “solution.” Evidently Radka believes ‘truth’ is primarily a subjective mental state; thus, three or four different people could come up with different solutions, and all be ‘truth’ because they all excite this same sense of ‘satisfaction.’ He seems to consistently describe ‘truth’ or ‘the solution’ in terms of achieving some sort of mental arousal. An eccentric and lonely sort of definition. I reckon we’ve come to the fork in the road, mate, as I still hold that it’s nonsensical to describe a ‘solution’ to a criminal case in terms that are not recognizably in a legal context. At a fundamental level, I accuse Radka of degrading the meaning of evidence. I don't buy the argument that 116 years makes a difference. In my Harry Truman world, the barmaid from Missouri still needs to be shown the smoking gun, whether Radka wishes to give her the time of day or not. Of course Radka denies this, and states he's not trying to "hang anyone." Am I unduly harsh? Maybe, but recall that Mr. Radka was the same fellow who foamed at the mouth when Patty Cornwell "solved" the case; stating, if I remember right, that she was "empowering" her feminist self by deliberately and knowingly accusing an innocent man. If we hold others to standards, we must hold ourselves to them. It's a form of intellectual cowardice to do otherwise; Radka is accusing Lubnowski of a grave charge. I expect him to do better, as he doesn't even have the beginnings of a circumstantial case against the man. He needs not change his methodology--that's his business-- but softening his rhetoric now and then might help his cause.
P.S. Here’s the citation you asked about:
"3. “Inferences are shaky, because even if the evidence from the other cases is shown to be entirely accurate, it does not necessarily follow that the JtR case must be anything like them at all. Inferences should be viewed as "hypotheses", or guesses, that still need verification.” -June 19th, 8:20 P.M.
>>Inferences may be used to define oppositions, which would then define further oppositions in the tripartite Hegelian sense. Following the evidence, I define a series of such oppositions in the Thesis. This ultimately justifies my epistemological center by the completeness of my analyses of the case evidence. “Verification” takes place only at the end of the evidence, not opposition by opposition. Hegel only knew he was right when he was done. Two-sidedness is the foundation principle of the universe, you know.' --June 19th, 8:20 P.M.
PPS. It's interesting to note how much lying Radka reads into the 'case evidence.' To accept A?R one has to accept that the historical records is teeming with lies. Levy was lying to the Inquest. The Jewish witness (evidently Levy again) was lying to Anderson. Anderson was lying to his subordinates. Sims' and Macnaghten's description of the Jewish suspects are further falsehoods that can be traced to the lies of the psychopath. The Colney Hatch admissions papers are more lies by Kosminski's family. All these lies are discernable by the Great Truth of Cleckley, when any dumb sod who's every spent an afternoon in a Psychology Department at a major University knows that no two Shrinks can agree on anything let alone a diagnosis. Take care and best wishes. |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 793
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, July 09, 2004 - 10:19 am: | |
Hi, RJ et al.
I have up to this time purposely desisted from commenting on this thread and Mr. Radka's supposed A?R "solution" to the Whitechapel murders in case something useful might come out of the discussion, and because of previous past friction with him on the old Casebook boards.
It appears that David Radka's "solution" is no solution at all except that David claims it "solves" the case, and expresses self-satisfaction that he is pleased that teh case is solved. In the end, though, he is just one more theorist with ideas but no real proof, his theory depending, as with so many other "solutions" on too many "What ifs", to make it workable.
David comes across as more eccentric each time he posts, which is a shame because he has put some thought into his ideas, although his habit of dressing his ideas up with half-baked and only partly understood philosophic concepts hardly helps his presentation. Moreover, David's constant slagging off those who dare to question his ideas and their internal inconsistencies further diminishes his theory and his own reputation. What a shame for David Radka and the field of Ripperology.
RJ, you, Dan Norder, John Omlor, and others have had the patience of Job dealing with the man. My head hurts! 
Best regards
Chris George
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 426
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, July 09, 2004 - 12:05 pm: | |
Re: Joseph Levy.
”Collard [Inspector, City Police] was in the mortuary supervising the preliminary examination of the body. The house-to-house enquiry in the neighbourhood which followed this cannot have been undertaken until the following morning. It turned up Levy who lived nearby, and he directed the police on to Lawende, a mile away in Dalston.” Martin Fido, The Crimes, Detection, and Death of Jack the Ripper (1987, 1993) p. 77
Let’s look at the primary sources for this statement:
Edward Collard “I took immediate steps to have the neighborhood searched. Mr. MacWilliam, chief of the Detective-Department on his arrival shortly after with a number of Detectives sent to have immediate searches both in the streets and in lodging Houses. Several men were stopped and searched without any good result. I have had had a house to house enquiry in the vicinity of Mitre Square--but I failed to find anything excepting the witnesses to be produced named Lawrence [sic] and Levy.” --Eddowes Inquest Papers, Corporation of London Record Office.
Joseph Hyam Levy gives his address at the inquest as “Hutchinson Street, Aldgate” which is indeed in the vicinity of Mitre Square. (Source, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, A-Z)
Jospeh Lawende gives his address at the inquest as “No. 45 Norfolk Road, Dalston.” (ditto)
“Throughout yesterday the City Detectives under Inspector M’William were making inquiries, but, so far, without result.” Daily Telegraph, Monday, Oct 1., 1888
Martin Fido’s statement seems to be well reasoned, and holds up to scrutiny. The house to house search on Sunday produced Levy, who told the police he had seen a couple near Church Passage. Further, he directed them to his companion, Joseph Lawende, who would not have been in the immediate vicinity that day. If Fido is right-- and I think he is--then we can make a reasonable conclusion. Joseph Hyam Levy was not only not being secretive and evasive with the police, but, to the contrary it was his willingness to freely cooperate with a house-to-house enquiry that allowed them to know about the Duke Street ‘event’ in the first place. A serious blow to the theory that he was hiding something.
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Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2685
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2004 - 7:42 am: | |
Hi
Just to suggest that maybe there were two ways the police could have got on to Levy - either by knocking on his door, or by knocking on the door of the (closer at hand) Imperial Club. Possibly the caretaker or whoever may have told the police the names of anyone who'd recently left the club, and perhaps even furnished the police with their addresses.
Robert |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 427
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2004 - 11:43 am: | |
Robert-- Hi. According to the Daily Telegraph, (October 1st) the Imperial Club was contacted and the members had no information, despite the fact that they were open until 2 a.m. Inspector Collard seems to be explicitly stating that Levy was discovered during the house-to-house inquires which took place the following day. RP |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2686
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2004 - 12:37 pm: | |
Fair enough, RJ. I agree, Levy seems to have helped the enquiry.
Robert |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 1:59 pm: | |
Mr. Norder wrote:
1.“Uh, David, are you serious when you say you want a 2-3 page essay explaining why a book based upon 50+ year old research in clinical psychology is outdated? Because, I mean, come on, that doesn't take more than a sentence or two, and it's already been well covered by myself and other posters. Of course you say you are about a month behind reading posts, so perhaps you'll get there eventually.”
>>Yes, that’s exactly what you need to do. You must state, specifically and in detail, how the three psychiatrists I use in the Summary (Cleckley, Hare and Lykken) led me to misrepresent psychopathy there. Tell us specifically, point by point, how my concept of psychopathy is inadequate. Otherwise, we have no idea how to evaluate if you’re talking about anything at all. Neither you nor any other poster has EVER “covered” this—quit lying. How can you expect us to believe that “it wouldn’t take more than a sentence or two?” If I’m significantly wrong in my views, there ought to be many rich points of disagreement for you to write about. I hope the light readers of this thread are finally getting an osmotic insight into Mr. Norder and his little mis-directional strategies.
2. “And surely you must be joking when you say that it doesn't matter if the word "Juwe" wasn't used to mean Jugendwerk until the 1960s because you are sure that the killer meant it to be used that way in the Goulston Grafitto of 1888?”
>>This is <yawn>, on Mr. Norder’s part, a scrambling of two different matters to produce what will hopefully serve as a difficult-to-refute lie. (a) I never said the reason that people should believe that “Juwe” referred to young people being brought up in the church was simply because “I was sure,” as you say above. I gave the contraction and the usage in the Summary. (b) No evidence has been presented to indicate that ‘…the word “Juwe” wasn’t used to mean Jugendwerk until the 1960s,’ as you say. Evidence was provided to indicate only that Benji Wiebe’s Mennonite group didn’t use it that way until then.
3. “Between all that and Mephisto's extensive use of mid-1980's Valley Girl slang to try to insult another poster I feel like this thread is some sort of bizarre time warp. But then it is a lot less grounded in reality than most episodes of the Twilight Zone.”
>>What does that have to do with my theory, right or wrong?
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 2:07 pm: | |
AP Wolf wrote:
1.“Predators or prey, Burgho? Nice to see you around by the way. I know sometimes you see a circle when I see a square, but it is my honest contention that serial killers are created by forces at work in society and these forces have it very much in mind to glamorise and perpetuate the killing of women in the name of the Freudian monster that stalks this planet.”
>>A dissolute and paranoiac curse, uttered by an intellect broken and devastated. How monstrous the results of years of abuse, how hideous the ultimate result. The notion that people like Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas are deliberately egging sexual serial murderers on for the purpose of gaining power or getting themselves off is so repugnant to every good and positive instinct as to sicken.
2.“These hapless killers are the prey of the super-senators of crime, the profilers and the writers, who are throwing gasoline on the fire as fast as they can, and then sitting back in pubs whilst the soldiers rip the throats and wombs out of women in a direct reaction to the words they have written and promoted as a basic truth: that men kill women for sex.”
>>We all know who’s “sitting back in pubs” very well, Mr. Wolf. And what you write is utter compost.
3.“Radka is a fuel thrower. He likes that fire to burn.”
>>How do I do that, pray tell? By writing a Summary that says JtR was a psychopathic Jew trying to get rich off the reward for his own capture? Where’s the connection with the “Freudian monster,” Mr. Wolf? Unqualified garbage, truly a slack drought from an unattended dustbin.
4.“You see, they make money out of it, and gain power over the troops.
There is no point in naming the Jack, apart from accolade and cash in the bank… I should like to see more discussion and understanding of what he did, not who the hell he was.”
>>When last I looked, the Summary was available on this web site to anyone who wants to read it free of charge. I’d like to see you demonstrate a real causal connection between anything John Douglas first wrote and then something a sexual serial murderer did.
5.“If you got cockroaches in your garage you should get yourself a couple of shrews. They know how to tame the cockroach.”
>>Surely you’ve got cockroaches in your medulla oblongata. Which may be better, come to think of it, than having no medulla oblongata at all. At least you don’t have a hole in your brain where your self-restraint is supposed to be; as does the man who abuses met amphetamine for twenty years.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 2:01 pm: | |
“I won't weigh in on the origin of your stupidity, Jennifer, but arguments are organic. They grow, they evolve. Radka's entire theory is based on a hodgepodge of philosophies. The argument is going to be likewise hodgepodge.”
>>No. Perhaps various schools of thought are used at one point or another, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the argument will not speak with a unitary voice. We make the argument that solves the case ourselves; it is another matter, in itself, beyond predecessor work.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2004 - 7:56 pm: | |
1.“…I have 2 card carrying members of "Team Psychopath" in my family. Both are very close to me and with both I have had many interactions with for many years. Neither behave in any real manner similar to what David would like me to believe. They both also suffer from a few other mental disorders. Of course they are never referred to as a 'psychopath'. We hardly ever refer to their 'condition'. If we are forced to, we call them what their doctors call them, 'sociopath'. According to their practicing (keyword) physicians the term 'psychopath' went out a long time ago. Their reason for it going passe? "Most people got it confused with the movie". Though some told me that since the term was coined by Clerkly, the condition has been studied deeper and that the name change was due to new understandings of the condition. The latter is probably more akin to what actually transpired. Thus the preferred term 'sociopath' is now more commonly used.”
The notion of the temperamentally antisocial personality is probably always going to be undergoing change. There will always be a new way of saying what it is. It will probably always be in development, psychiatrists will be writing new articles about it, controversies will be raised. Each new conception will have holes in it, but different holes than had the preceding one. Sometimes, for example, psychiatrists have thought it a good idea to maintain some distance between the temperamentally and the environmentally antisocial—when they like this arrangement they favor terms such as “psychopath” and “sociopath” respectively. Other times they like to nest the terms one inside the other—e.g., all psychopaths are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are psychopaths. Still other times they like to make the distinction disappear—e.g., all antisocial personalities are sociopaths, there are no psychopaths, and so on. The ultimate reason why there is change is the dichotomy between attempting to understand the condition on the one hand, and the profound irrationality of the condition and related behaviors on the other. The proximate reasons for changes are cultural developments like postmodernism replacing humanism as a descriptive condition in psychiatry, political feelings on the part of various psychiatrists, insurance considerations related to the treatment of these people, legal considerations related to their guiltiness, the matter of which psychiatrists sit on the DSM committee at a given time, recent books published, and so on. The situation reminds me somewhat of the presocratic Greek philosophers. Once Thales started with “All things are water,” the next and the next and the next also happen. E.g., Anaxagoras, Anaximander, “All things are number,” and so on. Once you encounter the ineffable, there seems always a better way of effing it. Innovation in psychiatry is the norm, and it seems to me a good thing on the whole, provided we keep in mind we’re in a stream, and not take too literally or finally the latest conception. And once again, let me emphasize CAREFUL STUDY OF CASE HISTORIES as the key learning opportunity in this field.
2.“Instead of coming out and say "Hey David, your so full of BS your eyes are brown. I know because I have 2 in my immediate family!!" I decided that it would be best to be an adult about things and ask him his history of treating or diagnosing 'psychopathy'. Of course, this just really pissed him off and he resorted to name calling instead of answering my questions.”
>>Honestly, it is so hard to find a real question in anything you’ve posted that I haven’t been able to answer. Can anybody find one in this post?
3. “"Hell, he could be a doctor for all I know!" I thought. "I might want to ask him about a few things before I go off an assume (we all know what happens when you assume)." Said my inner moppet. So I asked my questions and I received no answers. At this point I could have either presumed he knows what he is talking about or presumed he doesn't. I went with the latter. As it turns out he isn't a doctor. He's an accountant. From what I can gather because he won't respond to me, he's only read about sociopaths in books. He still calls them psychopaths while most practicing physicians call them sociopaths. He hasn't even _dealt_ with a properly diagnosed (read: card carying member) sociopath before.””
>>Sure I have. These people are not uncommon. A former Supervisor of mine “carried the card” as you say, and boasted of her psychiatric anomalousness to her employees. And so what if I never had met one? I know how to read psychiatric texts. Why should having a psychopath in your background be a prerequisite for understanding the syndrome?
4. “So you can wax philosophical and make all the references you want to Plato, caves, knowledge and opinion (though I would hope you wouldn't, since I have made the first step at attempting to keep the dialog civil). I still do not believe it changes the fact (not opinion) that I have extensive dealings with 2 sociopath's and their doctors. Unless David can answer my questions, I'm of the mindset that I am probably a little more equipped that he is to say what a sociopath would or wouldn't.”
>>Let met get this straight—you’ve never read a book on the subject, but you think you know more than me just because you have two antisocial persons in your family. I don’ theenk you are going to get a diploma based on that reasoning, senor.
5. “If only from observation alone. Where as I have dealt directly with them, he has not, etc. Even then, however, I am not a doctor AND I could still be wrong. The catch is: I admit it from the start. I don't go round telling people how smart I am or how wrong they are.. if you can follow where that thought is going. Regardless, these are my opinions and I am entitled to them. Just as you are yours. But lets break it down a little further. One of my biggest gripes with David was that he wouldn't face the fact that the root idea of his summary was not original.”
>>Now you’ve totally changed the subject without coming to any conclusion on the first part of your post! I thought we were talking about psychopaths! Can you see what I mean when I say I can’t find a question to respond to?
6. “Creative interpretation aside, most people take the gist of his summary as "JTR was a psychopath and as such he did x, y and z". Now, I take the root of that idea to be "JTR was a psychopath" as would a great many others. I tried to explain to David that it doesn't require collegiate level calculus to determine that someone running around killing women then disemboweling them had mental issues and that someone before him _might_ have thought them psychopathic in nature, regardless of definition (the more common or the clinical).”
>>(1) Psychopathy is not a mental issue. What psychopaths think is exactly the same as what psychiatrically normal people think. Jack the Ripper was a sane, but irrational man—a virtually incomprehensible combination. (2) Oh, lots and lots of people have thrown out the notion that JtR may well have been a psychopath. Where do you think I got the idea from, my grandma’s pantry? I got it from Cleckley, Hare, Lykken and other psychiatrists! A number of them say that JtR was a psychopath, and they were saying it long before I did. Psychiatrists have met and discussed the possibility that JtR was a psychopath for many years. But show me where anyone before me has published a detailed case solution of the Whitechapel murders using psychopathy as the central idea. Did Rumbelow do that? Sugden? Lykken? Hmmmm??? That is what is original about my work.
7. “He would have none of this and stated that other parts of his summary were original. Which is true, I never claimed that the summary as a whole lacked originality. I claimed that his idea that JTR had some serious mental issues and that they might have been psychopathic in nature was not original. I know I had the idea when I first read about the case years ago. Do you know why? Because of my dealings with my relatives. Not their actions directly so much as the people and places they have... 'visted' in the past.”
>>Taken in itself, the idea that JtR “…had some serious mental issues and that they might have been psychopathic in nature” is worth a bucket of warm spit. THOUSANDS of people have “had” that idea! But who wrote a case solution based on it? Only one of that many, mine freund. I am the “unum” of this “e pluribus”—catch my drift?
8. “Go hang out in a real psych ward for a few days and come back and tell me what you've seen. It shouldn't be long before you will see the dramatic differences between what David paints as a psychopath and a real 'sociopath'. If they have any that is. The ones I have dealt with are _really_ good social engineers, if they need to be. Well, you are going to see a great number of things, but try to focus on the sociopaths ”
>>What “dramatic differences” do you refer to? Please be specific. Exactly how do the psychopaths/sociopaths you’ve known differ from my view of JtR? Give us 2-3 pages, stand behind what you say like I do. Like Mr. Norder, in the above you say NOTHING.
9. “My opinion (ugh, there is that word again) is that he just hasn't had any real life experience with a sociopath.”
>>How do you know what my life experience has been? You don’t know me personally.
10. “Again, that doesn't mean he is correct or incorrect in his base presumption (we can't really prove anything anymore.. the case is just to damn old, therefore, I refer to it as a presumption) for I do not have to know how a combustion engine works to drive my car, etc. I think you get the point.”
>>No, I don’t. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you have a question? The only sense I get of you is a kind of leaping parochialism, which is not necessarily connected to any particular matter or question.
11. “This might be a good time to bring up that it's not so much what David states, it's how he states it that rubs most the wrong way. Things are often stated like they are 'a matter of fact' when in reality they are only half true (an example would how he touted for months that he knew who did it, only to have his summary list 3 possible candidates; 1 of which was unknown).”
>>It was either Woolf Abrahams, Morris Lubnowski, or some other relative of Aaron Kosminski who was handed a living room full of Aaron by his woman. How is this a half-truth? I’m not hedging and saying maybe it was Druitt as well; I’m narrowing right down to a tiny class of related people. I’m giving the principle of association of this class: Aaron Kosminski. No half-truths are involved.
12. “Does using the wrong terminology make David's summary wrong? No. It just shows that he is using an older source or has chosen to continue to use the word psychopath when most use the newer term 'sociopath'. Does having first hand experience with a sociopath make me correct and him incorrect? No. Not really. Remember this happened well over 100 years ago. Sociopaths of yesteryear might not behave as sociopaths of today.”
>>Psychopaths do not differ one from the next, and probably differ little over thousands of years. Their personalities syndromatically mis-developed, they are all mired in the same shallows. How they behave depends on their external surroundings, and what they may perceive as their specific opportunities, but what they are is stunningly the same.
13. “It just means that I have dealt with two who do not behave in a manner David describes. So from my personal experience, David is 100% incorrect on a great many levels (since I've only dealt with 2 that I know of and they behave nothing like he insists, that's 100% in the opposite direction).”
>>Don’t take the matter of psychopathic behavior literally, or overly objectively. The man who committed the Whitechapel murders almost certainly did not behave like JtR until he felt commandeered by his significant other. Your relatives have likely not been presented the same opportunities as JtR was, or put in the same situations. You need to get an insight into the psychopathic personality in order to understand what a psychopath is, and that is available I believe only through a thorough and patient study of many case histories. Learning about psychopaths is a part of becoming a human being yourself. You need sensitivity, logic, empathy, insight, imagination, dedication, and intelligence, being well read in the arts and sciences, and other qualities. You need to develop, to get better through your study.
14. “I would also think that having dealt with any sociopath would put me in a better position to judge their behavior than having dealt with none. My opinion of course. Who would you rather have doing the surgery... the guy still in collage or the guy with 5 PhD's hanging on the wall and 592 successful operations behind him? Crude analogy, but still, it delivers the point.”
>>I’ve got no idea what your point is. But if you think having two psychopaths as relatives in itself equips you to discourse reasonably about the type, I disagree.
15. “As you are obviously a well read man, I'm sure you can see the value of doing something as opposed to reading about it being done.”
>>What exactly have you done concerning your relatives? Give us two or three well-constructed pages on how you see their personalities, and compare to the psychiatric literature. Can you do that?
16. “Perhaps we can all stop attempting to bitch slap one another on this thread and get back on topic. Remembering of course that old adage about arguing over the internet. I propose that if we can't get along (and I have friends on both sides of this fight) that we take it to the chat room, put talk or somewhere else so that we do not eat up valuable space on Spry's server.”
>>I think a good way to conserve server space is for posters to think over what they mean before they post, so I don’t have to respond to what is essentially the same shallow misinterpretations of the Summary over and over again.
17. “We can create a "My god has a bigger unit than your god" thread, a "My IQ is so big, they can't even count it" thread.. hell we can even create a "Yes, but why is the rum gone?" thread (+3 cool points for naming that reference). All of which would probably be appropriate under pub talk and NONE of which will be archived.”
>>I believe posts concerning my Summary deserve to be archived because they discuss a valuable contribution to Ripperology. They relate to a published work on the case, not to off-topic personal discussions, as are found in the Pub Talk thread. I would think you personally have very little of substance to say about this subject at the present time, and would appreciate it if you would confine yourself to reading until you do.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 7:31 pm: | |
John Omlor wrote:
1.“Somewhere in the mess above, David Radka wrote about: "the tenor of the British people as patient, adventurous, emotionally cold, pragmatic, detail-oriented, science-oriented, and empire-oriented." You guys aren't buying this crap, are you? Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron just to name some off the top of my head from a single period..... There are plenty of others from every other moment in the history of British literature.”
>>You are taking me out of context. Just as there is a difference in Americans between a man like Chomsky and a man like Cheney, there is a difference in Britons between a man like Byron and that fellow who got the idea to get the Chinese addicted to opium, so the Brits could clean up selling their poppies from their Indian plantations in their Chinese colony. This is one of the most emotionally cold things I can imagine. It happened. It was a British institution of longstanding.
2.“And since someone mentioned Kant, he once wrote an essay called "On Nationalism" that is chock full of similarly hilarious and stupid stuff. Check it out.”
>>Kant wrote his works in such a manner as to provide ordinary people a superficial false interpretation, but one beneficial both to them and to philosophy in the long run. Kant was interested in giving ordinary people a basis for believing in their ordinary lives and being fully satisfied with that. He wanted to keep the cobblers cobbling. If they were to ask broader questions in the context of the upcoming modernization of culture, civilization might have too high a price to pay. Everything he wrote has to be taken in this context. For example his magnum opus, “Critique of Pure Reason,” while ostensibly designed to provide a basis for the Christian faith in a rationalist context, actually is a work of atheism by an atheist for those in the know, meaning philosophers. When a serious appraisal of it is undertaken from a Christian perspective, it is found to be also “…chock full of similarly hilarious and stupid stuff.” In other words, Mr. Omlor’s point that Kant wrote stupid stuff because he didn’t know what he was doing is incompetent.
2.“I read David's thesis once, a while back, and I couldn't find the place where he proves even that there was just one killer of all these women. Maybe I missed that part.”
>>The notion that the Whitechapel murders were perpetrated by a number of people in the copycat sense is probably the least reasonable feature of the deconstructionist position. With the exception of Walter Dew, all major detectives on the scene agreed in a single perpetrator. We now know there are such people as sexual serial murderers that do this kind of thing. The case evidence strongly indicates a single right-handed murderer using a throttling M.O., followed by the resolute cutting of the left carotid artery with blood spatter control (although not all features are present at all crime scenes.) The deconstructionists deconstruct too much. It is reasonable to deconstruct the public reaction, the police files, and the history of the case, but not the actual murders themselves. PS you read the Summary—I haven’t yet released the Thesis.
3. By the way, in case anyone is wondering, there's no such thing as "deconstructionist theories."
>>Correct, please forgive my typographical error. It should have been “deconstructionist strategy.”
4.“This is one thing I know about, having written a lengthy PhD dissertation in large part on the work of (and with the generous guidance of) Prof. Derrida. Whatever "deconstructions" might refer to, they cannot be "theories" per se. Derrida speaks explicitly to this point in an essay called "The States of Theory." It's collected in a book of the same name edited by David Carroll. Check it out, too.
>>Mr. Omlor is a deconstructionist, taught directly by the world’s chief deconstructionist.
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, July 09, 2004 - 12:56 am: | |
Hello Mr. Omlor,
In your post of July 7, 2004, 8:10 am, you wrote:
1)--"Somewhere in all this stuff above, I was asked, concerning my reassuring everyone that the "philosophy" in all this is not only not all that Platonic but is in fact merely window dressing (or the make-up on the whore, as I put it in another post that explained this in more detail) (Omlor)
2)--"Whatever do you mean, Mr. Om? Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders, as we’ve indicated" (Radka :July 04, 2004 - 8:34 pm).
Let's see how your quote in item 2, effects the accuracy of item 1, shall we?
You wrote: "We begin with a sentence that claims that A is 'the truth of the study' of B". But Radka didn't say, "the truth of the study", he said "the truth of study".
To understand the difference in meaning that your miscue imposes on Radka's claim, let's put it back into context: "Psychopathy is the truth of the study of the Whitechapel murders". What this tells us is: Truly, all those who study the Whitechapel Murders are Psychopaths. Now let's put Radka's phrase, truth of study, back into context: "Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders". What this tells us is: To study the Whitechapel Murders, is to study the psychopathy of the murderer. I'm sure you'll agree that Radka's original claim has an entirely different meaning, than your misquote. It follows then, that your claim, i.e., "we begin with a sentence that claims that A is 'the truth of the study' of B" is not an accurate reflection of Radka's argument. Your argument, therefore, has failed for two reasons:
1)--You have not proved that Radka's questioning of your meaning, "And David is asking ME what I mean?" is as absurd as you'd have us believe.
2)--Your paraphrase of Radka's argument, "A is the truth of the study of B", is inaccurate, and therefore, does not support your view that Radka is claiming a connection between his summary and Plato's theory of forms.
I agree with your position, i.e., if Radka had claimed "his particular interest is the perfect form of Ripper Studies", then "that claim itself can be easily dismissed as ego run amuck". However, I cannot agree with your accusation that Radka has claimed his theory to be "the perfect form of Ripper Studies". What I've gathered from reading his summary and his replies to his critics, is that he has claimed, rather consistently, that his theoretical approach is an alternative to the empirical methodology that has traditionally been used in building theories around the Whitechapel Murders. He has never claimed that his summary was the capo di tutti capi of Whitechapel Murder solutions.
Professor, I think that we, i.e., you, RJ, Radka, myself, et. al. can argue the syntax and semantics of this summary until we're all blue in the face. Our arguments would be more productive, and enjoyable if they were a little more focused and sequential. We could begin this enterprise by evaluating the general structure of Radka's presentation, and then argue the merits of each of the summary's sections, beginning with item 2, Who was the Whitechapel Murderer?. For example, we could identify its form, i.e., is it deductive or inductive; is it valid or invalid, how probable or plausible is it as an inductive argument; does it follow the tenets of the scientific method, etc. etc. Let's critique the scholarship, and not the scholar.
Let us decide to turn the corner on this thing, and agree to put, what could prove to be a very rewarding experience, back on track. This means no ridiculing the author, no matter how justified you may feel you are in doing so, and no more personal insults or barbs by the author, no matter how justified you might think you are. Likewise, Mr. Radka must agree to respond to the criticism, and not the critic. We should use courtesy as a matter of course. We all come from diverse backgrounds and we all have unique personalities, so let's have a little patience with one another. You all seem to be intelligent people, so I don't think these modest proposals will tax your capabilities.
Let's give it a shot, we have nothing to lose.
Mephisto
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 1:53 pm: | |
Mr. Omlor wrote, of Mr. Radka’s and Mephisto’s use of philosophical language: “The explanation that follows, while chock full of historical tastiness, does nothing to change my opinion. All this stuff is just for dramatic effect. There's no real philosophy of any significant sort taking place either in his or in Radka's work as far as I can see. As to why they feel compelled to use the language, well, I have my own suspicions about that. But it doesn't really matter.”
>>Speaking for myself, the history of philosophy is important to me. A long time was devoted to studying it. Concerning what I think about, I do seek perspectives from the various epochs. Why should this be a negative factor with respect to my views? Where are any specific criticisms, Mr. Omlor, in any event? What philosopher has been misrepresented, and how? So far I’ve been general, it seems to me. What’s the problem?
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John V. Omlor
Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 416
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2004 - 3:31 pm: | |
Good. More stuff.
Let's go backwards.
David writes, just above:
"Speaking for myself, the history of philosophy is important to me. A long time was devoted to studying it."
That's nice, but I still fail to see any real need for it in your project and I still fail to see how your use of the vocabulary is anything more than the paint on the face of the tart.
I've studied Colombian literature, but I don't feel the need to refer to Guajiro culture in everything I write. It would be silly and irrelevant, sort of like your references to Plato and Kant.
Your use of philosophical verbiage, David, hasn't been "general." It's been largely pointless. And, I suspect, designed solely to make your ideas sound more complicated and less pedestrian than they finally are.
Mephisto then tries to defend the following grammar:
"Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders".
Sorry for the mistranscription. But "A is the truth of study of the B," as a phrase, still means nothing to me. And the missing definite article in the middle only makes the sentence worse. It's bad writing at best and deliberately and needlessly convoluted in order to fend off criticism at worst. So it seems that even if I correct the misquotation, the point remains the same.
Incidentally, Mephisto generously reads
"Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders."
to mean
"To study the Whitechapel Murders, is to study the psychopathy of the murderer."
And perhaps, in some other language, these two sentences do indeed mean the same thing.
But I speak English, and I'll be damned if I can see how he got the second, rather clear sentence, from the first ugly one.
And also, I seem to recall that Radka did indeed invoke the Platonic form when speaking of his theory and even likened the rest of us to Plato's cave dwellers who need the philosopher king to come back down and tell us all... So I also suspect that my suggestion that Radka was claiming to offer us the perfect Platonic form of Ripper studies is more accurate than Mephisto might like to admit and that a certain amount of ego is in fact running wildly amuck throughout Radka's rhetoric.
And for the record, I like it here on this particular corner just fine and have no intention of turning to any other corner. Other people can see what's around that bend if they like. I'm quite happy where I am.
Now back to my favorite post, where David tries to defend a Kant essay that I suspect he hasn't even read.
David backs off of his nonsense claim made earlier about "the tenor of the British people" and assures us that he was just talking about some British people. This, of course, renders the whole argument vague and moot, since some people in every culture are "emotionally cold" and "pragmatic" etc., so his original point is now an obvious but irrelevant truism.
Then he writes a paragraph on Kant which doesn't once mention the essay I was talking about and doesn't once discuss whether what Kant wrote in that particular essay was any different than what I said it was. Why do I think this is because it's an essay David hasn't read? It's a work that is completely and utterly different than any of the Critiques and that works in a completely different way than those texts. And it's a work which is quite explicit about its politics and I don't see David offering a detailed alternative reading of it in his post. So I guess I'll just have to apologize for mentioning something that he's not familiar with and we can leave it at that.
He then accuses me of "deconstructing" something, thereby demonstrating that he still doesn't have a clue what the term means.
All I did was mention that I missed the part in his text where he proves that all these women were killed by one guy. I didn't say that they were or that they weren't. I just said I couldn't find that part in his essay. I have no idea whether they were or not. But for David, this somehow became me "deconstructing" something. Again, this is simple bullshit. I was doing nothing of the sort. Nothing I have ever written on this thread even remotely looks like a deconstruction. And asking whether all the women were killed by the same guy CERTAINLY is not a deconstructive gesture. It's simply a curious one.
David seems oddly determined to mention "deconstruction" for some reason whenever responding to me, despite the fact that I'm not doing any of that stuff here nor am I interested in doing any of that stuff here. He seems almost paranoid about it. I wonder why?
And his reminder that I was once helped along by someone who does work in this vein seems weirdly accusatory. But since nothing I'm actually doing here has anything to do with what I was taught in those studies, I'll take the accusation as a polite highlighting of my academic history. (By the way, there is, of course, no way anyone could ever be the "chief" deconstructionist, by definition -- and Prof. Derrida would certainly never call even himself a "deconstructionist," since that term cannot refer to any such movement or club or specific set of formal principles or theory, as I have already cited in an essay in another book David has obviously never read, which would explain his non-sequitur response to my having mentioned it.)
David seems to want everyone to know that I was trained in this particular body or works. I was. But I'm not using any of them here. I'm not really doing anything that remotely resembles those works here. Nothing David has ever written needs deconstruction to address it and I certainly see no reason why, as a topic, it is relevant to the question of whether David's speculations on who killed these women are any more sound or valid than any of a dozen or more other authors' similar speculations.
You don't need deconstruction to see that David has dressed up his particular theory about what happened in 1888 in a bunch of pseudo-philosophical language and bits and pieces of old psychologizing and announced to the world that it's something groundbreaking and unprecedented.
You don't need deconstruction to see that although there might be some interesting ideas here, and some useful speculation, there is also a whole lot of bad writing and unnecessary posturing and convoluted grammar and grand assertions of pointless truisms (remember, "psychopathy is psychopathy").
You certainly don't need deconstruction to read this theory or to comment on it. And there's no real reason even to be talking about deconstruction in regard to any of David's work, except that he seems to be particularly troubled by the fact that I know a lot about it. Oddly, he doesn't seem all that troubled by the fact that he doesn't.
Hey, how's that for fun with grammar?
Anyway, I'll leave it to RJ and company to debate the case data and history. I'm content to look at the bad writing and the shallow use of philosophical name-dropping and vague clichés of thought and all the assorted pseudo-intellectual window dressing that accompanies this stuff and tries so desperately to make the work here appear more deep and complicated than it actually is.
Pass on by, readers, and get to the good stuff that will be sure to follow.
All the best,
--John
(Message edited by omlor on July 11, 2004) |
Ally
Chief Inspector
Username: Ally
Post Number: 662
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2004 - 7:32 pm: | |
David,
Darling, your being crapful again. You wrote, "there is a difference in Britons between a man like Byron and that fellow who got the idea to get the Chinese addicted to opium, so ... This is one of the most emotionally cold things I can imagine. It happened. It was a British institution of longstanding. "
Heard of the native americans? Heard of us sending them alcohol and blankets ...blankets infested with disease so as to wipe them out? It was an American tradition of longstanding so we could get their land. It ain't just Brits, it's people.
 |
Donald Souden
Inspector
Username: Supe
Post Number: 255
Registered: 10-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2004 - 10:10 pm: | |
Mephisto Joe,
It would seem my vows to stay off this thread have about as much meaning as Liz Taylor's marriage vows. Anyway, is it not a little late in the game to suddenly ask everyone to start adhering to the Marquis of Queensbury Rules?
That said, I think you are right and I would go even further and suggest everyone take a two-week sabbatical from this particular thread. The thesis is out there, many of the arguments and counter-arguments have been made and we all might benefit from a liesurely study of what truths may lurk behind the fulminating.
As it is, I have been very quiet on the boards for several weeks now because I have started a new job and am struggling to master four new computer programs and a variety of new skills. I still read the boards and have had an opportunity to reflect on what I and others have said on this thread. In truth, my opinions have not changed markedly, but were I do it all over again I would certainly have moderated some of my language. It might really be salutary if we all took a break here.
And Ally,
Your point is well taken, but historical accuracy compels me to mention that the first record of such shenanigans in North America is that of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, a British officer, who sought to distribute smallpox germ infested blankets to the Indians.
Don. |
Ally
Chief Inspector
Username: Ally
Post Number: 663
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 12, 2004 - 7:45 am: | |
Donald,
Historical accuracy forces me to point out...no duh! You mean Americans haven't been here since the dawn of time? You mean Americans weren't first to do everything? Considering, you know, that America was founded largely by other countries, what an absolute shocker it is that people from other countries did things first here. And you know, considering that Brits were quite an empire in their day, damn what a shocker that they did do a lot of stuff first. Damn, my whole world view just went to hell. I guess the only thing we did do first is walk on the moon..we made it to space first! YEAH!..oh wait crap...darn.
The point is not who did it first. How about we excuse all transgressions of everyone, as long as they didn't do it first? I mean as long as you yourself didn't come up with the idea, then there is no reason to take the blame if you carry it out or continue it. We could wipe a whole slew of stuff clean using the "He started it" logic.
The point is that David is xenophobic to a ridiculous degree. He probably crosses the street if he sees people sporting out-of-state tags, not that I blame him really, those Rhode Islanders are a shifty lot.
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Jennifer D. Pegg
Inspector
Username: Jdpegg
Post Number: 494
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 12, 2004 - 9:02 am: | |
On behalf of the british,
DAvid what are you wittering on about?
Firstly was has it got to do with this thread or your theory. Secondly are we responsible for everything that has gone wrong. can we be blamed for the actions of our forefathers and mothers (which we don't think was so hot David)? Are average Americans responsible for the Vietnam war? I don't think so.
Get a grip
Jennifer
ps and there was me saying I was getting off this delightful thread!
"Think things, not words." - O.W. Holmes jr |
Donald Souden
Inspector
Username: Supe
Post Number: 256
Registered: 10-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 12, 2004 - 8:20 pm: | |
Ally,
Is there any wonder why I try to avoid this thread? It seems infected with incivility.
Read the first clause of my first sentence again: "Your point is well taken,..." Then, as a historical aside I mentioned Amherst. I used to teach American history, so I'm prone to those sorts of asides. The comment was hardly an attempt at exculpating anyone at any time.
May I never add another word to this thread.
Don. |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 9:49 pm: | |
Friends,
I’ve been giving some thought the past few days to an alternative interpretation of the term “Juwes” used in the graffitus that may hold some water. Recall that one of the psychopath’s purposes in the graffitus is to create the biggest possible anti-Semitic scene, a riot if possible, in order to serve as backdrop to his intimidation of his Jewish witnesses. The placing of the graffitus right in the Jewish street market set to begin in a few hours would display it broadly to them, and supposedly “get them going.” One way to show derision or disrespect to others is to deliberately mispronounce or misspell their proper name. It is a way of confiscating or converting the identity of the other. They are no longer what they are or may become in and of themselves, but what their derider makes them be. They are not what they properly are, but are instead a kind of broken or spoiled version of themselves, and it is by the hand of the derider that they become or are shown to be broken and spoiled. Consider the following posted on this thread by Mr. Donald Souden on May 13, 2004 at 11:22 AM (found in the May 13 archive):
“I thought you told us you would be off the boards this week MR. RAKDA -- promises, promises. Regardless, the continued fascination with this thread and its gossamer-like theory is puzzling. MR. RADAKA only answers those questions that allow him to hide behind Cleckly's research (and even then none of the patients studied by Cleckly displayed behavior remotely like the Ripper in the theory). Any other questions MR. RADKE deigns to address get lost in his insolence and self-absorption.” (Capitalization’s mine.)
Notice how Mr. Souden in his angry personal tirade intentionally misspells my name three different ways—RAKDA, RADAKA, and RADKE. It is an act of disrespect, derision, and provocation, in which he gets himself off by altering or slurring my personal identity, if only in his own fantasies. What I’m thinking is that perhaps the Ripper wanted the local Jews to retort to the misspelling of their proper name. The Jews supposedly would viscerally react to the misspelling by immediately assuming that the Ripper must be a Gentile, since no Jew would misspell “Jew.” In their anger they would conclude that a Gentile were trying to put the blame for the murders on them as a demeaned, slurred group, the object of Gentile derision and anger. They would then immediately retaliate against the anti-Semitism on the part of the Gentile by defending themselves; attacking Gentiles and rioting, and the psychopath would have what he wanted. The derision of misspelling might also motivate anti-Semitic Gentiles to sympathetically throw in and fight the Jews, in the same sense that Mr. Souden wants other posters of this thread to sympathetically throw in with him and fight me. “Juwes” essentially portrays the Jews to the Gentiles as “fightable ones.”
The whole scheme of misspelling a proper name to create animus seems puerile and childish, the kind of thing that happens on playgrounds, and thus well might have occurred to a puerile person like a psychopath. If it did, it would be on par with his other pompous and far-fetched communications of that night. “Juwes” in this sense would not have any meaning in itself; its meaning would be totally a matter of its intended effects on others.
This isn’t to say that “Juwes” might not have had other meanings as well. JtR was a clever fellow, capable of thinking on his feet, and would be capable of loading various meanings into a word when he needed to.
Copyright David M. Radka, 2004.
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 4:23 pm: | |
Hello Mr. Souden,
Thank you for your thoughtful message of July 12, 8:20 pm. I hope I can convince you to participate in a discussion with a format similar to the one I suggested in my post of July 9, 12:56 am.
I think Radka's summary has provided the Casebook readers with a number of innovations, i.e., a fresh philosophical approach, a systematic methodology, and a new unified theory concept, all of which should be thoroughly analyzed. Furthermore, I think that that action can be accomplished without the rancor, personal attacks, and side issues that, so far, have interrupted meaningful analysis.
I've found that in order to move past the obstacles and examine the rationale behind Radka's arguments, one must choose his or her battles. To me, if the object of the exercise is to determine the value of Radka's unified theory; the utility of his theoretical approach, and the realism of the scenarios he presents, then I'll just have to ignore the inane commentary.
Recently, R.J. Palmer and I have cordially argued a number of perspectives regarding Radka's paper; I'm sure that your point of view would broaden the exchange of ideas. I hope you will change your mind, and join our discussion.
Sincerely
Mephisto
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, July 12, 2004 - 4:54 pm: | |
Mr. Norder wrote:
1. “This is so tedious. David wrote: "Please note Mr. Norder has never “detailed” ANYTHING on this thread." I've detailed plenty of things on this thread, you've apparently just chosen to ignore them. As one of several examples, you falsely claimed that psychopaths are incapable of feeling anger. I responded with the important detail that unrestrained and explosive anger is a classic symptom of psychopathy, which is completely opposite of your belief on the matter. I then backed it up with a reference to the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria and also with Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist, which very specifically states that "inadequate control of anger and temper" is a strongly correlated trait.”
>>Mr. Norder, you are foisting a grave mistake of understanding of the psychopathic personality on the public from your editorial high chair. Let us let Robert Hare, the psychiatrist you claim to have studied and comprehended on this subject, speak to us directly on the matter of anger in psychopaths:
a. “(For) the psychopath,...violence is not emotionally different from other forms of behavior.” (Hare, “Without Conscience,” page 175.)
b. “...In a rambling book about hate, violence, and rationalizations for his behavior, (the psychopath) Jack Abbott made this revealing comment: ‘There are emotions--a whole spectrum of them--that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not. At age thirty-seven I am barely a precocious child. My passions are those of a boy.” (Hare, page 53.)
c. “...Psychopaths...tend to be two-dimensional characters without the emotional depth and the complex and confusing drives, conflicts, and psychological turmoil that make even ordinary people interesting and different from one another...(A life)...banal, sophomoric, and devoid of the detail that enriches the lives of normal adults.” (Hare, page 141.)
d. “...Casually (describes) a brutal offense as if an apple had been peeled or a fish gutted.” (Hare, page 89.)
And the following pertinent quote is from Hare’s mentor, Hervey Cleckley:
e. “Vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, and absurd and showy poses of indignation are all within his emotional scale and are freely sounded as the circumstances of life play upon him. But mature, wholehearted anger, true or consistent indignation, honest, solid grief, sustaining pride, deep joy, and genuine despair are reactions not likely to be found within this scale.” (Hervey M. Cleckley, “The Mask of Sanity,” page 348.)
Psychopaths are people who never develop a mechanism of psychological inhibitions adequate to enable them to live a normal life, a life in which they would be able to gauge adequately the future effect of their current actions on themselves and others in the social sense as normal people do, and thereby to gain the freedom to decide to voluntarily refrain from doing antisocial things in view of their likely bad consequences. An action that would have obvious immediate negative consequences, such as jumping off a two-story building, would not be done; but an action which would not necessarily bring an immediate negative consequence, such as stealing, would be inadequately inhibited and repeatedly done, often without any real desire to possess the stolen property and with seemingly no regard for later consequences. As I explained in the Summary, this is because psychopaths come into the world with no or a very reduced ability to experience the basic emotion of fear. This leads to a fundamental syndromatic misdevelopment of the personality on all levels. Inhibitions never develop, an autonomic mechanism of psychic pain experienced before acting never develops, feeling bad about bad things one has done never develops, emotions deeper than quick shallow spite or maudlin passing affection never develop, conscience never develops, a reasonable life plan never develops, behavior is inadequately motivated or unmotivated, and the individual does things that are so irrational, self-defeating and gratuitously or even monstrously evil as to pass the understanding of normal people. Psychopaths have been shown to lack an adequate personal transcendence of space and time, the fundamental building block of the human personality—they essentially live in the present time and place, with little or no regard for their history or future, or even for what may be going on in places other than the present place that may nevertheless directly effect them. Psychopaths are fundamentally incapable of experiencing anything other than shallow, low-voltage, emotions. However, because they also lack any adequate mechanism of emotional inhibition, these low-voltage emotions often emerge in their behavior. In other words, in order for a normal person to express anger in the form of violence, let’s say, he’d need an emotional voltage factor of 56 to overcome a reciprocal inhibition factor of 55. He’d have to be very angry or have a powerful rationalizing frame of mind under the circumstances to overcome what his conscience or forethought would be strongly telling him was a bad thing to do. Thus in normal people, emotions and the inhibiting mechanism mutually strengthen one another, and the latter usually wins. But for a psychopath to express anger only a very slight emotional voltage is necessary, because the inhibiting factor is so weak. A psychopath may decide to commit a murder based on an emotional anger factor of 3 overcoming a reciprocal inhibiting factor of 2. He doesn’t need to be very angry, or have anything like a genuine beef with his victim, or even have a reasonable plan in mind in order to act. In psychopathic people, emotions and the inhibiting mechanism mutually deplete one another, and the former usually wins. Rich, ironic, satisfying, or truly despairing emotions are completely alien to the psychopath. Anger in normal people is a very complicated emotion, rich in personal history, personal psychological pain and related psychological development, rich in notions of one’s own history and future; but in a psychopath it is the equivalent of accidentally stubbing one’s tow on a sofa leg. A psychopath is capable of getting pettily dissed off and striking out against another on The Three Stooges level, but he doesn’t appreciate the damage he is doing to himself, to the other and to society in doing so. His appreciation of life is massively qualitatively degraded and devalued on all counts. This is what we mean when we say psychopaths are not angry people. The “unrestrained and explosive anger” you speak of above is a misunderstanding of the type—psychopaths do not harbor any deep sense of emotions that may burst through restraints whatever. This is why they cannot be helped by psychiatry or psychotherapy—they simply don’t have enough residual repressed anger or other emotions paining them to be discussed, worked out or overcome. The emotions of psychopaths are so fleeting, simplistic and weak that the individual cannot be or can hardly be characterized by his emotions, despite that his actions are very much determined by his emotions, much more so than in the case of a normal person, and despite that an outburst may appear on its surface to express strong emotional feeling to an unskilled observer or thinker. I made this clear throughout the Summary, remarking on the Whitechapel murderer’s inadequately motivated behavior. The position you take shows that you have no understanding of what Dr. Hare is talking about and no business discussing it as Editor in the pages of ‘Ripper Notes.’ You make no distinction in anger between psychopaths and normal people—for you, when you say “…unrestrained and explosive anger is a classic symptom of psychopathy, which is completely opposite of your belief on the matter,” anger in the psychopath is incorrectly viewed as along the same lines as in the normal person.
2. “At this point both the person who is considered the world's foremost authority on psychopathy and the premier organization for mental health professionals (which is in charge of writing the standard diagnostic reference manual used by virtually all psychotherapists) both say that you are completely wrong -- on this point and several others already detailed on this board.”
>>You completely misunderstand both Dr. Hare and the DSM. Dr. Hare is talking about weak, shallow emotions, not ordinary anger (see his quotes above from the book you have supposedly read yourself), and the DSM assumes that its user already knows this. You’ve incompetently misinterpreted the both of them together in a unitary incorrect thought.
3. “It takes a lot of chutzpah for you to come along and claim that I haven't provided any details to support my side when your idea of supporting your side is to talk about dead philosophers.”
>>Are you saying that a philosopher becomes wrong when he dies? That seems rather similar to your point about Cleckley being “outmoded,” doesn’t it? By what strange mechanism does this happen? Why do many philosophers make so much effort to study the history of philosophy? You’ve never stated the sense in which Cleckley is outmoded—please do so, in detail here. I’ve spent years reading and discussing Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Cleckley and others, and have learned a little. And they are all as dead as doornails! You have still not supplied any details for any of your positions concerning the Summary. All you did above was make a simplistic erroneous misinterpretation. If you had included adequate details above concerning Hare’s real position on psychopathic anger, as I did, then you would have self-refuted. See what I mean, Mr. Norder? You know nothing, and have done nothing but try to bluff everyone reading these boards for the past 2 ½ months.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 13, 2004 - 9:15 pm: | |
1.Ms Hilliard wrote: “I think one of the things that is so amazing about this thread is that we are given an opportunity to not only dispute interpretations of evidence, but to discuss logic. Please don't make us stay "on topic"! Mr. Radka supports his theory with a pretty rigid (and I mean that in a good way) logical framework, and I am having a great time evaluating the strengths of his detractors (which are formidable). I'm sorry to be abstract but I am fascinated by the spinning out of his theory (psychopathy), because that is the meat of it. I think that one might term the "epistomelogical center" as simply a starting point within which context we will try to understand the evidence. If it clicks, great...if not...bag it!”
>>Exactly right, Liz. And the reason I published is because after testing many E.C.’s, I found the one that gave me out more than I put in, and it determined and analyzed all the evidence of the case satisfactorily. It was similar to a physicist trying out various formulas to explain a complex physical process, and finally finding the one that unifies the whole field. It is theoretical work until it locks into the whole of the data, then you have a combination formula/empiricism in one. The formula organizes the evidence according to what the true meaning of the evidence is, thus allowing the evidence for the first time to tell us what really happened in 1888. Mr. Palmer for example finds this extremely hard to understand, but here you have done so superbly.
2.“I am a scientist and I don't think that his methods are too far off. What I try to do is evaluate the evidence, try to form a sensical theory, and then, using published material, mathematics, and a reevaluation of the evidence, break that theory down or support it, depending on how things go.”
>>Right on the button! You are spot on target concerning A?R! This is just what my thought process was when developing my work on the case, especially concerning the reevaluation of the evidence.
3.“Theories become precious after too much work, and thank God, they are able to be modified. Maybe that isn't the way that science is supposed to be done, but I would venture that it's the way that it is usually done. Anyhoo, I believe that I have nothing really to contribute,…
Quite the contrary. You’ve made a sterling contribution already.
4. “…except that I'm going to be really pendantic and say that 1) Radka has shown us a plausible framework about thinking about the killings and 2) "epistomelogical center" might be exchanged with another term, possibly "theory". I've always understood that epistemology is concerned with HOW one gains knowledge, but you just seem to be using the scientific method! [I would be extremely pleased if we could discuss logic and philosophy off the board]. Liz”
>>Epistemology is asking questions about what we know, whether or not we really know what we think we know, and how we come to know. When we pursue it, we usually discover that we really don’t know a great deal of what we thought we knew, but here and there we find one or two things firming up as knowledge that we were previously unaware that we knew. And only a few little discoveries of this kind were required for me to come to know that the chronology of the case evidence was key to its logical causal organization, and the result of that was A?R in full. I know what you mean concerning discussions off the board, but since there are so many posting who haven’t seemed to get the knack of A?R, I’d appreciate it if we would continue to discuss on this thread. We are here for them. Thank you so much for your post! I’d be happy to send you a free copy of the Thesis when it is done. Everyone who doesn’t get the hang of A?R should study this post.
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 10:29 pm: | |
Hello Professor O,
On July 11, 3:31 pm you wrote: "Incidentally, Mephisto generously reads 'Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders.' to mean 'To study the Whitechapel Murders, is to study the psychopathy of the murderer.' And perhaps, in some other language, these two sentences do indeed mean the same thing. But I speak English, and I'll be damned if I can see how he got the second, rather clear sentence, from the first ugly one".
Actually professor I wasn't being generous with my interpretation of the sentence you focused on, "psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders" (Radka :July 04, 2004 - 8:34 pm), which I read as, "To study the Whitechapel Murders, is to study the psychopathy of the murderer" (Mephisto: July 09, 2004 - 12:56 am). Thank you for your compliment regarding my clarity, but Radka's sentence means the same thing in the same language you use on these boards, English. After reading your message, I looked through my file and found the following, check it out:
"The Whitechapel murderer is a near-classic and entirely typical case of psychopathy, as described in the literature. Read it for yourself and you’ll see" (Radka: paragraph 9, June 19, 8:20 pm). Apparently, my interpretation is accurate.
In that same message you wrote:
"And also, I seem to recall that Radka did indeed invoke the Platonic form when speaking of his theory and even likened the rest of us to Plato's cave dwellers who need the philosopher king to come back down and tell us all… So I also suspect that my suggestion that Radka was claiming to offer us the perfect Platonic form of Ripper studies is more accurate than Mephisto might like to admit and that a certain amount of ego is in fact running wildly amuck throughout Radka's rhetoric" (Omlor: July 11, 3:31 pm).
Sorry professor, but I think that I'm the person who invoked that "Platonic form" you're referring to. I alluded to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in my initial post to Radka: "The majority of your critics, however, are content to remain in the comfort and security of their subterranean vault, happily deluding themselves into believing that the shadows of the puppets and animal figures moving across the wall in front of them, is reality" (Mephisto: June 24, 2004-4:34 am).
I used some ideas from a political science paper I wrote last semester, to explain my opinion of the "cave dwellers", as you call them, in a post I addressed to you on Thursday, June 12, 6:08 pm: "Plato aptly demonstrates this concept through the individual who escaped the dark ignorance of the cave, and was intellectually broadened by philosophy, which Plato characterized as the sun, i.e., the form of the good. The escapee was an aristoi, who, driven by his aretè, returned to the demos of the cave to free them, so that they might share his enlightenment" (Mephisto).
It follows that if my interpretation of Radka's sentence is accurate, and I've shown that it is, then, according to your argument, you and I must speak the same language. Furthermore, if Radka did not claim a connection between his summary and Plato's theory of forms, and I've shown that too, then Radka's ego isn't any more inflated than yours……or mine, therefore, my original observation still stands, i.e., your arguments failed because:
1-"You have not proved that Radka's questioning of your meaning...is as absurd as you'd have us believe" (Mephisto: Friday, July 09, 2004 - 12:56 am).
2-"Your paraphrase of Radka's argument, "A is the truth of the study of B", is inaccurate, and therefore, does not support your view that Radka is claiming a connection between his summary and Plato's theory of forms" (ibid).
And just for the record, your desire to hangout on your corner of the world, correcting grammar etc. is fine by me. But I think I'll follow your advice, and seek "what's around the bend", i.e., a less contentious discussion of Radka's summary (Omlor: 2004).
Thanks for your time professor.
Mephisto
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2004 - 4:07 pm: | |
Hi RJ,
In your post of Friday, July 9, 2004-12:05 pm you wrote:
"Martin Fido’s statement seems to be well reasoned, and holds up to scrutiny. The house-to-house search on Sunday produced Levy, who told the police he had seen a couple near Church Passage. Further, he directed them to his companion, Joseph Lawende, who would not have been in the immediate vicinity that day. If Fido is right-- and I think he is--then we can make a reasonable conclusion. Joseph Hyam Levy was not only not being secretive and evasive with the police, but to the contrary it was his willingness to freely cooperate with a house-to-house enquiry that allowed them to know about the Duke Street ‘event’ in the first place. A serious blow to the theory that he was hiding something".
I agree with your assessment of Mr. Fido's statement, i.e., it is a well reasoned account, based on the available documentation, and I will assume that he had access to the same documents used in A to Z, however, as Mr. Linford suggests, there seems to be room for a reasonable interpretation of the gaps in the chain of events, which apparently aren’t accounted for in the historical record.
On Saturday, July 10, 2004 - 7:42 am, Mr. Linford wrote:
"There were two ways the police could have got on to Levy - either by knocking on his door, or by knocking on the door of the (closer at hand) Imperial Club. Possibly the caretaker or whoever may have told the police the names of anyone who'd recently left the club, and perhaps even furnished the police with their addresses".
The following is a hypothetical model I've constructed, based on Mr. Linford's idea of how the police first became aware of Levy and what he saw the night of Catherine Eddowes murder. The model offers four alternative concepts that explain the reasoning underlying Levy's cooperation with the police investigation, all four concepts occur within the context of Mr. Linford's first premise, "the police could have got on to Levy … by knocking on his door".
Levy is alarmed by the police activity in his neighborhood. When he answers a knock on his door, he's confronted by a police officer who explains that he's conducting a house to house search/canvas regarding a woman who was found murdered in Mitre Square, at 1:45 am, Sunday morning. The policeman asks him what he knows about the incident.
Levy doesn't know if the couple he saw near the crime scene are connected to the murder, and is unsure how mentioning them will affect his future. In the few moments that pass before he begins recounting his movements that night, a number of scripts run through his mind. It goes without saying that he wants to avoid getting in trouble with the law; he considers lying, but he has no way of knowing what the police know. Someone from the Imperial Club could have identified him as a potential witness, or possibly even a suspect, based on the time he left the Club. Lying would make him look suspicious or lead to his arrest, so he tells the police officer that he saw a man and a woman near Church Passage. But he minimizes his involvement by saying that he didn't get a good look at them. To verify his story, he tells the police officer that he was accompanied by another man named Joseph Lawende.
Levy and Lawende are close friends; from the small talk they exchanged Saturday night, Levy knows that Lawende will be away from "the immediate vicinity that day", and therefore, it will be some time before he's questioned, but he doesn't say so to the police when he gives them his address.
Later that morning, Levy goes to Lawende and tells him about: a) the couple he saw near Church Passage after he left the club; b) the murder; c) the house to house canvas, and d) that he's his alibi. It's also possible that Levy sent someone to advise Lawende of the situation.
The model shows Levy's behavior as "secretive and evasive". The following are four possible reasons that explain why Levy would want to minimize his involvement with the investigation:
1--He's indifferent, he doesn't want to get involved.
2--He's afraid he'll be framed for a crime he didn't commit (See A.P. Wolf's, Jack the Myth).
3--He doesn't trust the police or the criminal justice system. He recalls that government agencies were involved in persecuting Jews in his former homeland. When he considers his experiences with the unrestrained anti-semitism that exists in London's East End, he finds no reason to believe that he will be treated any better by British government agencies, than he was by those in Eastern Europe.
4--He's involved in an illegal activity, and wants to avoid prolonged contact with the police.
Bear in mind that the model indicates the possibility that Levy was alone when he left the Imperial Club, and that Lawende only became involved when he agreed to support his friend's alibi.
Each of the four mental scripts I've presented here offers a plausible alternative account of the constraints that made Levy's cooperation inevitable, rather than intentional. They are realistic representations of what might have gone through Levy's mind that Sunday morning. And although your post of July 10, at 11:43 am, provides information, which deals with the way the investigation acquired Levy's testimony, it doesn't argue against the possibility that he was restricted by circumstance when responding to the police officer's questions.
The model tends to support Radka's notion that Levy had something to hide, however, it retains no greater plausibility than your claim that Levy cooperated voluntarily. It's reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Levy's motivation to cooperate with the police investigation remains open to interpretation.
Thanks for your time RJ.
Mephisto
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2004 - 4:32 pm: | |
Mr. Norder wrote:
1.“…David's strategy is to dare people to find any one thing wrong with his theory and then ignore the countless numbers of errors already pointed out to him. One of the more damning examples is that the diagnostic criteria professionals use contradict what he says about psychopathy, so he angrily shouts out in all capital letters that those should be ignored. Why? Because supposedly they are to be trusted less than his layman opinions formed after reading a book more than 50 years out of date.”
>>The diagnostic criteria are not knowledge of the psychopathic personality. They are only a list of simple characteristics intended as a guideline for diagnosis. They are intended for use only by professionals who already have studied psychiatric problems in detail in their PhD programs, and in clinical experience. Basically the intention of the diagnostic criteria is to keep various types of disorders separate from one another, especially where there may be some overlapping presenting symptoms. If you think any of the diagnostic criteria contradict anything I say about JtR, then please list those particular criteria here for us, and point out in your own words in detail (2-3 pages) how I contradict them in my Summary. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a point to make here.
2. “And if that weren't absurd enough, we're supposed to believe that "Mephisto" called up a handful of anonymous professional psychotherapists, got past the secretaries, didn't pay an hourly fee and asked questions to try to support his stance in an online argument. So when he discovers what anyone who took even an intro to psych class knows, that there's some controversy over some of the classifications of mental disorders, he calls the entire professional process "bogus" and wants us to ignore the whole thing and go with what David -- someone with absolutely no training or professional credentials -- says about the issues instead.”
>>”Training and professional credentials” are not required to identify and discuss issues. Other qualifications may be relied on. You need to be intelligent, able to read psychiatric works, imaginative, and logical. Many courses involving psychiatry are taught at top colleges by non-psychiatrists. Dr. Miller Brown, a philosopher not a psychiatrist, taught a course on the work of Dr. Thomas Szasz at Trinity College for many years—I took it myself. Dr. Alphonso Lingis, also a philosopher not a psychiatrist, includes work by the Freudian psychiatrist Dr. Jacques Lacan at Penn State. There are countless more examples. The idea that you need have exhaustive specific training in a school of psychiatry to write about or teach psychiatric material is absurd, Mr. Norder, and not in accord with practice across the country. Do you think Cleckley, Hare, or Lykken wrote their books just for fellow-psychiatrists? A casual reading of their main works indicates this is not true, and that you have, again, no point to make. There is little “professional process” involved in making up the DSM. The practicing psychiatrists I’ve read almost univocally find fault with the DSM with respect to psychopathy, and rely on their own instincts and experiences to make diagnoses instead. The DSM is a committee document with social, political, cultural and personal overtones; it is future-oriented with an eye to altering or changing the whole psychiatric profession; it suffers from disagreement with case histories or other empirical verifications; it is not a document of a practicing psychiatrist trying to come to grips with the disorders he encounters. Dr. Robert Hare has for some years ran a service for practicing psychiatrists to help them decide on the diagnosis of psychopathy in particular cases (on a paid basis I would think), in part because the DSM is simply inadequate, in part because of the paradoxicalness of the syndrome itself. When a psychiatrist consults with Dr. Hare he’s not hiring the DSM, he’s hiring a man who’s seen many hundreds of psychopaths and knows the type when he sees it, and THIS is what makes the difference in the diagnosis. If the DSM were adequate, why would Dr. Hare be running his service? You are simply making up self-contradictory garbage and tossing it out, Mr. Norder.
3. “Of course what Mephisto fails to account for is that even if the entire American Psychiatric Association were thrown out and its DSM criteria dissolved, David would still would not be the one who gets to define what psychopathy is. For example, Dr. Robert Hare -- mentioned by David earlier as an expert whose writings he allegedly is familiar with -- thinks the DSM criteria do not go far enough and has his own guidelines, which are accepted by many professionals. And, again, what he says about the condition directly contradicts David's claims on several important points with a direct bearing on David's theory.”
>>I have studied the work of Robert Hare and find no contradiction with what I say about psychopaths in it. My concepts of psychopathy are developed to a certain degree out of what he writes. Get out your copy of “Without Conscience” or another work by Hare, please, and give us 2-3 pages of specifics concerning how I differ from him—don’t just cough out generalities and half-formed opinions. Cite Hare and my Summary page by page. Let’s reason together. I’ve asked you to do this many times over the past two months and you never do, indicating you really don’t have a position. PS--I am certainly not attempting to “define what psychopathy is” as you say. That would be far over my head. All I do is digest what psychiatrists have written about it, and fit that to the case evidence. I’m here to solve the Whitechapel murders.
4. “And if Mephisto were to come along and insult Dr. Hare and his supporters too, there'd be a long, long line of people he'd have to discredit (successfully, I might add, not with ridiculous sweeping generalizations) before what an accountant with a bizarre Jack the Ripper theory has to say should be considered as a credible source on the topic.”
>>I think you’re making a mistake in thinking you can put Hare in your pocket concerning your views concerning the trustworthiness and pertinence of the DSM, mine freund. I think if the DSM were pictured as the North Pole, we’d find Dr. H down near Patagonia. As for me, I’ve got seven years’ study in arts and sciences on the graduate level. I’ve taken far more A&S courses than accounting courses overall. Your strange attempt to label me as “an accountant” and my theory as “bizarre” are laughable. How does making my living as an accountant disqualify me from developing a workable theory of the Whitechapel murders? Mr. Larry S. Barbee is an embalmer, yet he has written a number of good articles on JtR. Mr. Paul Begg is a software analyzer, and he’s one of the very best in the field. Are you saying these men can’t be trusted either? You operate strictly in the court of public opinion. What you say is your attempt to set people against me personally, and you make no attempt to evaluate my work in the required detail.
5. “Similarly, David has a long, long way to go before his ideas about the Ripper case can be taken seriously. He doesn't seem willing to take any steps to do so, however. Ignoring points of criticism as supposedly "literally nothing" and tossing out insults left and right won't bring any respect. If he cares about that, he will change his behavior. If not, it's his loss, not ours.”
>>You are equating two different things here. On the one hand there is me, on the other the A?R theory. How can you say that I PERSONALLY have a long way to go before my THEORY is accepted? You don’t have to like me to like A?R, but you do have to evaluate A?R on its own merits. I’m willing to take any steps to make a comprehensive theory of the case evidence. Look at what I’ve done in the Summary, and see my work for yourself. It is thorough, exhaustive, well founded, straight from the crime scenes and other case evidence, and internally consistent. Nothing like it has appeared before. To be able to develop A?R, I had to be willing to do all that is required to develop a superior theory. What specifically do you feel I need do to “clean it up,” so to speak? Here again you are hiding behind generalities, and articulate no real position, the same as you’ve done for 2 ½ months.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - 11:09 am: | |
Cludgy wrote:
1.“…Well there's something I'd like to ask you. It seems to me as if you are the one fooling around with words. What if "Juwes" is not a contraction of any word(hence no reference can be found of the word "Juwes"). What if "Juwes" is a misspelling of the word "Jews", and refers to Jewish people?”
>>If that is the case, then there is no change whatever in my theory. The graffitus means exactly the same thing one way or the other. “Juwe” is a legitimate contraction of the compound German word “jugendwerke” meaning literally “early work” or “youth work,” no maybes about it. If the Ripper wasn’t using it this way, then perhaps the spelling means something else that we don’t have enough information to understand. If the murderer knew Levy and the two of them had once observed a misspelling of “Jew” as “Juwe” together before, perhaps on some Whitechaplian graffitus written by an uneducated person, then maybe the murderer used this misspelling to discretely reinforce to Levy that he had recognized him in Duke Street. Or maybe the misspelling is intended to mean to the Jews who would be gathering near the graffitus in a few hours for the Sunday Jewish street market that a non-Jewish person wrote the graffitus. On a visceral level, this might get them to think that they were somehow being set up by the Gentile for an anti-Semitic purpose, the hair on their necks would raise up, and they’d pick fights with Gentiles and riot. Rioting, as we saw in the Summary was a part of the psychopath’s plan. In other words, the Jews would think that no Jew could have written the graffitus, because every Jew knows how to spell “Jew.” The misspelling could in that sense be seen as an aggravating slur against them, much in the sense that Mr. Souden has intentionally misspelled my name three times on this thread.
2.“Misspelling, or a play on the word Jews? It can only be one or the other. Which of the two is reality?”
>>Some play on the word “Jews” is the reality. The murderer was too smart to misspell a three-letter word. One example of this is that the graffitus is written in a negative future passive voice. In order to handle that mode of speech you have to be reasonably educated, and any educated person knows how to spell “Jew.” I’ve taught University logic classes and believe me; many of my students would have to think hard to decipher the grammar of the graffitus.
3.“The fact that you yourself can find no reference to the word, "Juwes", (and I'd liked to bet that you have had a damned good look), seems to point to the fact that the word "Juwes", has never existed, and is a misspelling of "Jews".
>>No, no Cludgy. You can find the contraction all over the internet. It exists.
4.“Also what evidence do you have that JTR even wrote the graffiti in Goulston Street?”
>>By asking this you are trying to get me to agree to separate A?R from the case evidence. If you want to go that way, the fact that the PC didn’t see it on his prior round, the positioning of the half-apron, the use of anti-Semitism in both venues of the double event, and the fact that it couldn’t have been there long without causing a riot are pretty good reasons to believe in it. If you want to add A?R you get many more reasons, such as how it fits in with the Levy factor, the murderer’s desire to intimidate his witnesses, etc.
Copyright David M. Radka, 2004.
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Dan Norder
Inspector
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 166
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 3:53 am: | |
I know, I know, I should just ignore him. But I like to get in a hundred words of succinct replies for every thousand or so that he aims directly at me.
Take this statement, which starts out sounding decent:
"Let us let Robert Hare, the psychiatrist you claim to have studied and comprehended on this subject, speak to us directly on the matter of anger in psychopaths"
Yes, let's do that. Oh, funny, David says that but then lists some short quotes about generalized emotions and conspicuously avoids discussing what he claimed he was going to talk about.
That's most likely because when Dr. Hare speaks directly on the point of anger, he specifically says that psychopaths are violently angry people. It's important enough to him that he lists it as a key identifying point in his diagnostic criteria.
"You completely misunderstand both Dr. Hare and the DSM."
That's your belief, but then you haven't given anyone any reason to take your word for it.
"You know nothing, and have done nothing but try to bluff everyone reading these boards for the past 2 ½ months."
So I bluffed my way through graduate level classes in counseling and abnormal psychology?
"The diagnostic criteria are not knowledge of the psychopathic personality."
And it's statements like this that show you have no business even talking about the topic.
Diagnostic criteria by their very nature are the most important pieces of knowledge that the top professionals have about the conditions.
I mean, what, if you go to the emergency room and the personnel there start using diagnostic criteria to see if you might be having a heart attack, are you going to tell them that that's not real knowledge? Would you rather they get someone off the street with no training in medicine to start dreaming up conclusions about how to treat you based upon something they think they read once?
"If you think any of the diagnostic criteria contradict anything I say about JtR, then please list those particular criteria here for us"
Already been done. Several times.
"and point out in your own words in detail (2-3 pages)"
What is your obsession with demanding that people write 2-3 pages before you'll pay attention? Fine, try this. Type the following onto your computer screen:
"Dr. Hare says that psychopaths are explosively angry individuals and that this trait is so important to understanding and identifying them that he considers it one of the top pieces of information about psychopaths that mental health professionals and law enforcement officials should know. Thus when David says that psychopaths are incapable of anger, he is obviously wrong. To an amazing degree. To the extent that one would have to be living in chronic denial or be in a persistent vegetative state to fail to understand this point."
Then copy and paste that until it fills however many pages you want.
"There is little “professional process” involved in making up the DSM."
That's absolute nonsense.
"it is not a document of a practicing psychiatrist trying to come to grips with the disorders he encounters."
It's the document put together by the premier professional organization of practicing mental health officials working together to sum up information about the disorders they treat.
"I think if the DSM were pictured as the North Pole, we’d find Dr. H down near Patagonia."
If you choose to use that as a point of comparison, you'd wouldn't even be found on a globe. You'd be off on Neptune or something.
No matter how much you try to hype the point that Hare and the DSM disagree on some points (which I was the first to bring up, by the way) they both agree that psychopaths are explosively angry and do not act irrationally to the extent that you dream up in your theory unless they also have some other mental dysfunction.
"How does making my living as an accountant disqualify me from developing a workable theory of the Whitechapel murders?"
It doesn't. And it doesn't automatically disqualify you from discussing mental illness either. You disqualify yourself by ignoring facts that are inconvenient to your theory and attacking the credibility of the top experts in the fields you are discussing (both Ripperology and Psychology), all while throwing insults at anyone who happens to post in the thread.
"Look at what I’ve done in the Summary, and see my work for yourself. It is thorough, exhaustive, well founded, straight from the crime scenes and other case evidence, and internally consistent."
On the contrary, it lacks supporting details for virtually every conclusion, proposes a ridiculously complex series of scenarios to explain the murders that far exceed the stated supposed motivations of the unnamed suspect, is inconsistent with the crime scenes and historical reality, and contradicts itself so many times that it boggles the mind.
"Nothing like it has appeared before."
It's just the Mad Polish Jew Theory with some Monty Pythonesque absurdities thrown in to try to make it look new.
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
John V. Omlor
Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 431
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 7:08 am: | |
Mephisto,
You've missed my point. I wasn't claiming that Radka had not made the claim you offered us. I was claiming that his "A is the truth of study of B" was a badly written sentence and grammatically inane.
And it is.
You just replaced it was another sentence that corresponded to something else he had already said.
That's not translation, that's rewriting.
And if your plan is to rewrite all of Radka's badly written and grammatically inane sentences in his wake, you are going to be one very busy puppy.
But you are correct, it wasn't Radka who offered the elementary, undergraduate level reading of Plato as metaphor. That was you.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Radka too has been using the language of philosophy as a strictly name-dropping exercise in cheap cosmetics and that there is no real or significant philosophical innovation in his speculations on what happened in 1888. It just reminds me that he's not the only one doing it.
Thanks,
--John (who knows it was David who talked, apparently seriously, of his work being "part Plotinus (the center), part Plato (asking questions, opening doors), part Kant (a priori, a posteriori), and part Hegel (logical opposition as the underlying principle of the universe.)" |
John V. Omlor
Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 436
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 8:23 am: | |
D'Oh! 
I hate that editing denial screen.
Of course, the third paragraph above should read:
"You just replaced it with another sentence that corresponded to something else he had already said."
I guess that's one of the differences between David's writing and mine. When I write something that makes no grammatical sense, it's usually a typo.
Sorry, folks,
--John |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 428
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 1:35 pm: | |
"The formula organizes the evidence according to what the true meaning of the evidence is, thus allowing the evidence for the first time to tell us what really happened in 1888. Mr. Palmer for example finds this extremely hard to understand, but here you have done so superbly. " --David Radka
"Mr. Palmer" does not find it extremely hard to understand. It is a common ploy of the crank theorist to dismiss his critics as being obtuse. The fact is that I not only fully comprehend Mr. Radka's methods, I suspect that I comprehend them better than Mr. Radka does himself. I merely have denied that Radka's theory tells us anything about what "really happened" in 1888, anymore than Gosse's theories told us anything about the creation of life on earth. It is a bogus claim. Radka is offering us a closed system; a unified theory using the elements of "Ripper History" that have been repeated and reified until they have taken on the rather dubious claim of being the "Case Evidence." He has arranged them ("organized" is his word) into what to him is a pleasing explanation. But what does this really tell us about the relationship of his theory to reality? Mr. Radka can kick against the pricks all he wants, he still needs to demonstrate that his empirical data was good to begin with. (For example, he doesn't bother demonstrating that Levy had any knowledge of Lubnowsi or his relatives; in his system, the smoke in Kelly's chimney is evidence of this). So, in other words, what I've always objected to is Radka's strange and unreasonable claim that his theory somehow mystically reaches a critical mass whereby it tell us something . How so? Notice how coy and evasive Mr. Radka and Mr. Mephisto become when they are asked about the meaning of "solving the case" or what is meant by "logical satisfaction" or what the exact relationship is between this mental state of "satisfaction" and reality. Mr. Radka's favorite catch-phrase (now enthusiastically embraced by Mephisto) is "don't hamstring yourself" by worrying too much about empirical data. It's a jolly fun idea. But of couse, an actual scientist, using the scientific method, is going to make damn sure the yellow powder he is using is sulfur and not dried mustard seed. And he's certainly not going to claim he's proven anything until he's found out. (For mustard seed you might wish to read "Martin Kosminski").
I can't help conjuring up the image of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The Great Idealist charging at windmills he believes are dragons, and his somewhat more reasonable side-kick desperately trying to downplay his friend's madness. It seems to me, though, that Sancho is rather ginger in avoiding the more outlandish claims of his mentor. I'd like to ask him point-blank, What do you think of Mr. Radka's claim above that he's "allowing the evidence for this first time to tell us what really happened in 1888." Is this proven? How? Or do you think that perhaps his "incompetent" critics (your phrase) might, afterall, not have been entirely amiss in asking for better empircal data before they agree with this conclusion? RP
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R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 429
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 3:12 pm: | |
Mephisto writes: “3--He [Levy] doesn't trust the police or the criminal justice system. He recalls that government agencies were involved in persecuting Jews in his former homeland. When he considers his experiences with the unrestrained anti-semitism that exists in London's East End, he finds no reason to believe that he will be treated any better by British government agencies, than he was by those in Eastern Europe.”
Empirical data is a good thing. First of all, Joseph Levy had no “former homeland.” Levy was born in London. His wife was British, he was completely "assimilated", if that word can be used for a native Londoner. His children had English names. Skeptical of police? Maybe so. But how do we know this? I’ve recently been in brief contact with a Mr. Jonathan Edelstein who has completed considerable pioneering work on Jewish Constables in London, and intends to write a scholarly article on the subject. He has unearthed the fact that there were Jewish policemen in Aldgate (which is where Levy lived) as far back as the 1740s. Indeed, the Jews were specifically put in Aldgate since it had a large Jewish population and they could gain the confidence of that community. Walter Dew (H Division) writes in his memoirs specifically about the working relationship between the police and the Jews in the East End, and how they “never gave any trouble.” And on what historical basis rests the claim that anti-semitism in the East End was “unrestrained?” The Met’s own Ripper files show how the police & government took considerable pains to eleviate the possibility of a pogrom, up to, and including, erasing the Graffiti, and allowing Pizer to clear himself by addressing the coroner’s inquest. Could Levy have been scared? Of course. Was he lying? There's no empircal support for this contention.
So Mr. Mephisto gives an alternative interpretation to the "data", but without adding any new empircal supporting evidence to draw a sane conclusion. And there's the rub. The “empircal data” shows that Levy gave information to the police at the time of the house-to-house search, and that he duly showed up for the inquest and answered the coroner’s questions. The extant police files give no indication that Levy was anything but cooperative. It gives no indication that he ever had contact with the police again after October, 1888. Mr. Radka speculates that Levy was lying and made an appearance some months later. He speculates that Levy would have recognized Lubnowski's relatives. Interesting. Fine. But, as he is entirely wanting in empirical support for this claim (and for other elements in his theory) I am still at a loss of understanding how exactly his theory ends up telling us what “really happened” in 1888? Is this merely advertising or does he really mean it? If the former, I guess I can accept it for what it is. If the latter, he needs to explain himself. RP
P.S. To Mephisto. Place yourself in the scene. Why is Levy being evasive to his companions while he is leaving the Imperial Club. Or do you think Lawende and Harris were lying too? (Harris was interviewed by the papers). At the time the three Jewish blokes left the Club, they had no idea that a crime was about to be committed. Why wouldn't Levy have merely said, "Holy Smokes! That's my old friend Martin Kosminski's third cousin's husband. What is a married man doing with prosititute at 1:30 in the morning?" Instead, he mumurs something enigmatic (according to Radka) and shuffles off. Why at that moment is Levy evasive with his companions? It seems to me that Radka's thinking is retroactive. He's having Levy protect the murderer before he has even committed the murder in Mitre Square. |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2710
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 6:24 pm: | |
Hi David
If Jack wished to inflame the Jews, why not simply chalk "The next woman I kill will be Jewish"?
Robert |
Monty
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Monty
Post Number: 1257
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 12:28 pm: | |
Robert,
Apparently, simplicity wasnt Jacks forte.
Monty
No, you cant have one extra on the leg side...but you can have five ! |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, July 18, 2004 - 11:30 am: | |
Friends,
Unfortunately the time comes again when I must be away from you, unable to respond for about five days. This will be from July 19 through 23. I am looking forward to completing my responses to the archived posts soon, and then to be able to respond to the excellent Mr. Mephisto, that is if he'll have me. Until Saturday the 24th, then, adios amigos, and thanks so much for a wonderful experience and opportunity.
God bless you all,
David
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 6:43 am: | |
On July 15, 3:53 am, Norder wrote: "I like to get in a hundred words of succinct replies for every thousand or so that he aims directly at me".
Sounds like a plan dude, just let us know when you're good to go.
You know what Norder; I think we should start calling you "Rocky", because when it comes to talking about psychology, you don't know schist from Shinola.
Yeah, Rocky Norder, Space editor, that's the ticket.
Tell me something Rocky, what does Dr. Hare say about psychopathy and cultural diversity? And please don't try and avoid answering this question by telling us that he doesn't say anything about it, because you'll only prove my point, i.e., you don't have any substantial knowledge of psychology in particular, or of the social sciences in general. Actually, I don't think that you're even aware there's a connection among them.
By the way...Did you pass any of those graduate level classes you're so fond of bragging about?
Mephisto
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Mephisto
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 5:33 am: | |
Hello Professor O,
I'm sure that I, as well as most people who read your message of July 7, 8:10 am, got your point. You wrote: "Now then, let's stop for a moment and just look at the grammar of these sentences, shall we?". You invite the reader to "look at the grammar", but you don't say anything about Radka's grammar in this paragraph, which gives me the impression that you're trying to divert the reader's attention for some reason.
Next, you comment on what you mistakenly took to be his thinking,––We begin with a sentence that claims that A is "the truth of the study" of B……"I know he thinks he's invoking some sort of Platonic category of forms here", and "the perfect form of Ripper Studies". Strangely, you also claimed that Radka's "particular interest can be easily dismissed as ego run amuck, all we really have here is a badly written sentence", (Omlor: July 7, 8:10 am). Uh…..'scuse me boss, but can you tell dis lowly undergraduate what missah Raka's paticlua intrest Be?
In my post of July 14, 10:29 pm, I informed you that you had incorrectly attributed my reference to the the form of the good to Radka, and you graciously acknowledged that my claim is correct. It follows that if your claim, i.e., Radka's "particular interest can be easily dismissed as ego run amuck", is based on your confusion over who referred to Plato's Theory of Forms, then your criticism regarding Radka's ego is erroneous, and without foundation. Therefore, my assertions that your argument has failed (Mephisto: July 9, 12:56 am; July 14, 10:29 pm) still stand. As of this writing, you have not proved that Radka's demeanor is anything more than unshakable self-confidence.
It is also clear that you began that post (July 7, 8:10 am) by saying one thing, and doing something else, i.e., you criticized Radka's thinking, and not his grammar. If I can spot your syntactic error, then I can reason with your prose. Yeah, well good for you junior. What's it to ya? Read on MacDuff.
Radka's July 4, 8:34 pm post must have also caused you to confuse your semantics as well, because you managed to mis-copy ten words of one sentence, which changed its meaning in the process, i.e., Radka wrote "psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders, which you read as, "A is "the truth of the study" of B (Omlor: July 7, 8:10 am).
I brought this error to your attention in my post of July 9, 12:56 am, "let's put Radka's phrase, truth of study, back into context: 'Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders'. What this tells us is: To study the Whitechapel Murders, is to study the psychopathy of the murderer. I'm sure you'll agree that Radka's original claim has an entirely different meaning, than your misquote" (Mephisto, my emphasis). Apparently Radka's use of philosophical language had really gotten under your skin, because you completely misinterpreted the gist of this paragraph.
In your July 11, 3:31 pm you characterize the above as my effort to defend Radka's alleged bad grammar, i.e., "Mephisto then tries to defend the following grammar". Professor, if I wanted to defend Radka's grammar, I would have mentioned something outrageously trivial, like the missing definite article. But a close reading of this paragraph clearly shows that I'm trying to clarify Radka's meaning for you, and not his grammar. I do this by comparing his original quotation with your bungled transcription. Your misconceptions don't end here, they show up in other ares of your reasoning as well.
In your July 15, 7:08 am reply, you claim that I missed your point, "I wasn't claiming that Radka had not made the claim you offered us", you said, "I was claiming that his "A is the truth of study of B" was a badly written sentence and grammatically inane (Omlor). Can you try to be a little less criptic the next time you wander off topic?
The claim I offered you in my post of July 9, 12:56 am, was a clarification of Radka's semantics. You rejected this argument by claiming, "And perhaps, in some other language, these two sentences do indeed mean the same thing. But I speak English, and I'll be damned if I can see how he got the second, rather clear sentence, from the first ugly one}" (Omlor: July 11, 3:31 pm, my emphasis). It's simple professor, I read what's posted.
The facts are clear, you criticized Radka for his thinking and not his grammar; I tried to clarify Radka's meaning for you, and not his grammar; you rejected my clarification, because you didn't read Radka's original claim. If I can point out your errors to you, then I have indeed understood your point. Therefore, your argument fails.
You criticized a paragraph in Radka's July 4, 8:34 pm post, "Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders, as we’ve indicated. The case is what it is because of psychopathy, and psychopathy is psychopathy" (Radka), because you allegedly couldn't grasp the meaning of two sentences. Perhaps if you had read Radka's June 19, 8:20 pm message, you would have been aware that the idea behind the phrase, "Psychopathy is the truth of study of the Whitechapel murders" is that "The Whitechapel murderer is a near-classic and entirely typical case of psychopathy, as described in the literature. Read it for yourself and you’ll see" (Radka: paragraph 9). Professor, if an intellectually immature undergraduate can reason with these concepts, then you should have been able to figure them out too. You could have asked yourself...What could the phrase "psychopathy is psychopathy" (Radka: July 4, 8:34 pm post) possibly mean? Is it a metaphor similar to Shakespeare's notion that "a rose is a rose is a rose" (Romeo and Juliet)? Why yes it is.
By using Shakespeare's metaphor of a rose as the source, it would have been easy for you to infer the target of Radka's metaphor and grasp his meaning. For example, the things our senses tell us about a rose, i.e., its aroma, shape, color scheme, texture, and thorns, etc., become a mental script, i.e., they define the essence of a rose to any human being who's senses function well enough to give him or her the experience of those features. These qualities are deposited in our memory for future reference. Now just apply the format of that mental script to Radka's phrase "psychopathy is psycopathy", and you get: The way you define psychopathy, is based on what you know about it. It's a rather simple concept that I'm sure isn't beyond your ability to understand, and yet you saw fit to belittle Radka's intelligence, not because he chose to use it, but because you chose to not understand it.
I think philosophy is for everyone, not just Ph.Ds. And although reading Radka's summary is like trying to run through an 8' Brillo pad, I'm sure his use of "philosophical verbiage" (you) doesn't have a tenth of the value you attach to it. In fact, you're the only one here who's having a hairy conniption fit over sentence structure, and inane grammar.
What's remarkable about your performance is that you're perfectly content to go rooting around Radka's lower intestine with a proctoscope to discover his faults, when there're plenty of other people you can bitch at right in front of your nose. This shows that your premises on this issue are phony and contrived, if they weren't, we would have heard you moaning about Jennifer Pegg, or Sara what's her-name, or Glen Anderson, or anyone else who inadvertently made an error on your intellectual turf? But no one heard you say peep to these people.
If you don't like Radka, then why don't you just come out and say so, instead of trying to disguise your disdain for the man behind the tart's make-up you're wearing.
Thanks for your time professor.
Mephisto
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 8:53 pm: | |
1."Ahh, how I've missed all this banter and idle chit-chat the last few weeks... but to your credit David you are picking up old questions as you promised from the start. The whole thing with the Lusk letter... why a Jew would use an Irish spoken accent in a written letter you now explain perfectly. You now introduce the reason he used an Irish spoken accent in the letter... and that is for theatrics and to make it sound from "the dark side" and be more dramatic/persuassive?”
>>I do not introduce it now; I said it in the Summary originally.
2.“So Lusk wouldn't be afeerd of a mere human kidney received in the post attached to a simple English threatening letter; it would need a theatric fake spoken Irish accent to make him _really_ worried?”
>>It wouldn’t hurt.
3. “Errr, maybe I'm just a bit of a sissy, but, I think I'd be sh*tt*ng in my pants if it were Irish, Scottish, Cockney, English, Jewish or Swahili spoken accent in the letter if it were addressed to me (so he knows my address) and had a human kidney accompanying it. Yeah right... and your answer will be... ian thinks a while... scratches his head... adjusts himself... ponders _real_ deeply... oh yes... of course... it doesn't make a difference what you or I think on whether this makes any sense... he is a psychopath after all...”
>>Think of the Irish accent as just an additional flourish.
4. “OK a better answer woud be that if I received the letter how could I tell it was a *human* kidney and not a cow or a horse or a kanga-bleeding-roo so the Irish slant would possibly get my attention if it is a normal device used in plays of the time.”
>>The Irish accent might get Lusk’s attention on a dramatic note, yes. Lusk is to believe the half-kidney came from Eddowes because that’s what the murderer tells him to believe right in the letter. “I send you half the kidne I took from one women…”
5. “And my answer would be he's a psychopath so is extremenly confident that I _will_ know it's a human kidney as that is what he wants me to believe. Why does someone so confident need to gild the lilly.”
>>Probably to show his immunity from normal human rules and regulations. I mean, why not?
6. “And you reply he needs to gild the lilly because he's a psychopath and they always do embroider and go over the top...”
>>I’ve never said this and do not believe in it. He doesn’t NEED to do it.
7. “And my response is a hoaxer would want to pile effect upon effect and we have no real reason to even assume the letter is/was real evidence at all. Plus he knows Lusk won't fund the reward money personally so why even bother with the middle man, psychopaths aren't stupid, so send it to the organ grinder and not the monkey.”
>>Do you mean send the package to Henry Matthews? But why? Lusk was the person who had successfully built up the idea of the reward in the mind of the public. Lusk was the one who directed the public’s offense at the government for not offering a reward, its humanistic feelings toward the prostitutes killed, and its growing desire to see a large reward placed. All Matthews had ever done was say no. Surely Lusk was the organ grinder and Matthews the monkey.
8. “He doesn't even suggest or hint at raising the reward in the letter, to me it's obvious he's sending it to the vigilante group to back off and stand down or else they get it next; perhaps they got too close one night (if the letter were real).”
>>Surely sending the letter to Lusk is not going to get the vigilante group to back off, rather to increase its efforts to catch the murderer. And if he spoke of the reward in the letter, people would figure out what he were up to, i.e., trying to ace the reward money himself.
9. “And you reply... errr. he's a pschopath and so doesn't need to mention an interest in increasing the reward as he knows the message will be understood even if not written explicitly. And the cycle goes on... and on... and on...”
>>The murderer doesn’t want the message to be understood as an attempt to increase the reward. He only wants Lusk to return to his efforts of increasing the reward.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 8:16 pm: | |
Mr. Palmer wrote to Mephisto:
1. “Reflect on the following statement: >>"My theory is 100% internally consistent, and it 100% follows and affirms the case evidence. Please show us specifically where it doesn't, so that we may have a lively peer-level review discussion." --David Radka.
And, if you will, this: >>”Inferences may be used to define oppositions, which would then define further oppositions in the tripartite Hegelian sense. Following the evidence, I define a series of such oppositions in the Thesis. This ultimately justifies my epistemological center by the completeness of my analyses of the case evidence." David Radka
Ahem. Now my (Mr. Palmer’s) commentary. In relation to the first statement: Several years ago the science writer Martin Gardner wrote about a brilliant Islamic mathematician who came up with a new model of the Universe. In the model, we lived inside the earth, which was a largish self-contained globe. (Stay with me; this is not an attempt at humor). In the model, the movements of the sun, moon, and planets were fully explained, the math was completely valid, and so on. The startling fact is that the Islamic mathematician's model was ultimately irrefutable.
Another example. Back in the Victorian age a bloke named Philip Gosse wrote a book called Omphalos. Gosse was one of those earnest Victorian gentlemen who were profoundly disturbed by the implications of Darwin's theory. He spent a great deal of time meditating on the fact that Adam & Eve had navels, and one day came to the sudden realization that these navels were a 'record' of an event that never happened, the vestiges of umbilical cords that never were. Gosse then went on to realize that the entire fossil record was part of God's creation, nothing more than a similar 'record' of a geologic history that never actually took place. Now, I think you would be hard pressed to find a Biologist who accepts Gosse, but, once again, his bizarre theory is fundamentally sound and can't really be refuted. Indeed, Bertrand Russel used Gosse to illustrate "epistomological principles."
In your (Mephisto’s) above response to me, you spend a good deal of time discussing the argument between Messrs. Norder & Radka concerning the definition of psychopathology. Alas, my fine fellow, this is neither here nor there in relation to my criticism of Radka; it's like pointing out that Gosse and Darwin disagreed on the wing-span of the archeopteryx; or that Carl Sagan might have fought with the Islamic mathematican about the shape of one of Saturn's moons. These discussions have no bearing on the legitimacy of Radka's method, nor do they have anything to do with my fundamental criticism.
Radka states that his theory is 100% internally consistant and %100 'follows' the case evidence. I say, "so what?" So do the theories of Gosse. Radka has created a closed system. Fantasic. But this tells us nothing whatsoever about its relationship to the reality of what happened in 1888-1894. Is A?R really in the 'scientific traditon' like you claim? I suspect that it isn't. Radka elsewhere has mentioned his personal ideologies and beliefs, and I suspect that by embracing the Idealism of the Bishop Berkeley sort, he might, at the heart, be revealing that he really isn't pitching his tent in your camp…”
>>John Bishop Berkeley was a British Empiricist. I am more or less a continental-style rationalist/idealist. I do not promulgate ideologies.
2. “To me, he is more in the traditon of Gosse. You await his full thesis, impressed by how he has arranged the tea cups neatly around a shimmering tea kettle. But I fear that you haven't yet grasped the fact that has no intention of pouring you any tea.
>>You’ve seen all the tea poured already in the Summary; you learn how to drink it for yourself in the Thesis.
3. “Why? Note again Radka's second statement. I define a series of such oppositions in the Thesis. This ultimately justifies my epistemological center by the completeness of my analysis of the case evidence." Justifies? Nonsense. This is not the scientific method. Radka's "solution" is merely a subtle restatement of the original hypothesis. It's viciously circular. His hypothesis is that there is a 'center' in the case evidence (the murders of Stride, Kelly, etc. are related to the Lusk kidney, the Hove event, etc.). All well and good. BUT HIS SOLUTION IS DETERMINED ("utimately justified" as he puts it) BY THE COMPLETENESS OF THE ANALYSIS. In other words, the "wholeness" of his dissertation demonstrates the validity of the original thesis that there was wholeness. Wholeness=wholeness. It's like one of those invalid science projects that everyone's heard about where the apparatus of the hypothesis and the subsequent experimental methods are subtly predetermined by the original bias. Note carefully: it is neither scientific nor rational nor philosophical to assume that a 'fragmented' view of the case is intrinsically inferior to a 'holistic' one--but Radka's idea of a solution predetermines that he will come to this very conclusion. It's why I call it aesthetic. By way of illustration, the reality could be that Kidney killed Stride; that Rosslyn D'Onston, that weirdo extraordinaire, sent the kidney to Lusk; that a local antisemite, still miffed over the Pizer affair chalked up the Goulston Street message on the wall, and so on. Radka calls this 'chaos', but all that statement does is to illustrate that he has stacked the deck from the get-go by his very definition of what constitutes a solution. See?”
>>Basically I’ve got three responses to this post:
a) Whereas the center of A?R is critically determined a priori to the integration of the case evidence, in the above two theories there is no a priori factor. In A?R we start out asking what the center should be, and determining how the center should be verified by the empirical case evidence. We give ourselves a critically estimable outside factor to which to compare and by which to test the case evidence.
b) Whereas the self-contained globe of the Islamic mathematician and the God-made fossil record of Gosse don’t exist and can’t be verified independently of these two respective theories, psychopaths do exist and their nature and typology can be verified independently of my theory. My a priori is taken from outside my theory and brought inside it—the Islamic and Gosse theories are examples of a thinker simply widening his theory out until everything is inside it and it becomes merely self-referential.
c) Whereas in the above two systems we simply get a theory welded to the empirical world, a condition in which we can’t adequately evaluate either separately, in A?R we can fully snap the center apart from the empirical case evidence. In A?R we have four critically appraisable elements: the center, the empirical evidence, the combination of the two, and the method of combining the two.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 8:23 pm: | |
Ian wrote:
1.“The case evidence isn't that "he" had no chalk with him is it?”
>>By the case evidence alone, there is no way to say whether he did or didn’t have chalk in his pocket as of Mitre Square without speculating. But with A?R, one has a solid basis for saying that he did NOT have chalk in his pocket as of Mitre Square, because (a) He needs to write a message to the three Jews he saw in Duke Street and (b) The time delay between the murder and the appearance of the graffitus.
2.“The case evidence isn't that "he" is implicating Aaron or anyone actually is it?”
>>Same as above. It is speculation without A?R, solid with A?R.
3.“The case evidence isn't "he" didn't plan the message is it?”
>>Same as above again.
4.“The case evidence isn't the message wasn't writen before the murder rather than after is it?”
>>Even without A?R you are on solid ground in saying the message wasn’t on the door jam for any length of time, as the local Jews would have noticed it and reacted.
5.“The case evidence isn't "he" was known to Levey who then kept quiet is it?”
>>Without A?R, you are on increasingly solid ground saying he was known to Levy. See Mr. Scott Nelson’s excellent recent article for a summary of the hard empirical evidence archived on this web site. With A?R, you are standing on a mountain.
6.“The case evidence isn't that Juwe = Jew (you yourself wanted Juwe to mean something else I do recall) is it?”
>>Obviously the writer of the graffitus, whoever he was, meant “Jews” by “Juwes.” It is the meaning of the latter spelling that A?R attempts to reveal.
7.“Now we've walked a bit David... try reading them again and try to be impartial this time, try freeing your mind, open it a bit maybe, be playfull if you wish. Where is your case evidence for all these David? Can you justify or substantiate anything you said in that reply David.”
>>I am being totally impartial when I say to you that the actions of the Whitechapel murderer are those of a psychopath, and that my explanation for the chronology of case events is reasonable in light of the psychopathic personality and the evidence, taken together as a whole. The “case evidence” I use is the same you use—only I see it differently. If you don’t see the actions of the murderer as those of a psychopath, then you are in my opinion ignorant, period. You can read good books on psychopathy to get the knowledge you need to make a solid, reasonable connection. You are not in my opinion entitled to promulgate a lesser interpretation when you could have made and promulgated a better one. You are free to do so, but the availability of a superior perspective requires your acceptance if you are to hold yourself out as reasonable yourself. This sort of situation happens all the time in the sciences. Under a rationalist/idealist outlook, you are required to analyze all the perspectives you use, determine the best one, and use that.
8. “The case evidence is graffito was written in chalk and included the term Juwe (fullstop, nothing else, period), the case evidence doesn't even indicate JtR wrote the graffitus, only that it was on the wall where the bloodied apron was found. Anything beyond that is pure speculation on your or anyone else's part, ie that he had no chalk, he was implicating someone or warning someone, that the message wasn't planned, Juwe=Jew, etc.”
>>Clearly you’re not doing your best here, under the circumstances. You arbitrarily decide not to integrate the information you have into a whole. You show a dull empirical bias and dunderheadedness.
9.“You have convinced yourself you are right haven't you David? Your _interpretation_ of case evidence in your mind _is_ the case evidence.”
>>What I do is advance rationalism into studies of JtR in a logical way. That’s all there is to it. It’s about the A?R theory, not about what I believe or me.
10.“It's a tortology to say you explain what he did when we don't know what exactly he did, perhaps by you explaining what he did we will know what he did? Wow, like my head, it's spinning, this is soo heavy maan.”
>>I believe you mean tautology. We don’t know what exactly he did, I agree, we weren’t there and didn’t see it. But we do know how to take a reasonable perspective on the parts of the case we can’t see based on those we can. What is so hard to understand about that? You and I do it every day, we couldn’t live if we didn’t, and we are required to adopt the most reasonable perspectives in our studies. You can affably admit you are an irrationalist, but it won’t get you anywhere in your work.
11. “When you say, to quote: I’m only here to explain what he did, not what he ought to have done!! perhaps you meant to type: I’m only here to explain what he did, _and_ what he ought to have done!! For if JtR didn't write the graffito you've explained exactly why he _should_ and _ought_ to have!”
>>What do you want me to do, ignore all the previous evidence of the double event? Abandon logic? Choose to adopt a knowingly inferior perspective? The evidence does indicate that the murderer wrote the graffitus, Ian; it doesn’t prove it like a videotape would, but it indicates it. I think you have more respect for chalk on some bricks than you have for your own mind.
12.“Anyway, interesting that you say the graffito is now there to implicate Aaron - I thought it was a warning for Levy, perhaps it is all things to all men.
I've lost track of what you think the graffito signifies these days, yesterday Juwe=Jugendwerk, today Juwe=Jew, tomorrow, who knows.}
>>Simply reread the Summary if you start losing track. That’s what it’s there for—for everybody.
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unregisteredposter
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2004 - 9:57 am: | |
Is there a possibility that someone can sum up David's theory in a short paragraph or two, because I have tried to read it, and found the writing to be pointlessly wordy and rambling, as if trying to impress by using obscure vocabulary and convoluted phrasing.
What, in short, is his theory?
Also, a question: are Mephisto and D. Radka actually the same person? i.e. is Mephisto an invented pseudonym used by David to both support his theory, and to try to referee and control the tone of the argument? |
Jennifer D. Pegg
Chief Inspector
Username: Jdpegg
Post Number: 568
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 9:52 am: | |
No they are not the same person.
Jennifer
"Think things, not words." - O.W. Holmes jr |
Jennifer D. Pegg
Chief Inspector
Username: Jdpegg
Post Number: 573
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 10:54 am: | |
JT,
quite frankly I do not know how people are managing to keep so restrained on this thread.
No one is asking you to agree with Dan or anyone else but retorting to playground name calling is hardly making you look like a grown up. it is not the kind of behaviour one expects on a message board such as this. Quite frankly I would not be surprised if it broke the rules of posting here.
I doubt very much anyone else will respond to you until you stop acting like a child
Jennifer
"Think things, not words." - O.W. Holmes jr |
John V. Omlor
Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 462
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 11:45 am: | |
Mephisto,
That's a lot of writing to defend a badly composed and nonsensical sentence.
"A is the truth of study of the B" is just gibberish.
Now, you can choose to rewrite that gibberish in line with what you want it to mean or what you think David wants it to mean. That's fine. And I'm sure it even helps explain David's own thoughts somewhat (though I have no real way of knowing that).
But that doesn't change the silliness of the sentence or the many other sentences in David's posts that are equally disastrous.
They are, to me, evidence of a sloppy mind at work here.
And Radka's constant name-dropping and invocation of philosophers and their language within his work -- for no discernible reason other than that it makes his work sound deeper than it really is -- also suggests to me, as I've said, a sadly primping and painting whore covering a rather ordinary face with too much make-up.
I appreciate that philosophy is not just for PhDs, as you say. Unfortunately, since I see no actual philosophy taking place anywhere on this thread, I'm not sure that your comment is all that relevant to Radka's theories.
As to why I'm the only one grousing about this aspect of David's work -- well, that's probably just because I'm the only one who cares. It's just a personal interest in the appearance here of these names and this language in such a bizarrely amusing and unnecessary way that has brought me around.
Of course, my initial suspicions were confirmed when David wrote a few specific things about deconstruction (something I do happen to know a great deal about) and they proved to be ill-informed and grossly simplistic. That, of course, created doubts in my own little mind that he knew what he was talking about concerning all the other philosophers he kept invoking for no real reason.
Finally, for some reason of your own, you feel compelled to suggest that I "don't like Radka."
Perhaps I should quote from some philosophy here:
Ugarte: You despise me, don't you?
Rick: Well, if I gave it any thought, I probably would.
That's from Casablanca.
I don't despise David Radka. But then again, I don't give him very much thought, either.
Love to you all,
--John
PS: I loved the attempt to suggest that Radka was miming Shakespeare with his delightful sentence "Psychopathy is psychopathy." As the bard says -- "It made me laugh my ass off."
(Message edited by omlor on July 20, 2004) |
Rosemary O'Ryan
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 7:49 pm: | |
Dear John Omlor,
So, what's the point, John? Have you a fundamental disageement with the notion of "psychopathy" as a determinant of the "case- evidence", vis., JTR and the Whitechapel murders?
(Admittedly, I am still unsure of the precise definition of "case-evidence" in the Radkabobbigion scheme...but I expect a full exposition in his Thesis!)
PS. Did William really say: "It made me laugh my ass off"?
PPS. Beware Mephisto's bardic reposte!
Rosey :-) |
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