The votes are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council and the winner is the lovely and talented Dr. Sanity with a great post entitled “Beautiful Indifference:” The good Doctor gives us a case study of one “Mrs. O’Hara” whose “La belle indifference” to her malady is a sign of hysteria:
A middle-aged woman was referred to the psychiatric emergency room when a rather thorough medical examination could not explain the sudden onset of a complete paralysis below the waist. Additionally, the Resident was concerned because her “affect” was rather strange. It seems that, despite what one might normally consider a rather devastatingly traumatic event—the loss of one’s ability to walk or to experience any sensation below the waist—the patient was laughing and joking with the medical Resident.
As it turned out, Mrs. O’Hara was eventually admitted to our inpatient unit (yes, they actually used to admit patients like this back in those days). I did not follow her closely, but it turned out that her husband of many years had recently left her for a much younger woman. They were in the middle of a nasty divorce, fighting over how much money she was to get. The whole situation would have been quite upsetting to anyone, but Mrs. O’Hara insisted it didn’t bother her at all—and as long as she insisted such was the case, she was unable to use her legs. She literally “couldn’t stand on her own two feet” and didn’t seem to much care (“la belle indifference”)
I tell this story merely to demonstrate “la belle indifference” and to segue into a discussion of the curious, but beautiful indifference of our own Mainstream Media.
Curiously, because they are journalists, and I would think that journalistic instincts are easily aroused by curiosity, the crop of journalists we must deal with today seem to be suffering from a form of mass hysteria. Their journalistic insticts; their curiosity; their “nose” for a story has been severely impaired—almost paralyzed you could say, and they don’t much seem to care!
She then charts a devastating comparison of what the MSM is obsessed with and what they’re indifferent to. A must read to understand the pathology of the left.
Finishing a strong second was an interesting post by Gates of Vienna that I’m pleased to say, was triggered by my D-Day post regarding some of the “what if’s” in history:
In a house filled with amateur historians, the post sparked dinner table conversations that lasted for several days. Finally, the consensus came down to one incident, one date, that changed the course of the 20th century and set into play the events which were to dog the rest of our days, even down to the present.
That moment, of course, is June 28, 1914. The incident is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austro-Hungarian throne, by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.
Dymphna then goes on to detail young Princip’s unlikely role in the assassination and how the blundering of “Queen Victoria’s grandchildren” (the Crowned heads of Europe in Russia, England, and Germany) led not only to the slaughter of WW I, but also the Russian Revolution that eventually led to the deaths of perhaps as many as 100 million more:
In 1917, If only the German high command had not made the strategically brilliant move of sending Lenin to the Finland Station in a sealed train. If only if Russia had not suffered the particular reverses it did on the Eastern Front; if only the United States had entered the war earlier rather than later…If… if… if…
Timing was all, and timing led to the ascendancy of socialism. All the murderous totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century — Fascist, Nazi, and Communist — were socialist in nature. One hundred million or more souls perished, directly or indirectly, as a result of socialism. Whether tortured and murdered in the camps, starved to death in deliberately engineered and accidental famines, or killed in the wars brought on by the dictators, the victims at the hands of the 20th century were, by and large, the victims of socialism.
Finishing third in the Council voting was a great post from E-Claire called “Sins of the Fathers...” which takes on the issue of reparations for slavery and the gigantic problems associated with such an undertaking:
How do we decide how much to give to whom? How black do you have to be? I thought we’d gone beyond “a single drop of blood†or the idea of “high yella†folks. Who stands in line for the pay off? 1/4? 1/16? do some folks get 10¢ on the dollar and others FittyCent? How does one prove it?
Would someone get any ‘reparations’ payment if it were proven s/he were descended from one of the tribes who enslaved others and sold them to the Arabs and / or the white slave traders? How much would they have to pay? [since Oprah has now found out she is a Zulu, and the Zulu tribe had not yet been formed at the time of the slave trade, I guess she’s off the hook… and off the dole.]
Where do I stand in line for my reparations? I’m part Irish and you know the old sign: “No Irish Need Apply†but ‘former slaves’ could. And the German side were bourgeois industrialists. Do I just pay myself?
Provocative questions…read it all.
The winning non-Council post is Rusty Shackleford’s heart-rending response to Kos over the Durbin comments. It’s called “Kos Says U.S. Torture ‘Equal’ To that of Saddam Hussein (A comparison).” (Warning: Disturbing images)
Will someone please grab Kos head, pull it out of his ass, and force him to please see below.
Almost all of the accusations of ‘torture’ are NOT REAL TORTURE. Instead, they are minor instances of harsh treatment—the kind of treatment you probably wouldn’t want to be subjected to—but they aren’t TORTURE.
There are some instances of abuse and perhaps even the occasional act of real torture, these, of course should be investigated. But to say that the occasional abuse is somehow equal to the institutionalized and routine torture of the Saddam Hussein regime is disgusting, immoral, and anti-American.
If even the worse accusations turn out to be true, which I do not believe for an instance they will be, they would be nothing compared to what Saddam Hussein routinely did and on hundreds of thousands of victims.
You, Kos, are a certifiable idiot whose blind partisanship is disgusting and unethical.
I don’t know Doc…why don’t you tell us how you really feel…
You can see all the nominated posts here. And if you’d like to participate in the Watcher’s vote, go here and follow instructions.