Judge Brett Kavanaugh SHOULD Be Angry

National Review ^ | 09/28/2018 | Rich Lowry

[rockrr]

Fcuk Fineswine! She royally pissed me off with her disparagements of Kavanaugh this morning. She’s a disgusting pig.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

It was obvious that Ford had been heavily coached. I even wonder if she could have been hypnotized to implant her testimony, little-girl voice and demeanor.

I don’t have credentials to publish papers on the subject, but I think I know a little about “recovered” memory because

1. I had occasion to hunt for info on the topic, and read a bunch of microfilm of articles on it in the library. And,

2. For close to five years I was primary caregiver for my mother when she had Alzheimers’ Disease.

In order to recall something in the past, you associate your way back to the memory. It is actually a thought process, in which you draw conclusions and reinforce them with other recall. That means that your memory isn’t exactly the same after the recall process as it was before. The very thought process by which you recalled something will leave its tracks in your memory along with the memory you had before.

Because recall involves thought, it matters how dense your memories are about particular events - the more detail is there originally, the less thought is required to recall things. Alzheimers decimated my mother’s memory, and that meant that when she recalled things she had to draw conclusions from less data. Naturally, the less data, the more speculation - with the result that she sometimes “knew” things that were obviously false.

And believe me, from a caregiver’s POV, that ain’t fun to see and experience. Things like absurd accusations occurred. Note the passive voice. I don’t say, “She made absurd accusations,” because it is an unfair characterization of her character. She wasn’t lying, but she knew things that just weren’t so. It was just that her mind was working on a decimated data set, and her thought processes - which had been quite functional for most of eighty years - continued as if the data set was still adequate for the conclusions she was drawing. At a not-quite-conscious level. Her brain wasn’t working but she couldn’t know it.

My understanding of “recovered” memory is that it is a kind of voluntary gaslighting which utterly convinces you of things that just ain’t so (or if they were, it would be an extremely improbable accident). Psychoanalysis is the ideal setting to create “recovered” memories. And once you have a “recovered” memory - well, it might be more apt to say that a “recovered” memory has you. In a very real sense, you are your memory.

If you want to be a “method” actor, it would be the perfect “way into the part” - but finding your way out of the part afterward would be problematic. You would be a one-role wonder. And otherwise a complete wreck. A lot like Dr. Ford . . .

[ryderann]

Brilliantly explained. Thank you so much.