Law School Discussion

glype, some people have an uncanny ability for being on-the-spot when leading edges are sharpened or discoveries unveiled. They seldom author the creation or event themselves. Their knack is for pointing out what others may not see and explaining what new changes have - or have yet - to come. They often see the naked truth where others see the Emperor's new clothes.

Their purpose is to awaken the power of individuality, sufficient for others to willingly move beyond the safe, unproductive bounds of thinking and expressing, to the riskier 'pudding' aspects of doing (fulfilling life purpose). But there's a catch. As that famous moral monkey 'think no...hear no...say no...' depicts, they will not directly influence others. At most they enlighten or encourage. Without telling, showing or forcing, and without use of show-stopping miracles like feeding the multitudes or raising the dead, they penetrate without interfering with the superior ability of each to know - by feel - what's best and most right for them.

They do not invent the revolution, the time nor the place of its unfolding. That is a genetic, evolutionary inevitability, but they recognize it and bring it to the world's attention.

Give voice to the creative individual within, and contribute as born and meant.

Quote

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
"Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?"
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

Originally from, "Our Deepest Fear," A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson.

I believe I have seen this poem some other place in here..

[...] He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of pharmakon... So can Theuth simply have meant writing as a "remedy"? Isn't the undecidable demi-god condemned to invent undecidables? Not just remedies, but pharmakons? Isn't Theuth's desire for writing a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion? Isn't this pharmakon a criminal thing, a poisoned gift?

Although the word-chain pharmakeia-pharmakon-pharmakeus appears several times in Plato's texts, he never uses a closely related term, pharmakos, which means 'scapegoat'. According to Derrida, that it is not used by Plato does not indicate that the word is necessarily absent, or rather, it is always-already present as a 'trace'.

In ancient Athens, the ritual of the pharmakos was used to expel and shut out the evil (out of the body and out of the city). To achieve this, the Athenians maintained several outcasts at public expense. In the event of any calamity, they sacrificed one or more than one outcast as a purification and a remedy. The pharmakos, the 'scapegoat', the 'outsider' was led to the outside of the city walls and killed in order to purify the city's interior. The evil that had infected the city from 'outside' is removed and returned to the 'outside', forever. But, ironically, the representative of the outside (the pharmakos) was nonetheless kept at the very heart of the inside, the city, and that too in public expense. In order to be led out of the city, the scapegoat must have already been within the city. The ceremony of the pharmakos is played out on the boundary line between the 'inside' and the 'outside', which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace. Similarly, the pharmakos stands on the thin red line between sacred and cursed, ... beneficial insofar as he cures - and for that, venerated and cared for - harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil - and for that, feared and treated with caution. He is the healer who cures, and he is the criminal who is the incarnation of the powers of evil. The pharmakos is like a medicine, pharmakon, in case of a specific disease, but, like most medicines, he is, simultaneously, a poison, evil all the same. Pharmakos, Pharmakon: they escape both the sides by at once being and not being on a side. Both words carry within themselves more than one meaning, that is, conflicting meanings.

Pharmakos does not only mean scapegoat. It is a synonym for pharmakeus, a word often repeated by Plato, meaning 'wizard', 'magician', even 'poisoner'. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates is often depicted and termed as a pharmakeus. Socrates is considered as one who knows how to perform magic with words, and notably, not with written letters. His words act as a pharmakon (as a remedy, or allegedly as a poison as far as the Athenian authority were concerned) and change, cure the soul of the listener). In Phaedrus, he fiercely objects to the evil effects of writing, which, obviously, is what makes Derrida so interested in this book. Socrates compares writing to a pharmakon, a drug, a poison: writing repeats without knowing, creates abominable simulacra. Here Socrates deliberately overlooks the other meaning of the word: the cure. Socrates suggests a different pharmakon, a medicine: dialectics, the philosophical form of dialogue. This, he claims, can lead us to the truth of the eidos, that which is identical to itself, always the same as itself, invariable. Here Socrates again overlooks the 'other' reading of the word 'pharmakon': the poison. He acts as a magician (pharmakos) - Socrates himself speaks about a supernatural voice that talks through him - and his most famous medicine (pharmakon) is speech, dialectics and dialogue leading to ultimate knowledge and truth.

But, ironically, Socrates also becomes Athens's most famous 'other' pharmakos, the scapegoat. He becomes a stranger, even an enemy who poisons the republic and its citizens. He is an abominable 'other'; not the absolute other, the barbarian, but the other (the outside) who is very near, like those outcasts, who is always-already on the inside. He is at once the 'cure' and the 'poison', and just like him, the Athenians chose to forget one of those meanings according to the need. And, at the end, Plato put Socrates in what he considered to be the vilest of all poisons: in writing, that survives to this day. Phaedrus and Socrates both stand as a metonym [very significantly meaning "beyond names"] for the whole contest between speech and letters, for the central (if such an inappropriate word can be excused) theme of the Derridian project. The interplay between the words pharmakon-pharmakos-pharmakeus is another example of Derridian 'Trace'.

Quote from: rent a car on August 27, 2008, 01:29:53 PM

Pretty effective at making the point, u03! I was curious, though, how exactly does inductive profiling work; I mean, the specifics of it...

Senator Larry E. Craig used a dirty word as he explained how in June 2007 he wound up suspected of cruising for sex: profiling. Mr. Craig said the police officer working undercover in the next stall at a Minneapolis airport bathroom had lumped him neatly into the behavioral profile of someone on the prowl: the wide stance, the toe-tapping, the upward-facing palm, the flash of a wedding ring. In the well-developed profile of how a man intending to engage in lewd conduct in that bathroom behaved, the gestures added up to a coded message. The police were using a common tactic that has received less attention than the widely criticized practice of racial profiling (or gender, age, weight, ethnic or religious profiling, for that matter). That sort of profiling targets suspects based on their innate attributes, not on what they say or do.

But behavioral profiling, highly nuanced, draws heavily from cognitive psychology and, often, on the personal experiences with previous crimes and the subjective interpretations of the profilers. In an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC Mr. Craig said: "I now know that this cop is — this officer is a profiler. He said looking into a stall was one of it, and then a hand gesture or foot tap is another one. Now I know all about profiling. I know what people feel like when they're profiled, when innocent people get caught up in what I was caught in as an innocent person. It's very angering at times."

There are essentially two kinds of profiling, inductive and deductive. Inductive profiling, as was the approach in Mr. Craig's case, uses statistical probability and behavioral clues from previous offenders to create cookie-cutter profiles and predict the likelihood of a future crime. Deductive profiling involves analyzing the evidence — a tire track, DNA, a bloody knife — after the crime occurs in order to create a profile of that offender and use it to catch him. Behavioral clues, on the other hand, can range from the physical to the ethereal. For example, the possession of cold medicine, mason jars, rubber tubing, coffee filters and brake fluid would quickly lead investigators to suspect someone of intending to produce methamphetamine. A traveler with a stack of small bills, with only carry-on luggage and a one-way ticket, could easily be suspected of being a drug courier. Tattoos and the color of clothing — and even more obvious, a grab at the waist as if to draw a gun — are basic clues to gang activity.

That's not to say, thou, that they solely rely on the inductive method during the course of their work - they use it as a primary guideline, so to speak..that would be too simplistic!

Looks like to me you're trying to make something out of nothing here!