(Above: or is he bad and mad, or just a naughty boy?)
Usually we rabbit on at unseemly length at the pond.
... it lets seriously bad guys like Gaddafi off the hook, as well as his international cronies, often thugs who are similarly vulnerable to being pushed off their luxurious perches. He couldn't be responsible for his actions because he is mentally ill, right? It's the same for his mates, typified as "idiots", right? Wrong.
Garrulous is just another word for nothing left to lose.
But there are plenty of real world examples to follow in our bid to be rambling, roundabout, excessive, tiresome, trivial and talkative.
Take Alan Rosen's offering, which runs under the intertubes ID Is Gaddafi Mad Or Bad? A Psychiatric Opinion, which wisely has been changed in the header to Are we letting bad guys like Gaddafi off the hook?
Because Rosen - who works with the Brian and Mind Research Institute - purports a psychiatric evaluation of Gaddafi's behaviour, without apparently benefit of having actually met Gaddafi. So we get this kind of rhetorical posturing:
... mad? Maybe he is, but where is the evidence?
It's all so that Rosen can bang the drum about societal stigma, stereotyping and discrimination against people living with a mental illness, as if the average punter is likely to confuse Colonel Gaddafi with a street person wandering down the street shouting and gesturing at passers by ...
Oops, I see the pond has wandered off in to a stereotype.
In the meantime, just to show he's not short of an adjective, Rosen variously describes Gaddafi as being a bit more than dysfunctional, heartless, cunning, cruel, inhumane, bad ... and evil ...
Evil? Ain't it nice to know that while 'mad' lights the good professor's wick, a two thousand old year superstition about the devil and hell and evil in the human heart passes muster ...
Yes, it seems that Gaddafi is bad, not mad, because madness would let Gaddafi get away with murder:
Well it's nice to know that the good professor is helping out the case for the defence by suggesting a mental illness plea will get Gaddafi out of trouble with the International Criminal Court, but dare I suggest that in most jurisdictions, the notion that Gaddafi is metaphysically bad is as useless as bemoaning the way the idle pejorative 'mad' is tossed around in the community.
He may be very bad, but it is hard to find any unequivocal evidence that he is formally mad. He may be devious, deceitful, perverse and evil, but he is still one of us.
Yep, there it is again, 'evil', much like the four evils that will come at the end of the world: conquest on a white horse with bow and crown, war on a red horse with great sword, famine armed with a pair balances on a black horse, and on the fourth pale horse, death, and hell following him ...
I suppose 'evil' can be given secular connotations, but seeing as how the pond spends so much time listening to Christians rabbit on about the singular contribution of Christianity to western civilisation, surely we should give them their metaphysical due when it comes to the nonsense of evil, pure, distilled, essence of, or even diluted.
So it's a tad bemusing to see Rosen blithely noting Gaddafi indulging in 'unflinching atrocities' while getting agitated about people calling him 'mad', presumably on the basis of having seen him make one of his long, rambling, garrulous, mad as a march hare speeches.
And in much the same way, it seems we now must banish the notion of calling people 'useful idiots' or even 'useless idiots'.
That' will be a profound blow to the conservative Xian commentariat, who being generally useless idiots, are extremely fond of the concept of 'useful idiots'. You know, like George W Bush and Tony Blair and Berlusconi and too many other useful idiots to mention doing their thing to bring Gaddafi and his oil in from the cold ...
But it's also a tad unsettling for the pond. The concept is very handy for the useless idiots who visit here, scribble about 'uneducated opinions' and then come out with phrases like I guess as you were unable to rebuttle ... and I made this graph for you to demonstrate how important your are.
Sigh. It's "you are", Fotherington Smythe, you uneducated simpleton, you useless idiot. And why not try I guess as you was unable to rebuttle ... to demonstrate complete illiteracy (yo, Herbert Badgery sending me off to look up cromulent).
Please pick up the dunce's cap, Fothers, you bad naughty boy, on your way to the back of the classroom where you may stare at the wall for the rest of the lesson repeating over and over again Do not rely on the spell checker, it isn't your friend. It may be pure distilled essence of evil and bad grandmar...
But I digress.
We do understand where the good professor is coming from when it comes to mental illness and psychiatric disorders, and the tendency of those who suffer from them to get upset by casual mindless abuse.
But might it not also be a good idea for the amiable professor to resile from offering a diagnosis of Gaddafi, never apparently having met the man, or thrown him down on the couch for a decent analysis?
Who knows he might be as batty as a fruitcake, or perhaps as fruity as a bat addicted to stone fruits, or he might only be mad north by northwest, and when the wind is southerly know a hawk from a handsaw ...
Above all, might it not be a good idea not to evoke ancient theological strictures or divides revolving around the notion or concept of 'evil', or 'bad' or 'badness', and suggest that somehow these vague moral, metaphysical terms are less open to abuse than popular abuse of words like 'idiot' and 'mad' ...
And now on a lighter note, it's been doing the rounds for awhile amongst the Facebook mob, but you couldn't make up this story of The Stoner Arms Dealers, as featured in the Rolling Stone. No spoilers, just a note that it's a fully sick explanation of why everything is going so well in Afghanistan ...
And on a further lighter note, why not waste precious minutes of your life reading about the latest absurdity of Glenn Beck in relation to Dr. Martin Luther King. It's all here in Media Matters, under the header Beck Dismisses The Fact That MLK Died While Fighting For Labor Rights, and it was also picked up in Glenn Beck is still in denial about Martin Luther King's progressive leadership.
The total wilful ignorance of Beck reminds why I'll never buy a single product of the Murdoch empire while Beck's given free rein to peddle nonsense. But if Beck leaves the Murdoch empire - there's a contractual showdown impending, involving a lot of posturing which could either result in business as usual, or new business for Beck - never mind, I still won't buy a single Murdoch product because they once gave Beck free rein. Or should that be reign? Or rain? Fothers, thoughts please!
It's called Catch 22 ... you have to be mad or at least delusional (sorry Prof Rosen) to watch Beck, but if you decide you don't want to watch him, you must be sane. Hence you're fit enough to watch Glenn Beck, and so become insane ... Or some such nonsense, you know what I mean.
Sorry Prof Rosen, but Catch 22 is a wonderful exposition of the madness of psychiatry and it involves unseemly concepts like madness, craziness and insanity ...
But there is one positive result from reading about Beck. It led me to an excellent photo gallery about Dr. Martin Luther King and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike.
Here's a sample, one of thirty one, with one of his aides, Jesse Jackson on that April 3rd night at Mason Temple as he prepared to deliver his last public speech, the "Mountaintop". Being a useless idiot, Beck isn't fit to shine King's shoes, let alone pretend he understands or is in some kind of symmetry with King's legacy ... And that goes triple for Rupert Murdoch ...
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