About that "affluenza."

Those who think the rich teenager — who, driving drunk, killed 4 persons — should have gotten a harsher punishment than 10 years probation are focusing on the expert testimony he presented in his favor. A psychologist named G. Dick Miller testified that having grown up in affluence, "He never learned that sometimes you don’t get your way... He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle."

Miller used the term "affluenza" — a portmanteau of "affluence" and "influenza" — to refer to the young man's psychological deficit.

Affluenza, Miller acknowledged to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, is “not a medical term.” The psychologist said that it means “You have too much and you don’t know how to distribute it.” At Cooper’s prompting, Miller acknowledged that the boy was “a spoiled brat.”

The affluenza claim rightfully strikes the most absurd note since Dan White’s infamous 1979 “Twinkie defense.” Psychologists have loosely used the term for years to describe the emotional pitfalls unique to children raised in affluent settings.

Of course, psychologists will have a lot to say about the afflictions of rich people, since rich people are more likely to have money to throw into long, luxurious sessions with psychologists. And rich people have the money to put on a strong defense in a criminal trial, replete with expert testimony framing their deficiencies in the most compellingly sympathetic form.

It's the judge's responsibility to give this testimony the weight it deserves. The problem here is not that rich people have money to dump into a strong defense in a criminal proceeding or that psychologists have coined a catchy/cutesy term for the woes of the rich. It is the judge — Texas State District Judge Jean Boyd — who is accountable for anything that went wrong in the case of Ethan Couch. And we don't know the weight she put on Miller's testimony or the notion of "affluenza."

I don't know how Boyd has treated other teenagers. Perhaps she's deeply informed about the deficiencies of the teenage brain and has shown mercy to a great many poor and working class teenagers and her sentencing of Couch is — within her record — a model of equal treatment of the rich and the poor. Maybe she knows the research that has led, for example, to articles like this — "Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different" — in the New York Times.

That's a 2009 interview with Laurence Steinberg, "a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia... one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology." He says:

I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Asked whether the criminal justice system is "beginning to take these differences into account during sentencing," Steinberg says:

It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

At the link you can see links to the U.S. Supreme Court cases and descriptions of the neuroscience research about the teenage brain.

Speaking of brains: Let's try to think clearly about this case and the larger context. Don't get too distracted by the word "affluenza" — which no one said was an actual disease. Don't impulsively slot this into a class warfare template. Remember that the criminal defendant has a right to present the evidence in his favor. And the responsibility for sentencing lies squarely with the judge, but don't succumb to impulsive emotion as you judge the judge.

Why don't those who advocate locavore cooking and native plants in gardening...

... also oppose traveling to foreign places?

Once you make it a matter of principle that we should eat and garden within our local environment of plants and animals, shouldn't you recognize yourself as an animal, belonging properly to your area, and refrain from sojourns to exotic places? Perhaps you ought to restrict yourself to a walkable radius?

This post has 2 points:

1. To notice the incompleteness of the ideology of ideologues.

2. To explore the philosophy of travel.

ADDED: What would be the word for moving about only locally, the word to correspond to "locavore"? Shouldn't it be locomotive? According to the OED, "locomotive" is composed of the Latin locō (the ablative of locus, which means "place") and motivus (which means "motive" or that which causes motion). 

"Locavore" is not in the OED, but I wonder what the "a" is doing in that word. Wikitionary shows the etymology as "From loca- by analogy with local, location, locomotive, locus, and so on, and -vore by analogy with carnivore, herbivore, and so on. Coined by Jen Maiser, Jessica Prentice, Sage Van Wing, and DeDe Sampson, co-founders of the 'Locavores' Web site." Was it ignorance of Latin roots or fear of being taken to be loco (i.e., crazy)?

We the Peepers.

As used in the previous post — the last word of — I see how "peepers" could be a new coinage for "people" within the our newly understood world of pervasive surveillance. One might say:

We the Peepers of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

And:

... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the peepers, by the peepers, for the peepers, shall not perish from the earth.

"Peeper" — "A person who peeps or peers; esp. one who pries or looks furtively, or in a voyeuristic way" — is an old word, I see, peeping into the (unlinkable) OED:

1607   T. Dekker & J. Webster West-ward Hoe ii. ii. sig. D2v,   Whose there? Peepers: Intelligencers: Euesdroppers.
1652   J. Gaule Πυς-μαντια 375   He..had his eyes put out; an apt punishment for all peepers, and Star-gazers.
1711   R. Steele Spectator No. 53. ⁋8,   I doubt not but you will think a Peeper as much more pernicious than a Starer....
2003   Gay Times Feb. 61/3   If you view others, without their knowledge or consent..then peepers can expect up to two years in the slammers.

"Congratsturbating."

"Creating a problem that affects millions of people, then praising oneself for fixing the small part of the problem that affects you and then masturbating."

"If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

Justice Scalia is out and about, antagonizing — antoninonizing — students, this time at Princeton, with "a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd.'"

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Then he deadpanned: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded."

[The student] said afterward that he was not persuaded by Scalia's answer. He said he believes Scalia's writings tend to "dehumanize" gays.

Actually, he's humanizing you by crediting you with the capacity to comprehend rhetoric and engage in an on-the-fly verbal interchange. But it is easier to dehumanize your adversary. Afterwards.

What do they teach you at Princeton?

ADDED: Jaltcoh has 3 thoughts about this.

AND: David Lat reminds us about what Judge Posner said about horse meat: "a state is permitted, within reason, to express disgust..."