Criminal... Minds?

By -
Having a TV for the first time in many years, I've been watching it a lot. But we only have an antenna (no cable), so I only get a dozen or so channels. The one I watch the most is Ion Television, which shows re-runs of Criminal Minds for hours a night. (I'm typing this while between episodes!)

Two interesting things about the show:

1) The tech person, "Garcia," pretty much does three or four illegal searches per show, and no one in the FBI does (and I guess no one in the audience is supposed to) bat an eye.

2) Periodically someone in the BAU (or a guest expert) decides to put forward some deterministic theory of what "caused" the serial killers they investigate to become murderers. But the agents still get all self-righteous with the killers when they catch them. May I note this makes no sense? If the lady is a murderer because her neurons were flooded with serotonin in the womb, that's certainly not her fault!

Comments

  1. Josiah Neeley11:31 PM

    They can't help but be self-righteous when they catch serial-killers, it's the way they were raised!

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah12:04 AM

    I think you're right there, Edward!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more