Yeah. One of the notable subcategories of failed predictions, which, in the interest of brevity, I didn’t really discuss at much length, are the number of things which Kurzweil predicts which actually are now feasible or already implemented, and which have in some sense broken through — but as permanent niche products, which remain popular with a select class of people for a select few applications, and which pose no foreseeable threat of displacing anything or taking over the world like Kurzweil imagined they would. Reliable speech-to-text software is another example — you can pick up Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple hundred dollars and it’s good enough that a number of professional writers use it to do more or less all their writing. It’s just that all of them happen to have carpal tunnel syndrome or severe motor disabilities. Just about everyone else still uses a keyboard, even on devices like iPhones that don’t even have a physical keyboard (but do have a physical microphone, which could have been used for speech-recognition if anyone cared enough to insist on it).

It’s not that these technologies aren’t available, or even that they are priced out of most people’s reach; it’s just that people have the technology now but most of us don’t have much of a use for it as of yet. And there are, of course, drawbacks and trade-offs involved (you may love the idea of dictating your latest memo; but do you really want to hear all of your coworkers dictating theirs at the same time?), which futurists characteristically fail to take any account of.

Tommy_Grand:

I read that, in the US, more men (usually boys) get raped than women — but the male rapes go unreported. I never understood how “unreported” statistics get tallied, but I know that the number of rapes I see cited is not the same as the number of rape convictions.

Ross Perot’s Trade Policy:

Tommy Grand, you can read lots of things on the internet. I suppose with prison rape that’s possible, but it wouldn’t make much of a dent in Brownmiller’s hypothesis if the criminal fringe that compels all women to curtail their behavior in the outside world also behaves the same way on the inside world.

This question I can help out on.

I know of no empirical data that suggests that men are raped more often than women are. It’s certainly true that very few rape survivors report what happened to them to the police, and that male rape survivors are even less likely to report it to the police than female survivors are. But there is fairly extensive research on unreported rapes, and it does not indicate that the unreported rapes against men are anywhere near numerous enough to make up the difference.

Obviously, there is no perfect way to determine the number of sexual assaults that aren’t reported to the police. However, the best ways at our disposal to get a grip on something like the rough scale of the problem are anonymous victim surveys, in which researchers randomly sample a population of men and women (most often with telephone surveys or paper surveys), ensure the anonymity of the respondents, and ask them whether certain kinds of events have ever happened to them. Victim surveys like these are the kinds of surveys that are generally being cited when writers refer to the large proportion of rapes (over 90% of rapes against women, and an even higher percentage of rapes against men) that go unreported. Since the victim surveys are anonymous, and carefully designed to be as specific and objective as possible in their questions; and since there are no legal or social consequences attached to responding to the survey, as there are for making a report to the police, these tend to give a much more accurate picture of the situation than police report statistics do.

One of the most systematic, largest, and most recent victim surveys was the National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, for the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Justice. The surveys were done in late 1995 through early 1996, with the research reports coming out from 1998 to the present, and (in spite of the name) collected a great deal of data about the incidence, prevalence, and nature of violence against both men and women, including battery, rape, and stalking. You can read a great deal about their findings on rape in their research-in-brief report (1998) (which includes a couple of pages of discussion on survey methodology, pp. 13-15), their full report (2000), and their recent research report on rape victimization (2006).

What they found is that about 3% of U.S. men (about 1 in 33), and about 18% of U.S. women (about 1 in 6), have suffered either a completed rape, or an attempted rape, in their liftimes. If you look only at completed rapes, and exclude attempted rapes, the numbers are about 15% (1 in 7) for women, and about 2% (1 in 50) for men.

If rates of rape have remained relatively stable since 1995-1996 (police statistics indicate that, if anything, they have gone up; but as noted, police statistics are hard to rely on) then about 0.3% of U.S. adult women (about 300,000 nationally) and about 0.1% of U.S. adult men (about 100,000) have been raped in the past 12 months; and that there have been about 876,000 rapes committed against women in the U.S. in the past 12 months, compared to about 111,000 rapes committed against men. (The incidence numbers are different from the prevalence numbers because female rape survivors are much more likely to have been raped repeatedly than male rape survivors.)

Thus, while it’s appallingly common for men to be raped, and more men have been raped than most people think, women are nevertheless much more likely to be raped than men are.

I have no idea if it’s accurate, but (lacking evidence) I cant discount the possibility. Assuming arguendo that it’s true (more males are raped than females) how does that affect the Brownmiller hypothesis? I mean, if perception (and therefore fear) is one thing and reality another, wouldn’t her hypothesis still be valid?

For what it’s worth, Brownmiller is certainly aware of child sexual abuse against boys and the rape of adult men in prison. She discusses the former in her discussions of child molestation and of serial killers. She discusses the later at some length in a section of Chapter 8, “Power: Institution and Authority” (pp. 257-268). Brownmiller was, in fact, one of the first writers to conclude (remember, she published in 1975) that the rape of men in prison was systematic, widespread, and an instrument of prison hierarchies of power. She believed (rightly, I think) that the phenomena tended to support her theories about the use of rape as an instrument of gendered hierarchies of power, not to undermine them.

If it were true that more men were raped than women, then no, I don’t think it would much affect her hypothesis, firstly because her hypothesis, as you note, has as much to do with the felt threat of rape as it does with the actual incidence of rape, so with men, if there were in fact widespread stranger rape, but it were never talked about much, and especially not as something that threatens all men in daily situations, you wouldn’t expect it to have the same social effects. Similarly, and just as importantly, since the threat of rape (by other men, not by women) doesn’t generally lead to men being exhorted to seek protection from women, you wouldn’t expect it to have the same dynamics for sex-class that the threat of rape by one group of men has on women, who often are exhorted to seek protection from other men. And, thirdly, what we know about the situations in which men are most often raped (it is extremely rare for men to be randomly targeted for rape by strangers, outside of some well-defined spaces like prisons; but, while most women who are raped are also raped by someone they know, not by a stranger, the existence of a significant number of men, who randomly target women for rape, in everyday situations, at large in the outside world, does create a significant threat, which Brownmiller is describing in her Myrmidon theory, and which does not generally exist for men. (If the rape of men were more common than the rape of women, then no doubt widespread rape might have other systemic effects on men; but not the effects, as discussed by Brownmiller, that the threat of random stranger-rape in the world at large has on women, since the threat profile for men would be different in character.)

But, as I said above, see the victim surveys on actual incidence and prevalence of rape. As far as I know there is no evidence that stranger rape, or intimate partner rape, or acquaintance rape is more commonly suffered by men than by women.

John:

We already did that and we ended up throwing people out on the streets who were completely unable to take care of themselves.

Allowing people to leave when they want to leave is not the same thing as “throwing people out on the streets.” If someone is completely unable to take care of herself, it’s fine in my book for you to try to help them out. What’s not fine is forcing your “help” on her against her will.

We also filled our prisons with the mentally ill.

Transferring people from one prison to another is not what I advocate.

Deinstitutionalization was one of the biggest crimes of the last 50 years.

Compared to camphor-shock therapy? Electroconvulsive therapy? The ice-pick lobotomy?

Bullshit.

Eric Hannekan:

Hm. It sounds like he’s suggesting “mental therapy vouchers,” dispensed by a judge to those he deems mentally ill.

No, I’m suggesting that involuntary commitment be abolished, and that judges and other government officials be removed from the psychotherapeutic process entirely.

If you want to get together a voluntarily-funded charity or mutual aid society that covers the costs of psychotherapy, possibly including hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, then you should be free to do so, but one of the chief points that I’m trying to stress is that government officials and political power need to be kept as far away from psychiatry as possible.

Tacos:

One of the issues that arises in treatment of the mentally ill is that many patients have little or no insight into their own illness. You can’t expect all mentally ill people to recognize that they are even ill, much less recognize that they need to seek help.

Many people with diabetes or human papilloma virus have little or no insight into their own illness, and many may not even recognize that they are ill. Yet very few people are willing to imprison diabetics or HPV carriers and force “treatment” on them without their consent.

This might be seen as an improvement on the surface, but in reality if the patient is convinced that pyschiatrists are trying to implant a transmitter in his brain, his ability to choose between facilities might be somewhat impaired.

Ah, paternalism.

I know of some cases of people with cancer who chose to go for quack “therapies” rather than submitting to the usual regimen of treatment. Sometimes at the cost of their own lives, and often on the basis of beliefs that are no less irrational than the delusions common among certain people labeled as “schizophrenic.” Yet people who believe stupid or crazy things about magic cancer cures are not forced to undergo chemotherapy or radiation therapy against their will. If they were it would be more or less universally considered an atrocity, even if putatively forced on them “for their own good.”

What, if anything, do you think explains this difference in treatment? What, if anything, do you think justifies it?

Jesse,

Thank you for calling attention to this.

For what it’s worth, a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center was instrumental in finally getting Columbia shuttered, and the report that you’re quoting from is hosted on the SPLC’s website, but the report itself wasn’t prepared by the SPLC. It was prepared by investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice, who were investigating as part of an earlier DOJ lawsuit over the treatment of child prisoners. Of course, I’d be the last person to say that being produced by federal prosecutors makes it more reliable, but in any case, that’s the provenance.

Jennifer,

Charges? Hell, none of them will even be fired. The state government’s current plan is to shut down Columbia and let all the former employees who turned it into such a hellhole torture camp transfer and metastasize throughout the rest of the Mississippi prison system.

J sub D:

I initially expected something similar from this article. Fortunately it was just physical and emotional abuse, not sexual.

Unfortunately the Department of Justice’s report isn’t the only story out of Columbia. Besides the sexual humiliation involved in guards forcing teenaged children to strip naked before they are locked in the “dark room,” and reports by girls at Columbia of a peeping-tom prison guard (both reported in the DOJ’s report), there’s also been at least one federal lawsuit filed over a male prison guard’s repeated rape of a 14 year old girl imprisoned at Columbia.

N.B.: I haven’t started producing PDFs of the documents that I put on Fair Use, but I hope to one day. For those who are both impatient and savvy about DocBook and XSLT, the DocBook XML source is already available online, at http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/instead-of-a-book.book

I’d do it myself, but I’m a stickler about formatting, and am currently working on other projects. But if anyone produces a good-looking PDF from the DocBook source, I’d be glad to get a copy of that to post at fair-use.org. The person who generated it would get credit, of course.

Mangu-Ward:

This means lower profits in the short term, less R&D in the long term.

Maybe so. If so, so what? The government’s duty is not to maximize the amount of new pharmaceutical research going on in the world. It’s to get the hell out of the way and let individual drug-makers and drug-takers bargain freely over how much the new drugs are worth to them. Which would require, among other things, that the government not ban all competition for 20 years, or indefinitely ban efforts at arbitrage through buying drugs in foreign markets.

Noisewater:

In this instance, I believe that “allowing the government to negotiate bulk discounts” should be called by it’s better known name — a price control.

… as opposed to the government using taxes to buy up ~100% of the supply of a particular drug at the price set by drug companies for a now effectively non-existant retail market. Which we should call, what, market pricing?

In reality, whenever the government buys nearly all of a particular good, using tax dollars without any individualized control by the people forced to pay them, any price whatsoever that the government pays for the good will effectively be a price control. This is true whether the government allows itself to “negotiate” with the sellers or passively takes whatever prices they name. The only solution is to stop having the government do all the buying, not to substitute a higher price-controlled price for a lower one.