HelenM

I resemble that remark!

Daleth

Sorry, Helen. Yes, but you're not a man who believes males who fail to purge themselves of all feminine traits are part of a great cultural erosion called "gender confusion" which will lead to the downfall of nations because girly-soldiers won't be able to defend their borders. I just thought he should be aware of this remnant of his personality that needs erradicating for the good of mankind.

fatherphil

for me the issue can be approached, and in fact should be approached, from a purely secular sense. why would you bring God into any of this when i have not? regardless of the validity of His statements, they can do little good for folks that don't recognize His existence.

brig, i'm way too lazy to research much of anything we discuss here. sorry.

dal, the point is not to compare nambla's positions to apa but rather to state the fact that often times "research" or its conclusions are conducted in a self-serving fashion.

yguy

Then it behooved someone to do so - specifically someone who is a member of the APA.

Or someone who holds him in high esteem like yourself, perhaps.

I guess if being president of the APA was all he cared about, it wouldn't be. If I were in his shoes and somebody falsely attributed a quote like that to me, I'd have called a press conference yesterday with a scorching, blistering denial - after which I'd be on the phone with my attorney.

yguy

I think the inference rather a stretch. It could easily be that Seligman wasn't taken seriously as a child because his ideas were silly.

According to the quote, Seligman didn't see it as abuse.

There was a third choice, which some children would have opted for: having no one take him seriously. What kind of mentality is it that thinks attention from a pedophile is better than none at all?

HelenM

I don't hold him in that high esteem, actually. I simply think he has made significant contributions to the field of psychology.

Anyway, I fail to see what your response - that someone ought to ask him - has to do with my pointing out that you have no information about what Seligman knows about that paper and how he's responded if he's been asked about it.

But, who is saying it's falsely attributed to him?

And you're the only one who seems to have an extremely negative reaction to it. I don't see that it's enough of a big deal to anyone else - including Seligman perhaps - to make a big fuss about it.

Anyway, there's no better way of publicizing it than objecting to it. Sometimes ignoring something is the best approach, to keep it getting any more publicity than is warranted. To fight it vehemently - if it is that wrong - would imply it mattered more than it evidently does to the APA and anyone else here.

Helen

Daleth

Then what's with all this wasting of bandwidth? You say, "My gut feeling is that it's bad for kids." We say, "Our gut feeling is that it's not bad for kids." End of discussion.

And as I said to yguy, NAMBLA is organization devoted to espousing a particular agenda, so their conclusions are most likely going to be favorable to their agenda and their beliefs are unlikely to be changed by new data. (There are special-interest groups with better practices than that, but NAMBLA is not one.) The APA is an organization without a special agenda to serve. Its goal is to try to discover what is true and to use that information to help people in a variety of ways. When they get new data, their positions change. Your argument might apply to some sort of organization whose goal was to support working mothers. The APA is not such an organization.

yguy

It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the culpability of the APA regarding statements made by its president. If they knew what he said - and at least some of them did - and failed to call him on it, they can reasonably expect that those who find fault with the statement will hold the APA as a whole in low esteem.

Really, this all seems pretty elementary to me.

If Rind et al did not misrepresent him, he's only a notch or two better than Allen Ginsberg.

There is no such thing as one hand clapping. If you didn't care about it, you wouldn't have engaged me this far.

This is not one of those times.

I suppose it would. So what?

yguy

I think we need to look into the influence their pronouncements have in creating new data; in the next generation, if not in real time. The most striking example of this, of course, was the legendary perversion pusher Alfred Kinsey.

yguy

In order to admit one is being unreasonable, one must see that one is being in reasonable. I don't. From your perspective that could easily be denial on my part, but I'll just have to live with that for now.

Gut feelings and emotions are not the same thing. Your basis for finding anything morally repulsive is one or the other, so that when pressed logically, it will always appear that you have no basis for your belief.

Not at the moment.

Prolly ugly too.