Even the concept of arousal recoditioning strategies is so morally fucked up that I can’t believe you’ve typed your sentence in a somewhat serious manner.

If someone is a paedophile they should be removed from society and given counselling to rehabilitate, not having testing equipment strapped to their junk and have “deviant” thoughts blasted from their brain with “arousal recoditioning”.

Young people can be kidnapped and incarcerated without due process at the behest of their legal guardians, at any moment, and perhaps for the rest of their lives in America.

Police who witness the kidnap will do nothing to protect the young victim. Kidnap is currently accepted as legal in America.

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/July-August-2004/feature_labi_julaug04.msp.

Victims are offered no legal representation, no access to any due process to challenge thier incaceration. Through-out the subsequent period of incarceration in these “teen programs,” victims are tortured and brainwashed so commonly, torture within any “residential treatment center is almost certainty. That’s partly because these gulags are all spin off of the Synanon cult

http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/cult-spawned-tough-love-teen-industry

Its also partly because no official authority takes responsibility for what goes on in these institutions, claiming that they have no jurisdiction because they are “private” organizations, and are actively corrupt.

http://www.nospank.net/ashcroft.htm

To understand how bad these gulag cults are, peruse these survivor sites:

http://www.heal-online.org/childtortureusa.htm
http://www.thefamilyschooltruth.com/
http://www.mormongulag.com/

These sites only hint at how terrible torturous life is in these gulags. The penis torture described here is a best case scenario in the cults of the American Gulag: CEDU, Elan, Desisto School, Straight inc, et al have claimed tens of thousands of victims. RIP

But to the topic at hand. There is a current study being done that attempts to correlate penis engorgement measures with MRI studies on “normal” men and incarcerated child sex offenders by showing non-sexual but naked photos of male and female adults, teens, and children. The premise of the research is completely wrong on so many levels, and the testing process is flawed five ways to Sunday (I was a subject – in the “normal” category, btw – because it paid really well; the researcher was surprised that my “arousal” was minimal and he couldn’t understand why none of the relatively boring images aroused me. If they can’t get passed the idea that simple nudity does not equal sexual stimulation, there is no hope). Of course, the results will be written in such a way as to pass muster with so-called peer reviewers, and be published in a so-called scholarly journal that happens to be edited by the PI, and hence will enter the literature as “valid research.”

That the research is funded by federal funding agencies is an example that bureaucrats can be fooled into funding something that will supposedly prevent child sex offenders by being able to “discover” them through brain scans. This is extremely dangerous pseudo-science, funded under the auspices of federal agencies, and is completely reminiscent of the terrible mistakes made in the infamous Milgram experiments, the Stanford prisoner experiments, and Cameron’s LSD experiments on behalf of the CIA at Montreal’s Allan Institute.

There really needs to be an in-depth, arms-length investigation of CAMH, and its current and historical abuses. Sadly, it is protected by strong and powerful political and academic associations as well as powerful lobby interests among the psychiatric faculty at University of Toronto (who come out guns ablazing at any critique of psychiatric abuse or bogus research).

For a whole week, they browbeat him into “consenting”, and when he continually refused, punished him by strategically delaying or rescheduling him so that he missed meals, time with the doctor processing his case appeal, and time with his lawyer.

Its receiving negative comments because its being used in a judicial context and is really easily subject to manipulation. If it was used purely for research I doubt many would have a problem.

Like what? Any of the research scientists here I know are getting out while the getting’s good. You can’t get a government grant unless you fill out a form explaining what it is you’re going to discover, when you’re going to discover it, and how much money it will make after you discover it.

I was just talking to a cancer researcher here who’s quitting to go into law because that will involve fewer ethical compromises. Cancer research here means avoiding any talk of preventing or curing cancer and only talking about symptomatic “treatments” because that’s where the Big Bucks are.

Another example: the squirrel population in Canada is crashing and this may because of pollution from plastics and/or residues from non-stick frying pan manufacturing is interfering with their reproductive cycle. The research into this was cancelled because some Hill Billy MP stood up and decried the Waste Of Taxpayer’s Money on a study of “the sex life of squirrels”. (Good thing we humans are purely spiritual beings and our reproductive cycles can’t be affected by anything that affects the animal world.)

This follows on the heels of the cancellation of research into whether various no-knock gasoline additives we use here are frying little kids’ nervous systems because it might interfere with oil companies’ quarterly profits.

This is the country that threw away its virtual world-wide monopoly on the manufacture of radioactive medical isotopes because we’re too stupid to build or maintain nuclear reactors. When the chief nuclear plant inspector tried to shut down that last remaining reactor producing these isotopes because of worries that it might go BOOM! she was told to STFU and then fired by the PM. How dare the safety inspector affect profits in the name of safety!

Let’s face it: this country is run by a PM who, as ultra-right-wing pundit Andrew Coyne recently complained in his MacLean’s column, is an ignorant know-nothing and proud of it. He’s PM because of this, not despite it, as it plays to the widespread Canadian seething hatred of “elites” who use crap like “facts” and “logic” instead of “feelings in our bellies”.

Or, as the alcoholic illiterate who used to be Premier of Ontario famously said “but your facts contradict my intuition!”

What, Canada broke off the continent and floated away? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

In other news, Hawaii is part of the United States but is not in either America. The natives of that state (accurately) call the American parts of the USA “the mainland”.

You seem confused by English. Let me help you. In English, there is North America and South America. Both continent together can be called either the Western Hemisphere or the the Americas (plural). Central America is the isthmian portion of the North American continent. America (singular) means the United States of America which is a nation that includes all 50 states, not all of which are on a continent.

Canada isn’t in America. It is in North America, the Western Hemisphere, and the Americas, but it isn’t in “America”, which in English only refers to the United States of America.

Perhaps you are studying here in the United States of America, where geography is largely unknown.

Perhaps English isn’t your first language so the nuances which can be more than little confusing are catching you? Either that, or you are being willfully ignorant and want to pretend that when anyone says “America” (singular), they mean the the entire Western Hemisphere and the Americas (plural).

Educated Mexicans know they are Americans (although they understand the common usage in the USA because of US media) and most Mexicans actually have some idea of the locations of North, South and Central America.

In the USA, most people probably can’t even locate their own state capitols on a map. Saying a bunch of people who can’t grasp first-grade geography get to decide who is called an American seems like pure idiocracy to me. But it certains fits the image of the Ugly American – all assertion and no comprehension.

“Cancer research here means avoiding any talk of preventing or curing cancer and only talking about symptomatic “treatments” because that’s where the Big Bucks are.”

Here’s a list of research programs carried out by the BC Cancer Agency.

http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/RES/ResearchPrograms/default.htm

Basic research features highly, including a world-class genome sequencing centre. Detection and prevention are prominent in there as well. Research into palliative care is a small (but important) part of that. It is by no means the exclusive “Big Bucks” (have to use capitals, eh?) focus.

I really hate responding to ill-informed conspiracy-theory style rants, but this was too close to home.

Can’t believe this has been going on and no-one is screaming mad about it.

I’m with Tom Cruise on this one: Psychiatry is one crazy pseudo-science. (Not that alien spirits trapped in a volcano is any better, Tom)

OT: Don’t people think that some type of testing similar to that described might be appropriate in the monitoring of whatever treatment they provide for convicted pedophiles (ie actual pedophiles, those attracted to pre-pubescent children)?
My understanding is that such people are considered to be, as a matter of fact, mentally ill: and if that is so, then there ought to be some way of determining the progress – or lack of such – of any treatments administered, more objectively than simply asking them if they feel aroused by children, and then assigning a probability to whether or not they are lying about that based upon the questioner’s opinions (even though such usually would be professional psychologists and/or psychiatrists).
As I’m not involved in our corrections system, I don’t know what the actual practices in such cases may be: but it would not surprise nor outrage me, if some such tests were used in those cases.

That aside, the issue has a lot more to do with the trade-off between the extreme intrusiveness of the technique, and the value of the information it provides. If the information is so unreliable that it cannot be used in court as evidence, is it justified to subject anyone to it for any other purposes?

And if it is so unreliable, can you justifiably use it to make decisions about things like parole?

As for prisoner’s rights, some are retained, and some are not. Restrictions to a prisoner’s freedom of movement are hardly the same thing as strapping devices to his penis (and, it would seem, sticking them up his rectum in some cases). Personally, I would place this somewhere between strip searches and digital body cavity searches in terms of intrusiveness. There are certainly limitations in more ethically developed nations as to the use of such measures. (e.g. look at page 47-50 of this document).

Alcohol legal, but pot is illegal? Trying to get affordable medical care is equated to fascism, but going into wars based on lies that heavily profit privatized interests with offshore tax-havens is patriotic? Evolution is full of holes and hard to believe, but the Bible makes perfect sense?

I could go on forever. Society is… well… dumb.

Considering how recently Newfoundland and Labrador joined our Confederation, it may well be that your grandparents were not Canadians (ie if they emigrated “away” from Newfoundland prior to 1949): IIRC, the Rock and Labrador joined up in March 1949.
Prior to that, it was a colony of mother England.

All that being said, I have friends who live in St.John’s, and they have often asked that I take the time to visit, and check out the action down on Water Street in their company.
I suppose I really ought to make the time to visit. My brothers, who have been there, tell me that I’d be certain to greatly enjoy the place, the people, the icebergs, the whales, the moose, the cod’s tongues, and the Screech.
And IMHO I think that any Americans who make the journey would also enjoy the place.

But our “Atlantic Islands” include PEI and Cape Breton as well, so “Newfoundlander” would perhaps be a better, more specific, appellation.
If you should care to adopt it.

PS Today’s whale story from Newfoundland:

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/08/16/Watercooler-Stories/UPI-13581281954600/

Visit Newfoundland and Labrador!

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org

Basically, it’s a small room with a comfy leather chair, a couple of tv screens, the device in question, and (I think) a camera aimed at the subject’s face. The person in charge of controlling and monitoring the experiment sits in another room.

I never signed up for any of the experiments there, but we did have to take a couple of media psychology experiments in a different department.

One involved rating depictions of violence and/or sexuality within the context of other similar or dissimilar depictions. Most of it was fairly benign (fields of horses, followed by a western shootout), but there was an extremely jarring scene of rape/murder that I still can’t unsee.

Besides, Penile plethysmography is practiced widely in both Canada AND the US, and is not admissible in court in either country. At least BC had the good sense to suspend it, albeit after a sexual assault case.

As for Canada having a “long, hard fixation” with catching people getting aroused about things, this was developed by a Czechoslovakian who emigrated to Canada. You also use the Fruit Machine as an example, a project scrapped in the Mid-sixties. Nice methodology, has Boing Boing been bought by Fox news? Perhaps you should compare it against the dismal treatment of gays in the US today (civilian and military) and the battles they have to go through to defend what few rights they’ve managed to piece together in your country. Who’s fixated on other people’s sexuality now?

If we always judged other countries based on some bizarre bit of sensationalized news without any context, then just imagine what your Tea Party maniacs are doing for your global image… assuming you care. We might use the same questionable techniques on sex offenders that YOU do, but at least we’re not raving lunatics!

Excerpts:

“Despite numerous constitutional challenges, courts routinely uphold PPG as a condition of parole, probation and supervised release.”

That’s in the US. It’s also become a required part of compulsory treatment programs within state prisons. Although not admissible as evidence in court, it’s happily used as evidence in other contexts. I would guess it would also allow for singling out of individuals for “special treatment” by prison guards.

Here’s a slightly more subjective, but very informative magazine article from 2002. Apparently the technique gets used in the UK, and its use was upheld by the Court of the Council of Europe.

It’s mind-boggling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMzepSePD4&NR=1