Talk:Disturbed character
Problems
This article has a great many things seriously wrong with it. First, there is no clinical definition of "disturbed character"; there are just a great many terms applied to a great many character and personality problems. To pick out the phrase "disturbed character" as though it is meaningful in its own right is wrong.
There are numerous problems of grammar and usage. Perhaps the most notorious is the sentence
- "In 1886 he joined Pasteur's adversaries who tried to discredit his method of antirabies vaccination whenever a death of patient occurred and who were ready to unleash hostile campaigns in the French press that was always looking for scandal and in the scientific press, that had gained an important position in society since the first half of the nineteenth century."
This sentence is astoundly long, goes all over the map, and has dangling pronouns and subordinate clauses all over the place. Who had gained an important position? Pasteur? Clemenceau? Pasteur's adversaries in general? The French press? The scientific press? If one divides one's writing into sentences of reasonable length, one can focus each sentence clearly.
Also
- "Instead of using underhand means, Pasteur showed science in action, personified the march of progress and at the same time his aggressive adversaries were consumed by envy and "cast into the shadowy realm of the wicked", along with archaic opponents of Pasteur's method."
might be a compound sentence, or a simple sentence with a compound verb phrase. One can't just mix these things willy-nilly.
Also, are you saying that Clemenceau was a disturbed character? I think that's what you are saying, but no connection is made, making the whole section something that doesn't seem to fit in with the topic of the article.
Also, the doctrine of spontaneous generation was a hot topic at the time, but the people supporting it were not necessarily evolutionists. Darwin's theory of evolution had only been published 5 years prior; there wasn't time for battle lines to be drawn on this issue. In fact, Darwin didn't comment on spontaneous generation until 7 years later. Evolution should be left out of the argument.
And who was the "Tiger"?
I've fixed some of the more egregious stylistic errors, but I'm not really an expert, either on psychopathology or on its relationship with the Pasteur/Clemenceau dispute.
SamHB 22:28, 15 December 2013 (EST)
- "The Tiger" was one of Clemenceau's nicknames. Otherwise, you seem to be on the right track. You need a more established source than George Simon before you can claim that a generic phrase like "disturbed character" has a specific, encyclopedic meaning. PeterKa 00:55, 16 December 2013 (EST)
Still problems
I have re-reverted some of the recent reversions by user AK. These relate to what I consider to be an extremely narrow view of what the term means, so narrow that only one person is listed as an example, and to the characterization of Pasteur's scientific opponents as "evolutionists".
Here is a list of some people, all murderers. The individual details are not important:
- Lee Oswald
- Sirhan Sirhan
- James Earl Ray
- Charles Manson
- Timothy McVeigh
- John Hinckley
- Charles Whitman
- Seung-Hui Cho
- Eric Harris
- Dylan Klebold
- James Holmes
- Adam Lanza
- Karl Pierson
I think just about everyone would consider these people to be "disturbed". There has been extensive discussion in the media about their mental health, and how public mental health programs can be improved to identify such people before they commit their crimes.
So my question is: Do you consider these people (or most of them; I don't want to quibble) to be "disturbed"?
- If not, what definition of "disturbed" are you using, where do you get it, and how do you explain the massive disconnect between the way you use the term and the way almost everyone else does?
- If so, why, in an article about disturbed characters, do you name only one person, the person who opposed Pasteur's theories on abiogenesis? to the exclusion of anyone else?
As far as "evolutionists", many people were "evolutionists" in a very general sense in the years shortly before and shortly after Darwin's Origin of Species. The term was used, prior to Darwin, in a very general sense, to mean one who believed in a "tree of life" of the various species of living things, without any explanation for why the tree takes that form. In any case, mixing Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest, etc.) in with the Pasteur/Clemenceau debate on abiogenesis is absurd. See [1], where Clemenceau is shown to be a Lamarckian, not a Darwinian. Note the statement that Clemenceau was a "nineteenth century biological Lamarckian with admiration and respect for the person of Charles Darwin but with some reservation for the complete acceptance of the Darwinian theory." Definitely not what one would call an evolutionist today. Of course, Lamarck's theories predated Darwin's by about 50 years.
SamHB 19:23, 18 December 2013 (EST)
So I guess terrorists would count too. RKelly 21:07, 18 December 2013 (EST)