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Comments at Salon.com Nov. 3 2014

gootserdaddy What's happening is "switching," literally a switch into using different brain pathways, associated with early childhood abuse. It isn't the woman before her that makes him snap, rather in a sense he "snaps" first and projects childhood demons onto the person he's driven to destroy. He literally is not the same person he was beforehand, just like someone with multiple personalities isn't when they switch into their alters. 
It's discussed here: 

nodarksarcasm Patrick McEvoy-Halston Ktimene The mother could have been abused by the father
The mother was inevitably abused by her husband. This barely empathic father, however, was certainly not one of those modern-day ones in progressive parts of the world everywhere, where both partners spend about equal time with the child. Rather, the father was absent from the child's life; the mother was the child's "all." 
gootserdaddy Okay. 
magistra To deceive yourself into believing that a 'progressive' label immunizes or separates you from membership in a racist, classist and yes, misogynistic culture shows an utter lack of self-awareness. 
It does separate you. Owing to warmer, more truly helpful childrearing, progressives don't need society to act as sort of an outside sandbox where all their grievances can get expressed. They don't need a misogynistic culture to take revenge against childhood abusers. So what they do is become the only ones who can label what others simply see as normal as in fact an abusive, primitive, misogynistic society. It requires no effort; they don't psychologically need a misogynistic society, so the misogynistic culture they come in contact -- no matter how in plenty -- doesn't play on any base, so it slides off easily. 
What they do is become the only ones who push others as much as possible into reforms. And if that fails, historically they cease trying and simply group amongst themselves and move. 
rj857694 Patrick McEvoy-Halston
I do not see the poor reasoning in arguing that we should naturally be drawn to explore the possibility that our very first caregiver, the one we primarily relate to to establish the very structuring of our brains, has more influence on our lives than anything else. I do not see the poor reasoning in suggesting that abused women, disrespected and denied in the patriarchal societies live in, will make use of their children to fulfill their unmet needs -- i.e. abuse them -- rather than love them. I do not see the poor reasoning in suggesting that we should therefore explore later adult male violence towards women as a means of revenge against one's own mothers. 
You think my brain is disintegrating; I think your own won't let you be aware, lest you lose your mother's -- an alter you've installed in your right hemisphere -- approval. 
magistra Patrick McEvoy-Halston do you really think we can study 'typical behavior within misogynist cultures' from the outside, like anthropologists?
We feel no compunction in examining misogynist families/cultures within the U.S. Yet, the progressives who are doing so are really not of that culture -- they're on the outside. The culture progressives belong to is not associated with a nation -- which really is an outdated, primitive concept for them --  but with an attitude, a level of care, that's spread in different "cultures" around the world.
Every progressive New Yorker who feels more at home in London or Stockholm than they do in the Bayou, knows what I'm talking about. 
Ktimene Patrick McEvoy-Halston It's nobody's fault. Hurt people hurt people. 
@Tristero1 @Tristero1 What is dangerous about arguing that more societal resources needs to be put into ensuring that the mother-child matrix is given much better support? Included in this, would also be living wage reforms.
What is ridiculous to me is that people whose brains are literally different from yours, vastly damaged owing to early childhood stress, abandonment, abuse, are nonetheless to be held accountable. 
Maybe we like the bravado of the idea that no matter your past circumstances you can will yourself past them, but I think that just serves to help deny the true impact of our own pasts, as well as re-live it: the harsh world where you're ultimately on your own, is the one the abandoned child knows. 
The idea that we actually have potency in this situation, choice, feels great when the truth in our childhood was just to suffer. 
@Tristero1 @Patrick McEvoy-Halston Because I think that's a cold response to what was in my judgment inevitable behaviour patterns. Our prisons are full of the mentally-ill, not those who could have chosen otherwise but instead wilfully chose evil. 
You know those progressives who argue that the particular nature of a child's first three years will for the most part determine who they become -- I'm one of those. You issue in a maltreated life form into the outside world, and when it behaves grotesquely, we further smash it to pieces -- filth! creep! scum!? No, nothing less than loving therapy -- redress. 
Those he attacked need just as much respect and care. But along side that progressives need to show the cause as early child abuse, at the hands of unloved mothers and grandmothers (the fathers in these families are easily as abusive but nowhere near as present) and urge more tax money towards supporting mothers, not just societal education of grownup/late-adolescent (i.e. mostly determined) men.
Ghomeshi's parents are of Iranian descent. I'll be interested in seeing if we learn this is typical behaviour within misogynist cultures (for some sense of it, go here:http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln03_terrorism.html) ... and a conviction of him something that ends up playing into the hands of anti-muslims, war-cravers. 
jane Jones Just the fact of lacking "male modelling" doesn't explain, not his behaviour, buthis rage, though. You don't see violence (in video games) and necessarily want to hurt and degrade someone. You have to want to degrade someone badly, exult in revenge, and that means that that single mother would have to have used their boys -- essentially incest-incest. The problem isn't so much the missing father as an unloved mother making use of her children to satisfy her own unmet needs. 
If the single mother was well-loved she wouldn't so much need a partner. The boys would come out fine. That for me is key, not two parents.   
The origins of the "disease" are being maltreated by all the legions of disrespected, unloved mothers out there. Ghomeshi, to have been able to be someone who could be genuinely progressive in so many areas, to be so unCanadian in being un-afflicted in being a star, must of had a mix -- a mother who'd received enough love in life that she could be very attendant and respectful -- engendering -- but also still possessed of the default of all women who became mothers who'd known a world of disrespect and abuse: she used her child, a sort of incest -- like incest-incest. These women he raped later in life were those he displaced his rage onto, no doubt in a dissociated state  -- different brain patterns are being accessed -- as you suggest. 
Furthermore, just to be clear, if he were into extreme rough sex or BDSM and his partners had all been willing participants, I’d be in the chorus telling people to mind their own damn business
This strikes me as safe. Ghomeshi might not be forgotten because he might be an avenue to explore what exactly goes on in BDSM. Most progressives have decided to herd it into a Green World category of play or as a cultural identifier, a source of pride. When people (including maybe many secretly lapsing progressives) unconsciously want to undermine the legitimacy of progressive "moralizing," to fine-tune their targeting of the gay/lesbian community, all they might have to do is take a closer look and decide that, no, there are people damaging one another here; and "consensus" is a canard in the way it is with the truth that prostitutes can feel they gain some control over past abuse they've suffered in doing their tricks: marginal therapy at best, and clearly deserves to be done away with. Why, they'll ask, have progressives dissociated themselves from what was going on? Was it only so to keep backwater ways they have a legitimate right to intrude upon, located in ... backwaters? Rather than these glorious, intriguing GWs?
He emanated progressive values, cultural sensitivity and Torontonian sophistication, and was well known as a supporter and ally of LGBT cultural figures.
He's a better man than many, and if he did as accused, he is a rapist; he degraded a lot of people. This should concern us. If less evolved people aren't behaving like he is is it because they've found another way to disassociate their rage, something more established, more societally routine? Perhaps by counting themselves of the chorus -- a huge chorus, that involves the whole concept of being a nationalist -- that, unlike him, enthrals to bomb other nations and rape the environment and the world.  

@rj857694 @Patrick McEvoy-Halston  Also, fyi, when I was reading through your little blurb I kept asking myself why the father wasn't doing anything to help support the kid.
Boy, you don't like me ... you want to make think I'm worth your barely getting your brain in gear. The reason I don't mention the father is because he isn't there -- because he is largely indifferent to the child. He is terrible, a horror as a person -- but because he had abominable childrearing. He doesn't choose this, just like the mother doesn't choose to use her children to try and stimulate herself out of depression. If you were poorly nurtured you will use your kids and lose interest when they start focusing on themselves. If you were loved, then you become the kind of woman or man who will choose to get actively involved in the child's life, offer real love. It'll comes naturally to you. 
There is no one to blame. You are, in my judgement, simply determined by the nature of the generational chain you belong to. Our origins are akin to these New Guinea tribes, who are barely beyond primates in the amount of love they've known and the amount they can transmit. 
You discounted factoring in the influence of the mother in creating later male violence, apparently because it used to be used to engender hate towards women (really? feminists used to argue it). There is no way you can argue, however, that it is only neglected, abused women, living within patriarchies -- societies that devalue and deny them -- that will inevitably incestuously use their children and somehow afterwards fight your way at the end to actually blame them. 
You're arguing that it is out of their control; and you're evidently favouring society going along the course Katie would have, that is, of providing more support and societal resources to women everywhere, not further harming them (for Christ's sakes!). They deserve it. They deserve to lead as rich a life as anyone out there. Plus, if they have children their children will less serve to satisfy their huge unmet needs, denied to them not so much by anything other than our collectively horrid, unloving past (i.e history). 
Our mothers incubate us as we come to know the world. She is our "all" as our brains form and our expectations shape. I bring this up as the factor in considering later hatred of hatred of women, and your response isn't, don't overstate it, but rather, this canard again? ... let's look instead at frats, when boys are eighteen rather than infants, because this is clearly where they are most susceptible/vulnerable. Current studies prove it; keep up. Maybe the world will collude in agreeing with you, but to me that's insane. 
We don't explore "mother" because it brings our very own mothers into examination. If we've drifted away, as you're arguing, it's because we've lost courage, psychology has lost courage -- some period of latitude is over. Part of our brain has been built to make sure we keep her saintly and slay those who seek to see her actual influence straight, and it's in charge, ruling over every study where mother might possibly be factored in. 

rj857694 Patrick McEvoy-Halston I did not realize that the concept that the primary caregiver (i.e the mother), the one we literally use to format our brain through countless interactions early in life, when abused throughout life, will not be loving but will inevitably use their children, was once accepted as an explanation for later male violence towards women. You'd never know it here, where I seem to be the only one suggesting this explanation. 
Did science prove this out of date?; or did researchers -- like all of us -- back away when we realized just how pissed our own mothers got that we were willing to see them as they are rather than as they insist on being seen? Don't think their won't be retaliation for what you're saying about me ...
cont'd
Children are experienced by mothers as extensions of their bodies, and any separation or independence is seen as rejection of the mother, as reminders of the severe rejection of the mothers' own childhood. Mothers do not allow others to nurse their children, saying their milk is "poison," and even do not allow their one- to two-year-olds to visit their relatives for fear they would "poison" them. When a mother dies, often the "infant would be buried with her even if perfectly healthy," and if the infant dies, "the mother remains secluded with it for days, wailing, attempting to nurse it," blaming it by saying "I told you not to die. But you did not hear me! You did not listen!" When infants begin to show any sign of independence, they are either wholly rejected and ignored or forced to stay still. Typical is the Wogeo child, who Hogbin describes as often being "put in a basket, which is then hung on a convenient rafter...or tree" and "discouraged from walking and not allowed to crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours at a time [and only] make queer noises" as he or she is immobilized to avoid even the slightest movement of independence from the mother. Anthropologists regularly see these ubiquitous New Guinea baskets and net bags in which the infants are trapped and in which they are often hung on a tree as "comforting," even though it means that the infants often live in their own feces and urine and can neither crawl nor interact with others. Only Hippler describes them as a function of the mothers' pattern of "near absolute neglect" of her child when it is not being used erotically.

Parental rejection in preliterate cultures is often overt it is what Boyer found was called "throwing the child away." Boyer discovered that "a great many mothers abandon or give children away; babies they have been nursing lovingly only hours before," when he and his wife were offered their babies, a practice he ascribed to the mothers' "shallow object relations." Few anthropologists have seen the high adoption and fosterage rates in the New Guinea area-some as high as 75 percent as rejection, but of course that is what it is. Child rejection is widely institutionalized in various forms, usually after weaning, when the infant has stopped being useful as an erotic object. In the Trobriands, for instance, "the transfer of children who have already been weaned from true parents to other parents is a frequent occurrence..." Anthropologists usually see giving away a child as evidence of parental love. Kasprus, for instance, says the Raum really "love and like children," but that "although they love children they may readily give one away..." Mead describes the giving of a child away by her parents as a "happy" event. The occasion is a family giving a seven-year-old girl to the family of her betrothed, an older man: 

The little girl is taken by her parents and left in the home of her betrothed. Here her life hardly differs at all from the life that she led at home....Towards her young husband, her attitude is one of complete trust and acceptance....He calls out to her to light his pipe, or to feed his dog...she becomes warmly attached...I asked her: "Did you cry when you first went to Liwo?" "No, I did not cry. I am very strong."

Rejection of the child when off the breast is ubiquitous in New Guinea. Small children are rarely looked at or talked to. Whereas in American families an average of 28 minutes of an average hour is spent talking to and interacting with the child (including an average of 341 utterances per hour), in at least one New Guinea study mothers were found to interact with their children only one minute out of each hour. The millions of looks, communications, admirations, mirroring and emotional negotiations between mother and child the "emotional dialogue that fosters the beginnings of a sense of self, logical communications and the beginnings of purposefulness" are simply missing for the New Guinea child. The result is that the early self system in the orbitofrontal cortex has no chance to develop, and since "the orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates the capacity to empathize with the feelings of others and to reflect on internal emotional states, one's own and others," when these emotionally rejected children grow up they are unable to empathize with others or have much insight into their own emotions. 
Since to the infanticidal mother, as Hippler puts it, "the child is an unconscious representative of [her own] mother, his autonomous actions are seen by the mother as abandonment. The response on the part of the mother to this 'abandonment' by her infant...is anger" and rejection. Mothers throughout the South Pacific are said to "hold their small infants facing away from them and toward other people while the mother speaks for them rather than to them."Obviously the infant is an extension of the mother's body, not an independent human being at all. "No one says very much to babies,"and when they begin to walk, they are felt to be abandoning the parent and are emotionally rejected. As Hippler puts it, 

I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and empathizing with his needs. While categorical statements are most risky, I am most certain of this. 
This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization has been widely noted among infanticidal mode parents in simple societies. When the baby stops being a breast-object, it simply doesn't exist. In my New Guinea childhood files, for instance, I have over 1,000 photos from books and articles showing adults and children-including one book of over 700 photos of Fore children taken randomly so as to capture their daily lives.Virtually all the photos capture the adults continuously caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and mouthing the children's bodies, but only two show an adult actually looking at the child. Not a single one shows a mutual gaze between the adult and child which Schore contends is the basis of formation of the self. The photos illuminate Read's description of the "customary greeting, a standing embrace in which both men and women handled each other's genitals...hands continually reaching out to caress a thigh, arms to encircle a waist, and open, searching mouths hung over a child's lips, nuzzled a baby's penis, or closed with a smack on rounded buttocks."This emotional abandonment is further confirmed by Boram, who recorded every detail of a typical day of one six-year-old Ok girl. Interactions or talking to the mother were found to be rare, while the child spent the day going about looking for food, hunting frogs and cooking them, "fondling" babies and pretending to nurse piglets from her breast. Boram concludes that for Ok children "most of the day is spent simply in killing time..."It is not surprising that he also mentions that tantrums are frequent and suicide is high among these children, and that he observed many "episodes of insanity" in Ok children. 
(Lloyd DeMause "Childhood and Cultural Evolution)")

I think this is a good education. Truly. But so too is this bit about how children get raised from the least-loved, most abused women in the world (boys from well-loved mothers are never going to take pleasure in intimidating women), which I think goes towards explaining why some men feel such rage towards women, and why simply getting angry at their predatory/violent behaviour is actually "unfair" -- you're getting angry at people who were highly neglected as children. So imagine this was all filmed, and thenafterwards a film segment on how they as adult males were perennially bent on gaining revenge on women: 
The "love" of the infanticidal mode parent is mainly evident when the child is useful as an erotic object. When children are off the breast or otherwise not useful, they are rejected as emotionally meaningless. The infanticidal parents' emotional bond does not really acknowledge the separate existence of the child, whose main function is to provide "bodily stimulation [that] helps the mother to come alive, and she seeks this from the child...countering her feelings of lethargy, depression, and deadness."As with all pedophiles, the child is a "sexual object...that must show a readiness to comply, lend itself to be manipulated, used, abused [and] discarded..."There is never just "incest" it is always "incest/rejection." 

There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that as soon as infants are not being nursed, they are paid no attention, and even when in danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that little children play with knives or fire and adults ignore them. Edgerton comments on the practice: "Parents allowed their small children to play with very sharp knives, sometimes cutting themselves, and they permitted them to sleep unattended next to the fire. As a result, a number of children burned themselves seriously...it was not uncommon to see children who had lost a toe to burns, and some were crippled by even more severe burns." Langness says in the Bena Bena "it was not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers playing with sharp bush knives with no intervention on the part of caretakers."But this is good, say the anthropologists, since when "children as young as two or three are permitted to play with objects that Westerners consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or burning brands from the fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and competent children." Children, they explain, are allowed to "learn by observations...e.g., the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly with a knife." As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby "with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him," this was good for the infant, since in this way "the child learns to discriminate between the edible and inedible." Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about the wisdom of mothers making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fall into the water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps in the floor or falling overboard into the sea because they were "set in the bow of the canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten feet away." 

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