This argument assumes that the social forces (excluding possible physical causes) that caused Dahmer to want to kill and eat his lovers (a rather unsual desire in capitalist society) are those forces you identify, and not, for instance, something experienced in early childhood. Or whatever. Which is unknowable.
The USSR produced a similar individual, Andrei Chikatilo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo ). This is not something capitalism-specific.
--- On Sat, 4/4/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> Chris Doss, jokingly brought up Dalmer.
>
> But think it backwards. Were the hell do guys like Dalmer
> come from? They are constructed through various social
> forces, just like the rest of us. So obviously there is
> something seriously broken in our legal and conceptual
> construction scheme if Dalmers are the product. My choice of
> candidates are some psycho-social combination of homophobia
> and homosexuality construction systems operating in
> conjunction with sicko legal punishments produced that
> nightmare. What's interesting is he was sentenced to
> multiple life terms. He was murdered in prison.
>
> I had to look Dalmer up on wiki... It looks like he had
> early sexual identity problems. So you could make the
> argument that Dalmer might possibly be a poster boy for
> abolishing both legal prohibitions of homosexuality and the
> prison system. I said could make the argument, that in
> concrete and non-theoretical ways the prison-industrial
> complex created Dalmer, literally created him.
>
> A more broadly conceived approach could say, the cultural
> system of the prison-industrial complex mentality produces
> Dalmers.
>
> But then it gets even more interesting if you think back to
> Foucault and Genet. They are not too far removed from
> Dalmer, and they created the discursive methodology to
> deconstruct the prison industrial complex, as such. They
> started with their own knowledge and experience and
> understood the psychodynamics of how such nightmare
> constructions work.
>
> Anyway, Angela Davis when through related experiences,
> constantly harassed, spied on, jailed, tried, escaped,
> underground .... so forth. So her own methods of discussing
> crime, punishment, legal and philosophical definitions and
> construction all converge in a closely related domain to
> Foucault, Genet...
>
> So these theoretical foundations are encapsulated into the
> political demand to abolish the prison-industrial complex.
>
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> CG
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