I believe he’s an idiot savant — capable in one narrow area, but clueless in all others. The problem is that the one area (brain surgery) is idiomatically held to be a sign of great intelligence, when it’s a very specific skill. According to some people he wasn’t as great at it as the hype, he just had a compelling backstory.
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From Wikipedia :
Patrick and Benjamin Binder (born February 2, 1987) were conjoined twins, joined at the head, born in Germany in early 1987, and separated at Johns Hopkins Hospital on September 7, 1987.[1] They were the first twins to be successfully separated by neurosurgeon Ben Carson, of Baltimore, Maryland. For this operation Carson was able to prepare by studying a three-dimensional physical model of the twins’ anatomy. Carson described this separation as the first of its kind, with 23 similar attempted separations ending in the death of one or both twins.
Although Carson was able to separate the boys, they were both left profoundly disabled. The Associated Press reported, in 1989, two years after the separation, that Patrick remained in a “vegetative state”, following the surgery.[2] He never came out of his coma. According to a 2015 Washington Post article, he “died sometime in the last decade”.[3]
Benjamin recovered to a certain extent.[2] The Washington Post reported that Peter Parlagi, the twins’ uncle, said their father was emotionally unable to ever handle them, or share in their care.[3] He said the twin’s father became an alcoholic, spent all the couple’s funds, and left their mother destitute and alone. She was forced to institutionalize them.[3]
In a 1993 interview, their mother, Theresia Binder, described guilt for agreeing to the operation that ruined the boys’ prospect of ever having any quality of life.[3] According to the Washington Post’s 2015 interview with Parlagi, Benjamin never learned to speak or feed himself, but he does enjoy visitors, and being taken for walks.[3]
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My wife recently was discovered to have a brain aneurysm which required surgery, fortunately she has fully recovered and the surgery itself was angiographic so less invasive (but still a difficult and temporary debilitating trial for her. The surgeon was one held in the highest esteem for his expertise and, insofar as I could tell, performed admirably. However, in his ability to communicate to his patient and her spouse, in his inability to empathize with her, he displayed that narrow focus of expertise that Carson seems to have.
It’s almost like they are in some fashion on the autism spectrum and dealing with complex and shifting human emotions is beyond their grasp.
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brain surgeons are just overpaid seamstresses who work wet.
Carson’s most important accomplishment was separating conjoined twins that shared some brain tissue. People said “it couldn’t be done” – and through trial and error, resulting in the suffering and death of a number of children, he finally managed to separate a pair where neither of them died. Both of them are now profoundly disabled – one of them died after decades in a coma, the other is institutionalized, unable to feed himself, or even learn to speak, but he does, reportedly, enjoy “being taken for walks”.
Because Carson separated them so soon after birth, it took years before people realized what a disaster the surgery was for the boys. In the interim, Carson became famous, and a hero,
Carson is no idiot savant. He’s a idiot who thought he was special, and destroyed the lives of conjoined twins and their families to prove it
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“…many of which have suffered at the hands of male domestic abusers…” That tells you something right there. The correct way to say this would have been “many of whom”.
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Carson pioneered the groundbreaking solo cranial-rectum insertion procedure.
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Ben Carson has as much concern about equal rights as Donald Trump has about ethics.
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Go ahead and criticize Pelosi, but never forget the root cause, the GOP.
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…And affirmative action played absolutely no role in him getting consideration to get into Yale…
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Fair point. It wasn’t asking for help, it was noting that Trump’s BFF would just roll over the rest of Ukraine if the U.S. merely declined to assist and pulled our troops and toys out.
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Or he used that gift certificate that he got last Christmas for a prefrontal lobotomy .
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Pat Toomey is going to Hell for creating the Club For Growth—a misnamed organization if ever there was one.
And his IQ hovers around room temperature, which makes him a star geniuse in the GOP.
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I didn’t know any of that. Terrible.
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First Law of Life–pull the ladder up after you.
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Rich and renowned black Republicans like Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson used to befuddle me, but my thinking was shallow and linear and stereotypical. There is always a huge portion of the American population that is willing to kick over the ladder once they have climbed it - this sort of moral and ethical failure is just human.
Many of the self-proclaimed “self-made” people I have met have demonstrated a notable lack of empathy for people who are less fortunate. The feeling of “no one gave me anything for free” and “I got here by my own hard work” seem to be pretty common sentiments.
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Happiness for her recovery!
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It’s one of the Republlican fallbacks: “Eh, don’t pay attention to what Trump said. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
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Maybe Carson forgot to mention all that stuff in his number of fiction loosely based on facts books about how awesome he is.
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Each trumper more loathsome and contemptible than the last.
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When I read that he use the words “extra rights” it clicked in my brain that he said something similar in the past. Bingo
https://www.advocate.com/politics/2017/1/12/ben-carson-lgbt-people-dont-deserve-extra-rights
His basic argument is that LGBT folks are “abnormal” (his term), and if we make accommodations for “abnormals” then the religious folk won’t have anyone to harass.
And I may be wrong but his argument that
"[cisgender] women — many of which have suffered at the hands of male domestic abusers — who believe there are men who might hurt them,”
doesn’t wash with me. I wonder how many domestic partner abusers are transgendered? Now I will admit that there’s possibility, but it has to be in the range of low to one.
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