In the onrushing flood of pissy rhetoric regarding the Wal-Mart atrocity do me this favor...

Listen to hear a proposed solution that doesn't involve government action, particularly federal authority. When you do, report here.

You probably will not: Americans, and consequently the rest of the world's people, imagine their lives to be a product or by-product of government. And they're cool with that, on the whole.

Investment.

This person teaches mathematics instruction to (guessing) education majors who will in turn teach mathematics to grade/high school students.

For Professor Gutiérrez, math should be a “moral,” rather than a “rational,” issue.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/math-prof-who-argues-against-truths-and-knowledge-to-host-carleton-college-convocation/

China, Hong Kong and Google.

From the comments: “Fortunately for China they have an ally in Google, which will help China do their best to keep as much of this hidden as possible from people in China.”

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/337979/

I do not question the timing.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/03/feds-probing-aocs-chief-of-staff-saikat-chakrabarti-after-sudden-resignation/

Buying the house is half the battle. The other one is fighting for years -yes, that's plural- with townhall for the construction permits to fix it up.

The bonus 50% is because once you get the materials, the contractors, and the permit ready. Some asshole(s) bureaucrat(s) will block it because iT's A hIsToRiCaL BuIlDiNg, YuO cAn'T rEmOdEl iT.

https://twitter.com/areas_abandoned/status/1158055092219547653

Listen to hear a proposed solution that doesn't involve government action, particularly federal authority. When you do, report here. [...] You probably will not: Americans, and consequently the rest of the world's people, imagine their lives to be a product or by-product of government. And they're cool with that, on the whole. ~ Crid at August 4, 2019 8:12 AM

That's because we have a bad tendency to go for instant gratification, both in our personal lives and our societal ones, unintended consequences be damned.

You'll hear a lot of calls for gun control or assault weapons bans - because the mere existence of these weapons drove the shooters to commit such atrocities - this despite evidence to the contrary.

So, what is the base cause of people wanting to go out and kill as many fellow human beings as they can? What psychological break is driving this? The weapon, be it a gun or a bomb, is just a tool. The cause is rooted in humans, not tools.

We have, in the past, had automatic weapons readily available for civilian purchase - one hundred years ago, you could walk into a store and purchase a Thompson sub-machine gun, advertised to the public as ideal for vermin control on your ranch or farm. Yet, we didn't have mass shootings like we do today. We did have mass bombings - a spate of them from the early 1900s through the 1920s.

The response to the bombings was an expansion of government power and the creation of a government office with virtual free rein to investigate subversives and radicals, a division of the DoJ's BoI headed by J. Edgar Hoover. The solution included the Palmer Raids, effectively warrant-less raids on radicals and minorities (especially Italians), anyone identified by the government as undesirable.

The Palmer Raids were lauded by some as effective and necessary at the time, even by The Washington Post. They were also criticized by others as a reckless abuse of power.

And what were some of the unintended consequences? The Raids helped inspire the creation of the ACLU and established J. Edgar Hoover's power base. They also cost Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer his shot at the presidency.

I don't see the point of this.

Use a microscope or a telescope: Inspect your political environment. Looks at Trump's heartiest, masturbating enthusiasts; at the air-sniffing never Trumpers at the middle; and at his oblivious, foaming detractors. Scan the zones between them with all the focus your glare can resolve.

Do any of them seriously contend that people are basing their conduct on the moral teachings of Donald Trump?

All-Time Champion Side-Eye Internet Photograph.

Second Place.

Lenona, was going through old stuff, and found that I still disagree with you here.

There's a feminine habit, benefiting no one, of presuming that everything bad in the masculine heart can be corrected with a good sit-down-and-talking-to.

No.

More government interference, well, a bunch of busy bodies attempting to use the government to interfere.

Denver NIMBYs are using historic preservation laws to stop a restaurant owner from selling his diner to a developer so he can retire.

https://reason.com/2019/08/01/neighborhood-activists-would-rather-preserve-toms-diner-than-let-its-owner-retire-in-peace/

Hotel.

If someone can offer two or three tight sentences about why we shouldn't regard the fashionable mania for enforcement of injunctions against "hate crimes" and "terrorism as a twitching and cowardly disregard for our own finest and best-tested principles of jurisprudence, that'd be great.

I murdered your sister, or you/mine. Does it matter whether you hated her, or meant to instill fear?

Simple music, simple video, very charming.

Another in the fashion of the Examiner editorial, but only a little bit more convincing.

Not just the shooters, Crid, but the bombers and stabbers et al. In fact, disengagement from society is also a symptom of the committers of chronic violence in inner cities as well.

So, how do we get these and future young men engaged and invested in society?

I don't know.

I want the solution NOT to be authority over their lives by distant people.

Haidt, whom I've come to admire a great deal despite never having actually read one of his titles, has suggested in passing that Hillary's 'deplorables' comment may have a turning point for Western Civ, and not a happy one.

A favorite twitter guy is UCLA's @GabrielRossman, psych dept I think (checking, nope, sociology), and he had a cite this afternoon about whether "amok" is something which happens in some cultures while not "tolerated" in others... And I *think* he regards government as the source of that difference. I might be wrong about that, and hope so.

The world's bright people are doing their damnedest to flatter themselves and each other about their righteousness and distinction elevation from others. Favorite pieces about this are—

Nozick https://tinyurl.com/yyg8j6v8

Posner http://www.denisdutton.com/posner_review.htm

If the popular clucking about these atrocities brings them empowerment to act, that work will not be kind or provident.

Distinct elevation, etc.

I always thought that Tyson guy was a goofball, but this sentiment seems reasonable and useful—

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1158074774297468928

—if you read it as a plea for *proportion.*

Almost no one will.

I"m reminded of this quote I cam across a few years ago in a review of Nick Hornby's About a Boy by Heather Malick in The Toronto Sun:

But there are very few novels written about men who would not be played in a movie by Bruce Willis. Ordinary men are not represented in fiction. It has only just occurred to me how destructive this must be for men.

As rotten as it may be for women to have to look at endless images of unreally sexed-up women, how terrible it must be for men who are force-fed a diet of action men and high-earners.

Face it, if I want to be more attractive, I can help things along by, for one thing, quitting stuffing my face. I have that option.

But if I look at the way men are represented in the endless novels I am sent for review, I know this: If you men want to be more attractive, you have to foil the blowing up of American embassies worldwide or you have to earn at least US$200,000 a year. You have to be expensive meat.

"So, how do we get these and future young men engaged and invested in society?"

Oddly enough the answer seems to be to have government less engaged in them.

The government has an amazing capacity for failure. If you take a government provided retraining course you are less likely to find a job than if you didn't. You are also more likely to make less money than if you didn't take the course. But our government still offers such things. When governments take over food production you soon see starvation and sometimes directed genocide. You see the same thing over and over again among all government services. So the best solution to getting people engaged in society is to have society stop trying to engage them. At least in a formal capacity.

—if you read it as a plea for *proportion.* | Almost no one will. ~ Crid at August 4, 2019 11:12 PM

Tyson had a good point, but the reaction to his tweet was swift, and also on point.

Having your child killed in a car accident sucks, but having him shot at the mall by a deranged lunatic is not quite the same thing.

Lenona, was going through old stuff, and found that I still disagree with you here.

There's a feminine habit, benefiting no one, of presuming that everything bad in the masculine heart can be corrected with a good sit-down-and-talking-to.

No.
__________________________________

Crid, I take it you mean this:

"Again, maybe we wouldn't have that problem (children on welfare) so often if parents of teen sons took unwed fatherhood more seriously - and really TALKED to them about it."

There's a big difference between suggesting that women should have to reform their male peers (of COURSE adult males don't appreciate being lectured to by someone who isn't their boss or supervisor, and it's not the women's job anyway) and suggesting that PARENTS have a duty to reform the uncivilized little human beings they chose to become parents to, while the kids are still minors.

Plus, of course, all the talk in the world doesn't help when parents act more like the kids' lawyers/friends than like anything else, from day one.

Bottom line: Parents have to let their sons know, from an early age, how horribly disappointed they will be if the sons don't live up to their obligations as citizens. As in, not just obeying the law, of course, but also following the Golden Rule to a T. Plus, they need to CONVINCE them, without being specific, that there will be true hell to pay if they break any family rules. No passing the buck to anyone.

E.g., I don't remember sneaking off to the neighbors' houses to watch extra hours of TV because I would have been too terrified to do so - and it was probably the same with my brother, but I don't remember.

Besides, if boys are going to behave more badly than girls, whether as children or as teens, then they simply need more supervision (plus maybe heavy-duty community service or something similar). We wouldn't tell elderly people to lock themselves up so they won't get mugged by 8th graders, so what's the difference when it comes to any other crime or bad behavior?

And just in case you didn't catch the meaning behind the "lawyers/friends" paragraph:

https://buffalonews.com/2002/01/20/after-misbehavior-talk-is-cheap/

By J.R.

"When I misbehaved - and it didn't matter whether the misbehavior occurred at home, school or in the neighborhood - my parents rarely asked me to explain myself. In fact, if I even tried to propose an explanation, they would generally cut me off by saying something along the lines of 'there are no excuses.' And indeed, as I now realize, every prospective explanation was an attempt to excuse myself, to justify what I had done, to pass the buck, to turn wrong into less than wrong, if not right.

"When their children misbehaved, people in Tom Brokaw's 'Greatest Generation' acted. In the 1960s, however, parents began listening to experts who promoted the notion that good parenting was primarily a matter of how well one talked to one's child. So, where yesterday's parent acted, today's parent tends to talk, and not just talk, but talk talk talk talk talk talk and, then, talk some more. Mind, talking is not all bad. There's a time and a place for but the time and place are not always and everywhere. Adding to the problem, in the course of all this talk talk talk, many of today's parents actually help their children evade responsibility for misbehavior.

"A mother recently told me that her 5-year-old is misbehaving at school. Nearly every day he brings home a bad behavior report, and she responds by sitting down and talking with him about it. Mom told me she always feels these conversations clarify and help her son come to a 'better understanding of how to act better next time,' but when the next time happens, he acts badly again. Unwittingly, this mom is giving her son opportunity to construct excuses for his misbehavior, to explain it away. These Socratic exercises, furthermore, have taken the place of consequences. I propose that instead of leaving these conversations wanting to act better, he leaves understanding that he can act pretty much any way he wants to because (a) nothing of consequence is going to happen, just talk, and (b) he has his reasons, and if his reasons don't sound good to anyone else, they sure sound good to him.

"When a child misbehaves, an adult needs to impress upon the child the fact that when you make a bad decision, bad consequences result. It is not bad to have one's parent sit down and talk to you. It's simply inconvenient. It's bad to have your bicycle and television privileges taken away for a week, to have a weekend spend-the-night canceled, to have to write a letter of apology to the offended party, and so on. Punishment, in short, is bad, and when dealing with bad behavior, one must fight fire with fire.

"Now, after a parent has punished, talk is fine. But first things first. And make sure your talk does not open the door to excuses. Remember, there are none."

Another example of NOT acting like your kids' lawyer, from "Farmer Boy":

...When Royal had been in the primer class, he had often come home at night with his hand stiff and swollen. The teacher had beaten the palm with a ruler because Royal did not know his lesson. Then Father said: “If the teacher has to thrash you again, Royal, I’ll give you a thrashing you’ll remember.”

(Not that any sane person would advocate violence by teachers these days - see below.)

But Mr. Corse never beat a little boy's hand with his ruler. When Almanzo could not spell a word, Mr. Corse said: “Stay in at recess and learn it.”

So at least Mr. Corse understood that overreacting doesn't necessarily accomplish anything good.

and it's not the women's job anyway
________________________________________

I should have said "it's not the peers' job anyway."

It's nice and noble, of course, when the adult MALE peers gently tell him that his behavior is not admirable - but again, it's not their job and the man they're trying to reform could make trouble for them.

> having him shot at the mall
> by a deranged lunatic is not
> quite the same thing.

The world is crawling with ugly death. They say 50 people died from gunshot wounds in Chicago last weekend. And the weekend before that. And the wee okay you get it.

Go listen to some of those Haidt lectures I've been linking for the past five months: Recent generations of American parents have gone apeshit about vanishingly improbable events. And you can show people chart after chart about the enormous decline in gun violence over our lifetimes, and they just don't care. You can talk about the nearly FOUR HUNDRED bombings in NYC between '69 and '70, but no one will concede that we're any safer.

Haidt argues the problem is (essentially) pornographic television, now accelerated in social media. We've had 20 years of My Name is Adam-type television programming (and so forth) readily corrupting the editorial patterns of CNN-ish news operations (which are illiterate anyway). You grow up seeing pictures of cute missing children on the milk cartoon every time you eat a bowl of cereal, you're going to think your own children have no business being outdoors.

That's not a metaphor or anything: That the way some of the fathers in my department at work (in their mid-30's)view the world. They're seventh-graders never go anywhere unless Mom drives them... Sending them four blocks for a dozen eggs would be unthinkable. It's how they've decided to look at the world— Through the dementia of commercially-rewarded fear narratives. (Hell, some people watched enough TV to decide Donald Trump would be a good president!) And as a consequence, we're seeing retarded rates of dating, driving, working outside the home, and all the rest of adult behavior. We're turning kids into pussies.

I can go on and on about this, but the smirk of your comparison is just not appropriate. Yeah— We're men and women and children in an animal biological form, and bad shit can and will happen.

I regard the broad panic about these atrocities as a demand by the safest, best-rewarded people who ever lived for less-upsetting television programs.

They should turn that shit off. Or change the channel. Or read a goddam book or grow the fuck up. The tweet was lost in the recent Twitter update, but it was like this: Art doesn't owe you representation. Nobody promised your own romantic enthusiasms (bi! trans!) were going to be depicted in flattering terms for public consumption.

But it's bigger than that: Television doesn't owe you anything... Certainly not the truth.

> if boys are going to behave
> more badly than girls, whether
> as children or as teens, then
> they simply need more
> supervision

Dearest Christ, NO.

1. Girls are not the standard for behaving, badly or otherwise. You may find them more agreeable, but duzzenmadder: The point is not to turn boys into girls, it's to turn boys into men.
   
   
2. Nothing is ever simple… Not at this scale. (Specifically, I think this is a wickedly intricate collapse of humility by all parties.)
   
   
3. See the comment just above, and everything I've been writing about (re:Haidt/"Coddling") all year. We've got supervision out the pooky-hole, and we're turning children into genderless, spineless ninnies. In any number of his talks, Haidt (w/Twenge, Skenazy et al.) explicitly affirms that the problem is that children aren't allowed unsupervised interactions with each other in groups, such that they learn how social systems work.
   
   
4. Parents are dropping the ball, but I can imagine no project of deeper futility than the convincing them to adopt your model, correct as it so certainly is... Especially as we become more broadly, and clumsily, "diverse."

Coney— Their seventh graders. Sorry.

(I don't understand why that misspelling wasn't a problem for the first five decades, but now happens all the time.)

Look, sarcasm built around "having him shot at the mall by a deranged lunatic" will always, always find its destination.

But when the frequency of these atrocities is (essentially) stable or dwindling, and every thoughtful observer describes a complicated, fleshy, management-resistant problem of social integration for a particular kind of person (manboys), why would you mock a call for proportion? (Are you eager for some authoritarian response?)

Favorite aphorism, the provenance of which I'm about to investigate using the popular "Google" information service: "No statement of truth is ever insolent."

Result: Various wordings, no clear source.

Girls are not the standard for behaving, badly or otherwise. You may find them more agreeable, but duzzenmadder: The point is not to turn boys into girls, it's to turn boys into men.
___________________________________________

Good lord, you're dodging the issue like mad. If a particular boy shoplifts and his sister doesn't, then the boy needs more supervision until he's truly willing to stop shoplifting. How is that turning a boy into a girl?

Since when should the expression "boys will be boys" be applied to crime? Even if it's "just" vandalism?

The "point" is to raise civilized adults. "Ladies and gentlemen," if you like - or don't like. Not overgrown animals who think they can break the law whenever they're smart enough not to get caught.

Reminds me of what a man said to a boy when the boy asked when he would be old enough to do exactly as he pleased:

"I don't know, son - no one has gotten that old, yet."

(In fairness, though, I was offended as a teen when I read that - I thought it was obvious that the boy wasn't asking to be free to commit crimes - or even hurt people's feelings - and not be punished for it. But it's possible some boys do think that way.)

Just to clarify my first paragraph:

Obviously, the boy doesn't need to be a clone of his sister. But if she doesn't break the law or any family rules, then she clearly doesn't need more supervision than most kids her age do.

Besides, even if he doesn't HAVE a sister, he obviously still needs more supervision than ANY boy or girl who doesn't break the law.

> Good lord, you're dodging the
> issue like mad.

Never.

> If a particular boy…

HOLD THE PHONE, MISSY

> shoplifts and his sister
> doesn't, then the boy
> needs more supervision
> until he's truly willing
> to stop shoplifting.

This is such a gi-nor-mo swap of context that I almost breezed past the part about "truly," in which you peer deeply to the interior life of a distant person to make sure his thoughts are in good order.

> How is that turning a
> boy into a girl?

You've crudely jerked discussion about encouraging young men to take fatherhood seriously —encouragement from the larger culture— to a single instance of shoplifting from a "particular" child.

It elucidates my bigger fear about your approach: A feminine presumption that brief, punchy narratives of intimate character-building can be instigated at the level of policy, if only we could we all resolve to be more Oprahoid in our countenance.

I was totally wrong: 50 people were shot in Chicago, but not all were killed.

It's not nearly as bad over there as I'd thought. It's nonetheless horrific:

Year to Date
Shot & Killed: 278
Shot & Wounded: 1365
Total Shot: 1643
Total Homicides: 305

https://heyjackass.com/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-homicides-data-tracker-htmlstory.html

Also, the word "willing" conjures endless, wordy, Clintonian evasion.

Boy:

Yes, I said I was truly willing... But I never said I was truly *able*!

So let's plan on talking about it for another ten years, while I breeze past the candy rack at 7-11 tonight....

Crid, what are you suggesting? That cowardly parents who balk at talking about ANY unpleasant subject with their teens are doing the right thing, since many teens don't take their parents seriously anyway? Or when cowardly parents don't even suggest that they will PUNISH teens for bad or illegal behavior? (Presumably because they want their kids to "like" them?)

I should probably say, before I go on, that many good, well-intentioned teen boys become teen fathers as well as bad boys, in part because their parents ignored the memo that said that it's been de rigueur, for the last 30 years or more, for parents to tell boys in detail about the many dos and don'ts of condom use - and to emphasize that whether you're male or female, it's YOUR job to prevent a pregnancy you don't want, and that that means always using two or more contraceptives. What's so silly about demanding that parents of sons teach all those details? Especially when teen girls aren't robots who obey every command, whether boys like that or not?

I agree with those who say that teens love to dodge responsibility by blaming their parents for all sorts of things that are really the kids' responsibilities. However, that doesn't let the parents off the hook when they refuse to talk to their kids about truly important subjects, such as education, common courtesy, stereotyping, bullying, racist violence, sex, STDs, drugs, alcohol, and last but maybe most importantly, peer pressure to break the law - or pressure to be cruel or insensitive to other peoples' rights.

Does any good parent NOT warn kids about the importance of staying out of traffic, at least? What's the difference?

Why would teens believe that any one of the above IS important - or hazardous - when the parents won't even talk about it? Why wouldn't they go astray, as a result?

Reminds me of a case of a 9-year-old I read about in the 1980s who had been taught stern, absolute obedience by her parents and, partly because of that, was a very timid and lonely wallflower at school. So when she finally made ONE friend, her parents were glad. Until, that is, the friend turned out to be a very manipulative shoplifter who wouldn't take no for an answer - and the shy girl couldn't stand up to her because her parents had never taught her how to say no to anyone - and they didn't really know how to start teaching her anything about being assertive, since that would be "unladylike"! (The mother was pretty much the same way as the girl.)

Finally: I seem to remember a clever TV ad, from the 1990s, maybe, that combined live action and animation. There was a teen boy, with animated words going "in one ear and out the other." However, the nonverbal comic acting by the teen, plus the narrator, stated that, according to psychologists, teens really do retain most of what their parents tell them - and that it influences their behavior more than what their peers or the media tell them. IF the parents order them to listen in the first place.

If some kids DON'T listen to their parents most of the time, maybe it's because the parents aren't convincing authority figures? Or because the parents are desperate to be "friends" to their kids?

Also: I agree that it's wrong to put more restrictions on one set of innocent people than on another innocent group. However, once an individual person DOES break certain rules or laws, what's wrong with restricting that person's freedom, as a result, until there is proof that person can be trusted? It's only fair that other people's safety and dignity should be protected, after all. (See what I said about elderly mugging victims.)

Especially when teen girls aren't robots who obey every command, whether boys like that or not?
____________________________________________

I should have said: Especially when teen girls aren't robots who get abortions or give birth on command, whether boys approve or not.