I shouldn't have dunked on the Ramble Dogwalker, Part 1.

I shouldn't have dunked on the Ramble Dogwalker, Part 2.

I was trying to remember an Austin novelist's name - it was Ruth Pennebaker, now in her 70s - and stumbled on some pretty good debates by other people on how to teach young people to be kind and generous while also teaching them their private property rights.

For the record, here's what Pennebaker said in a 1986 humor book of hers:

"...the Tall Ones have double standards. You never see either of them lend their clothes or cars to anyone, do you? But they're always pushing you to let that dorky kid next door play with your best toys."

Elsewhere, someone said, when DO kids learn they can politely say no, anyway? They can't say it to their teachers, they can't say it to their parents, they (typically) can't say it to their siblings, and they can't say it with regard to PUBLIC property, such as playground equipment. Why shouldn't they have personal boundaries, somewhere?

Another site:

https://motherhoodmaniac.com/my-child-doesnt-have-to-share/

Excerpt:

"Sharing is NOT a social skill, taking turns is a social skill. Sharing in the traditional sense is teaching children that they are more entitled than someone else and they should be given something just because they want it. That is not a real-life expectation."

Beginning of piece:

We were at our campground and my 4-year-old son had packed up his trucks, his shovel and his pails and we walked over to the park. He set himself up, his trucks had their spots and he started to dig out his “construction zone”.

All of a sudden two other boys came rushing over and each one of them grabbed a truck and started driving it around. My son looked over at me, partly in disbelief and partly in anger, he couldn’t believe it. I looked back at him and quietly nodded my head. He knew what that meant. He stood up and said to the two boys, “those are mine, give them back!”.

The two boys weren’t listening to him, I waited a few seconds while my son asked them again to give them back. I looked around and saw the boy’s parents sitting on the other side of the park not paying attention. So, I stood up, walked over and told the boys to give them back, that they were my sons’ and he had brought them to play with.

The two boys dropped the trucks and ran over to their moms. I heard their raised voices and finger-pointing in my son’s direction. Then the boys ran back over and asked my son if they could play with him. He looked at me, I shrugged my shoulders, “it’s your choice”, was all I said. He turned to them and told them “no”. This resulted in the boys running to their mothers again, more fingers pointing in our direction, some angry looks from their mothers, in my direction.

But, my child doesn’t have to share with yours!

A Missed Life Lesson in Not Sharing
Instead of their mothers using this as a teaching moment for those boys that;
a) they can’t just take another child’s toys and,
b) not every child wants to share their toys and that’s ok
What they taught them was that my son was not a nice boy and that I was a bad mom for not making him share.

A Sense of Entitlement
So, what drives a child to think that it’s ok to take toys or that when they ask for something, they get it? An overwhelming sense of entitlement. You may not even notice that it’s happening, you want your child to be happy and have everything they want...

Know Your Child’s Personality
In the above scenario, my son was all set up, in his own little space, ready to play for hours by himself. He would rather play by himself, he’s always been that way. He’s quiet and enjoys the peacefulness of solitude. While he doesn’t have all the same traits as his highly-sensitive brother, he is starting to mirror the early traits. These boys were loud and rough and made him very uncomfortable. He wouldn’t have been happy to play with these boys and I knew it.

Why It’s OK To Not Share
From an early age, children are taught to share but what does that really mean? For the most part it means they have to give up something they have just because someone else wants it.

Sounds a bit ridiculous when you word it like that, doesn’t it? But in traditional sharing instances, that’s exactly what it is.

Can you imagine as an adult this same scenario? Since when as adults do we give up something the moment it’s demanded of us? We don’t. We are expected to wait for our turn. If you were in the middle of reading a book and someone asked to borrow it, you would wait until you were finished reading to lend it out. No one would expect you to stop, mid-book, and hand it over because someone else wants it...
_________________________________

(Note, again, that she was NOT talking about public property! Also, years ago, Miss Manners once praised a parent who was having trouble teaching her kids to share, but MM also said "let's not overdo it. You wouldn't want them to grow up to share their husbands or wives, would you?" She then offered some advice.)

From Scarymommy:

When my son started preschool, while I filled out paperwork, they let me know that they had a very specific policy on sharing. The policy was this: If a child was playing with a toy, they didn’t have to share it with another child just because somebody else asked for it. They could choose to share it, but if they were actively engaged and didn’t feel like giving it up, they could just say no.

I gotta say, this blew my mind. I mean, I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, so I basically had the background mantra of “You have to share!” flowing through my veins. I think I might have gasped. But then, our preschool explained to me that once they started implementing the policy, the amount of fighting between the kids, tattling, and general annoyingness of caring for multiple preschoolers dropped dramatically.

And it makes sense if you really think about it.

Imagine this: You’ve just settled yourself down at your favorite coffee shop with a hot drink and you open up your laptop. A stranger walks up to you and says, “Hey, let me have a turn on that thing.”

You say, “Um, no. This is my laptop.”

He says, “No fair! It’s my turn!”

And then he goes and tattles on you to the barista. The barista comes over and says, “Okay, I think you’ve had enough time on the laptop. It’s time to give your friend a turn.”

And then she takes your laptop away from you, and hands it to the guy. That’s crazy, right?...

Same piece:

https://www.scarymommy.com/i-dont-make-my-kids-share/

Last paragraph:

...the goal, I think, is to teach our kids empathy rather than just forcing them to do our will or turn them into doormats who never stick up for themselves. If you have an abundance of something, you should share it, of course. Not just because it’s the kind thing to do, but it feels good to make other people happy. Kids know this somewhere deep in their naturally selfish little souls. We just need to encourage it, not force it.

The Ramble Dogwalker incident is what happens when two Karens encounter each other. From the NYDNews article - Crid's link 1:

At this point, Christian performs a self-own for the ages:

“ME: Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it. HER: What’s that? ME [to the dog]: Come here, puppy!

“HER: He won’t come to you.”

"ME: We’ll see about that... I pull out the dog treats I carry for just such intransigence. I didn’t even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog.

The nearly 500,000 students enrolled in the California State University system’s 23 campuses should expect to pay full price for tuition this fall.

A spokeswoman for the system told The College Fix via email that tuition is expected to remain at the regular price despite the system’s decision to remain virtual for the fall 2020 semester.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/california-state-university-no-plans-to-reduce-fall-tuition-despite-keeping-classes-online/

Darth & Patrick have added comments, so wading once again into the torrents—

Over many years I've seen it: Ninnies daydream that the local police force is a set of tough older brothers, or a heavily-drinking uncle from the wrong side of town, who can be summoned on short notice and who will arrive in default sympathy with their side of a conflict. But they never test the daydream, so as they enter adulthood, it calcifies into presumption, as narcissistic prayer often does.

I've seen that presumption from immigrants, especially. (But also from children of incompetent homes.) They know that their constables in the old country were on the take from the word go; now that they're in the land of Milk and Honey, they assume their righteousness will be affirmed as a matter of course. It's always jarring when you hear that assumption spilling out of lips and dribbling onto the sidewalk; you're instantly assessing what other vast regions of their ego, beyond their incompetent beliefs about their public safety, are constructed as poorly.

The Ramblebunny certainly had that going on. I don't have the heart to watch it again… But IIRC, she encouraged the cops to move with urgency because—

1. She was frightened.
   
   
2. 'He's filming me!'

Can you IMAGINE how delusional you have to be to think the NYDP — the New York Police Department, which Bloomberg famously described as the seventh largest army on the globe — is going to be so readily manipulated by a theatrically girly tone of voice on a phone call?

Fourth graders have seen enough of the world not to try that shit.

Of course her employers fired her. Quite aside from the racist arrogance, quite aside from bringing a successful financial institution into planetary disrepute for no good cause on a quiet springtime holiday, no investor could ever trust someone so naive with a nestegg, or even a $50 flyer on a whimsical startup.

SpaceX channel. About 2 hours and 30 minutes from launch. Currently showing a greatest hits video from previous launches. Not sure when they'll join mission control in progress.

https://youtu.be/8g_dUAiJ1fY

FTR, it's not certain that carrying puppy treats to entice, or perhaps seemingly to poison, the housepets of others is the move of a "class act.

Wes Yang is all over this.

Hey Amy, what would you do if some antagonist in public tried to attract your dog Fluffers with taste treats?

Audacious marketing.

This might be a better SpaceX feed.

https://youtu.be/rjb9FdVdX5I

About two minutes ago, the laptop screen on the gantry was flickering, and I can't imagine why. Laptop LCD's aren't progressively scanning.

About 15 minutes before that, the blog is posting slowly today.

R.I.P. Larry Kramer, 84.

I never knew he was a screenwriter for - and one of three producers of - "Women in Love"!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/larry-kramer-dead.html

Excerpt:

...The protest was organized by the militant group Act Up, of which Mr. Kramer was a founder.

The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one who got the message — after Mr. Kramer wrote an open letter published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988 calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot.”

“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”

Mr. Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective treatments. He credited Mr. Kramer with playing an “essential” role in the development of elaborate drug regimens that could prolong the lives of those infected with H.I.V., and in prompting the Food and Drug Administration to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs.

In recent years Mr. Kramer developed a grudging friendship with Dr. Fauci, particularly after Mr. Kramer developed liver disease and underwent the transplant in 2001; Dr. Fauci helped get him into a lifesaving experimental drug trial afterward.

Their bond grew stronger this year, when Dr. Fauci became the public face of the White House task force on the coronavirus epidemic, opening him to criticism in some quarters.

“We are friends again,” Mr. Kramer said in an email to the reporter John Leland of The New York Times for an article published at the end of March. “I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I emailed him this, but his one line answer was, ‘Hunker down.’” ...

Or rather, the ONLY screenwriter!

Ah well, maybe tomorrow.

What do you know...

I hinted, pretty recently, that even CF - or indifferent - people don't necessarily mind being asked "do you have children" or "do you have grandchildren." That's normal conversation, after all. It's only when the those questions get increasingly presumptive or arrogant that the speakers come across as nosy or rude. Such as when they include the adverb "yet."

Well, today, this popped up at Bratfree:

http://www.refugees.bratfree.com/read.php?2,436318

"...I remember being harassed from my 20's through my late 40's on this topic. One of the advantages of getting older is that you can really do the 'is that any of your business?' look and stop someone in their tracks.

"I remember being on the job in my 20's and people telling me 'you're next,' or when I was not next, 'what are you waiting for?' Some dude even said to me once, 'you know, you don't have to wait for the swelling to go down.' After he started it, I said something like, oh, I know where babies come from and I know how to prevent them, and I asked him how his sex life was after pregnancy and two kids because mine was FABULOUS and it was going to stay that way thanks to no kids. That shut him up pretty quick. What a tool. I remember asking this old crone why it was so important to her for me to have kids and she blurted out, 'I don't care very much about that--I just want to see you ruin your figure like the rest of us.' A rare moment of honesty.

"Pushing 60 is great, no more dumb questions.

"If I ran the world, these would be my rules regarding what's rude: I don't mind a 'do you have children' when you first meet someone because it's an opener and people try to find things in common. Not taking 'no' at face value and not moving on is rude. Asking someone WHY they do not have kids is rude. Asking someone if they are trying to have kids is rude. I think it's rude to ask someone you barely know if they want to have kids. Why can't people just leave young people alone and not harass them about when they are getting married and when they are having kids?

"I was born in the 1960's and it looks like the world is only getting more rude about these questions."

(end)

They used to say that to teh gays, too—

Oh, Edgar, you just haven't met the right girl… YET.

Sam Morril is right. (And you'll enjoy his special if you like standup.)

The Ramble incident may have strongly diminished the Karen stereotype, by burning through so much of the fuel that no one enjoys the scent anymore.

From Dear Abby:

"Woman With New Boyfriend Keeps Neighbor Up at Night"

https://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/2020/4/15/0/woman-with-new-boyfriend-keeps-neighbor#disqus-comments

The best part was the top-rated comment.

"I was in this exact situation once. I met the neighbor in a parking lot and asked what movie they’d been watching so much at 3am. He asked what I meant and I said it sounded like someone dying.

"His face turned bright red and I never heard them after that."
________________________________

But...there COULD be problems with that solution, too.

From "The Best of Dear Abby" (I can't find the exact column):

"My husband joked to our married neighbor, Mr. Smith, about how his noisy mattress acrobatics were keeping us up at night.

"My husband received an icy stare.

"We learned later that Mr. Smith worked nights."

Signed: Foot in Mouth

Smolinski.

I'm generally fine with people giving my dog treats.

But if I were walking my dog in the early AM and I was alone in the woods and some man approached me and then he told me he was going to do something I didn't like and tried to call my dog over...