Closely documented in a Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's deep look at Dylann Roof.
https://www.gq.com/story/dylann-roof-making-of-an-american-terrorist
I don't know how to reel those boys back into society. I mostly don't care except that they are so dangerous.
Closely documented in a Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's deep look at Dylann Roof.
https://www.gq.com/story/dylann-roof-making-of-an-american-terrorist
I don't know how to reel those boys back into society. I mostly don't care except that they are so dangerous.
#1 nails it, I think. I remember watching _Fight Club_ the first time, and just thinking "this is such a brilliant condemnation of an entire ethos of male victimization and self-pity" [and a demonstration of the danger that males pose in a modern industrial society, too]. I think I even had to ask about it here, only to learn that there were some who saw it that way, but far, far more (I guess) males who saw it as a call to arms/celebration of a sort.
Just insane.
Though it seems like the solution is simple [albeit impossible to enact with our current set of priorities]: steeply progressive and confiscatory taxation, with the proceeds going to pay for gazillion of manual-labor jobs at decent pay, cleaning up all the shit we've wrecked in the last hundred-odd years. And preparing for AGW, etc. Lotta work there. Just give 'em work at a decent wage, and the rest'll sort itself out. And it'll have to be work that doesn't require brains -- because these boys don't got it. But that's OK: I mean, Henry Ford's River Rouge plant wasn't offering edifying work either -- just work that paid decently, even if it was mind-numbingly boring.
Though there is one other thing: even -with- such work and wages, there's the problem of misogyny. And there's a lot of 'em that are intractably misogynist.
I think a large fraction of anti-Semitism is and always has been hatred of Jews in virtue of being rich white guys. Shylock, Rothschild, Soros.
Mossy,
[tongue-in-cheek] don't you mean "rich non-white guys"? In the sense that (since at least in white culture) [the generic] you can hate rich Jewish guys b/c (as a not-rich white guy) you'll never be like them, all the while that you aspire to riches yourself?
I kind of feel that this post is concatenating three separate problems. 1) there are a lot of people who are economically inactive, socially inert and culturally void 2) there are a lot of people who are online dirtbags 3) there are a lot of people with extreme rightwing politics.
1: these people are of all ages, disproportionately nonwhite and presumably male/female evenly split. Also, since unemployment is very low, there are fewer of them than in previous years.
2) these people are mostly young white guys and there are very few of them but they are highly visible on social media by definition
3) these people are mostly middle aged, employed,, and richer than average.
Is the overlap really a big enough set to support meaningful analysis?
ajay: Nothing in the OP supports #1 -- it's all about #2 (with, perhaps, a small amount of #3 ?)
I mean, is there any evidence that places like 4chan are frequented by women or girls? I'd be -shocked-. Truly shocked. And similarly, I've seen no evidence that people of color are common there -- aside from some small number of incel Asians.
Part of what ogged is talking about (to me) is the differential response to adversity, of various kinds of folks. And I'd just be shocked to find that women of any color's response to adversity, was the sort of insanity you see coming out of 4channers, both online and in meatspace.
But that's the point. 1) is about millions of people who could be reached by government action- the post mentions the WPA. 2) is s tiny number of people who we only know about because they are deliberately making themselves known on social media and are probably not worth caring about that much. 3) is about tens of millions of people who hold a great deal of political and economic power.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/11/03/how-to-forecast-an-americans-vote
This toy is very good for understanding voter demographics.
have a very limited language for describing their own situation
This is interesting. Leaning heavily on stereotypes, the classic alt-rightist is a programmer, the classic jihadi recruit (pre-IS, anyway) an engineer; the promise of wives and concubines was a major recruiting tool for IS; and the principal target of jihadists (although Jews, women, and local outgroups are always on the list) is as a rule the local regime, which in MENA is coterminous with the local equivalent of rich white guys.
But, equally, important to remember that the typical unmarried male Arab Muslim engineer is not a maniacal jihadist. He is, in fact, a fairly normal bloke. Which might tend to suggest that the question is not so much "what turns unmarried engineer types into maniacal jihadists" and more "what draws maniacal jihadist types to engineering". And the same for 4chan, etc.
"what draws maniacal jihadist types to engineering"
I assume it's the illusion of certainty. Most if not all branches of engineering are heavily mathematical, so it tends to be clear whether a solution works or not, even at a pre-implementation stage. This is comforting, if you have a bent for maths.
Religious extremism also offers an illusion of certainty. If it didn't nobody would touch it with a window pole. These two factors aren't directly related, but it makes sense that they might both attract people who feel a greater than average need of comforting certainties. Which is not to say that most engineers are primarily motivated by this: most of them just want to build good bridges, write good software, design good cars. But at the edges, I can see how it might work.
I haven't a clue about 4chan. Never been there, never will.
I'll also handwave that Ajay's (1) and (2) may be distinct groups, with the latter performing the jihadi functions of recruitment/indoctrination, while the former do the suicide operations. Which they are similar to, in that I don't think many of the actors are expecting to get away, even if they aren't expecting to die. And I think they make a habit of pre-recording messages, as suicide bombers do.
Also it is really easy to read the entire post after the first para in the voice of, say, Bill Cosby explaining, more in sorrow than in anger, what is wrong with young black men these days, right down to the blame on absent fathers.
Access to women being also a major recruiting tool for gangs.
And I'd just be shocked to find that women of any color's response to adversity, was the sort of insanity you see coming out of 4channers
Mate, you really need to meet more women.
I'm much more sympathetic to Ogged's original ideas, partly because they chime with the work I am familiar with on jihadis. What's missing from it, I think, is the reinforcement and the strength they get from being with each other: the extent to which the group becomes the father substitute, if you like -- the strong entity which shows them how to navigate the difficulties of life, and the source of validation.
For people who live online, their identity there is much more real than whatever they have, or haven't, in the real world. If you think of online discourse as a sort of play, of game, it's much easier to understand group self-radicalisation. The canonical example of that, for me, is the reaction of one of the "counter-jihad" blogs to the Breivik massacre, where you can track in real time the realisation that the murderer was someone who had got all his ideas from one of their commenters. As if the game were all of a sudden being played with the nuclear football.
If you think of online discourse as a sort of play, of game, it's much easier to understand group self-radicalisation.
This is a very important point - involved as well in a lot of the online bullying cases you read about, where people say atrocious things online about and to people they know offline, but somehow don't regard it as serious. Makes me wonder if it will die down once we are all digital natives.
Meh. I think I'm on team ajay here.
Anyway, dumpster diving on the internet is not a healthy activity. To quote The Last Psychiatrist: "If you're reading, it's for you."
Has anyone got any real data on how many of the people under discussion actually have jobs? My impression that is most of the ones in the US, especially the older ones (>18 years old). What they don't have is hope, or a path to it. The jihadi example is somewhat apposite. A lot of these guys got engineering training or CS, or something in a STEM-like field, maybe even degrees. Then they discovered that there are no jobs for them in the MENA world, and no women. (There's a fairly well-known story about how Al Fatah decommissioned a bunch of their terrorists by setting them up with wives, back a few decades ago.)
I agree with NW here. The nutso online space for most people involved in it is a game, not something they take seriously in the sense that they might act it out offline. There is a small minority that do take it seriously, of course, and some of them eventually became dangerous.
"When everything you have is yours and not stolen, a girl comes up with something to prove. Don't just stand there, busta move."
Timeless advice.
Anyway, in my experience fatherhood takes a lot of time, but you can half-ass lots of it.
22.1 is the question.
15.1 to 22.2. Anyone know to what extent the jihadi internet is made of unorganized radicalizing echo chambers, as opposed to real jihadi propaganda?
It's like dating. You need to be there and you need to listen, but otherwise expectations are just really low for dudes.
21: Unless someone pays you for it.
Has anyone got any real data on how many of the people under discussion actually have jobs? My impression that is most of the ones in the US, especially the older ones (>18 years old). What they don't have is hope, or a path to it.
But are "the people under discussion" people saying creepy stuff on 4chan, or actual mass shooters? These are two very different groups. Just like "male unmarried Arab Muslim engineers" and "jihadis", even if you assume that the first includes all of the second (which obviously it doesn't in either case), because the second is only a very tiny part of the first. And that means - again - that looking at the characteristics of the small group and trying from that to extrapolate something important about the larger group is not a very helpful exercise.
Yes, the larger group has problems! But those problems are not necessarily the reason why the smaller group is so awful.
Looking for an answer, this from 2015.
Using data from the 2010 NYPD report, this study presents results from the first regression analysis of all qualifying mass shooters who struck in the USA between 1966 and 2010 (N=185).Haven't read it yet, and doubt its relevance, considering you would get a bigger N from this year alone.
To 2018 (emph. added):
Fame-seeking perpetrators were overwhelmingly males who often perceived themselves as victims. They were more likely than other types of mass shooters to be young white students, with signs of mental illness, suicidal tendencies, and grandiose behaviors.
28. By "the people under discussion" I meant the people Ogged introduced his post with: "millions of young men" on 4chan who have been or become "sincere 20-somethings."
As far as managing to be not disaffected, it really does help to have a skill that lets you earn a living without close supervision.
"millions of young men" on 4chan who have been or become "sincere 20-somethings."
I suspect that "millions" is rather overstating 4chan's actual user base.
16 is pretty much my reaction, and I'm impressed that you're going to such lengths to draw sense out of it. Last night I typed a comment about how it looks like Unfogged has an op-ed section now, but it seemed at once too mean and too confusing (which to be fair is my brand). But of course there are girls on 4chan, 8chan, and all over the IDW, and of course there are people of all genders and ethnicities who are assholes and love transgression and think they're going to get something out of participating in these movements, people who are sometimes very deep in denial about how much their peers hate them for their identities alone. Probably more every day, in fact.
But I'll try saying one constructive thing, which is that the question of remedies raises the question of scale. The vague and vast scale of op-eds commentary like this is the hardest in terms of concrete solutions, since no one has much leverage for action at the federal level and there is more underemployment than raw unemployment than during the New Deal. The federal government would be competing directly with Amazon and Uber for workers, etc. More local action seems more plausible to me, but that's very incremental, and I have a somewhat apocalyptic view of the next ten years.
Ogged, what role does education play here? Not all the POS shitposters are idiots (anyone with the patience to listen to Jordan Peterson is at least in theory receptive to lectures that aren't crap), higher ed is a big snarled mess, secondary ed is to a lesser extent a big snarled mess... where do you think it's headed in the U.S.? One thing that occurred to me, with your combination of useless employment and absent fathers, is work opportunities with more apprenticeship/mentorship components. But that's a clichéd answer too.
In ogged's defense, my brain was poisoned yesterday.
Clichéd answers aren't necessarily wrong.
16 is pretty much my reaction
But 16 was just lazy snark. Saying these people have been let down and looking for societal solutions is the opposite of Cosby's bootstrap line.
I suspect that "millions" is rather overstating 4chan's actual user base.
For sure. There are millions of underemployed young men, some (probably small) percentage of those post on 4chan, and some (very small) percentage of those are shooters-to-be. But I think these folks are all on a continuum or alienation and anger (and there are other outlets for some of these people, whether it's Stormfront or the Proud Boys, or things I haven't heard of).
The Last Psychiatrist
PBUH. I was bummed when he got doxxed.
They could take up challenging video games or build this golden retriever sized beauty
It will probably come as no surprise that I get a lot of Peterson/4chan fans in my classes, but for some reason I have something of a reputation as what one of my colleagues dubbed "the libertarian whisperer." I get a following, and I talk a lot of them out of the alt-right. I see these guys as sort of the natural extension of the guys I knew in college who were into Any Rand. They're convinced of their own genius, because they're eighteen, and here's a system that tells them that their genius is being denied by a $foocorrupt society. That's intoxicating shit at eighteen, especially in a subculture that tells them they were born white males because of their good behavior in the preexistence. Most grow out of it. Most will say they're not really taking it seriously.
Ogged, can you say what you mean by 'fathering?'. I have a decent amount of success by treating them as reasonable and arguing, but working from the presumption that they can do better than Peterson.
But 16 was just lazy snark.
I lied. I had other reactions in 34.2 and 34.3.
I have a decent amount of success by treating them as reasonable and arguing, but working from the presumption that they can do better than Peterson.
Could you elaborate?
39: The Peterson/Rand analogy is apt. An interest in either figure indicates a willingness to make at least some effort to engage with "ideas", such as they are. There's hope for getting such people interested in the genuine article, instead of the simulacra that they're currently settling for.
And in each society where they exist, they direct their anger at the universal scapegoats (Jews and women) and the local outgroups (blacks and Hispanics in the US, and e.g., the Roma and Middle-Eastern migrants in Hungary).
Should mention (and probably start with) women, and that none of these are universal. The only universal hatred is themselves.
It's hard to know what sort of aid could be given. At a certain point, socialization itself adds trauma so early intervention is probably good but for adults? Massive increase in funding and scope of social work (obviously good for any number of reasons), but how would you get these guys to go in?
Some sort of pro-social gaming? Use message boards as honeypots for mental health interventions?
but for some reason I have something of a reputation as what one of my colleagues dubbed "the libertarian whisperer." I get a following, and I talk a lot of them out of the alt-right.
What works? It seems insanely stressful to me to engage and coax libertarians into more thoughtful positions.
The problem with interventions is that arrogant smarter-than-thou kids will not buy into them, and nothing works without buy-in.
I genuinely think one of the most effective solutions would involve legalized pot. Numb that impulsive part of their brain a little bit and give them a dose of hippiness. I have no idea how to implement getting them to adopt it, though.
I'm at some midpoint between #1, ajay and NW on this. The OP and the Fightclub comparison seems too much like a just so story, because for the tiny number of radicals the causes generally turn out to be over determined.
Obviously there's all sorts of things that need to be fixed in the real economy, and there's a problem of low skilled jobs with no exit path, and a tiny percentage of low skilled workers end up working themselves up into a lather online. Though I'm not sure that 4chan is as economically stratified as all that.
Misogyny seems more like a lazy throwback adopted in response to little hope - and I suspect much of it would go away if people had the economic ability to present differently.
@47 are we actually talking about the smarter-than-thou types of the culturally void? I think a lot of things are being conflated here.
41: Mostly just taking them seriously as young people who are responding to a genuine problem in their lives (how do I create a meaningful life), and working toward getting them to see that there are other options besides Peterson or whoever the latest flavor is. Sometimes it takes the form of weaponized Socratic method; sometimes, it's "hey, cool that you're thinking about this, maybe you'd like to read XYZ (it helps teaching philosophy here); sometimes it's just disagreeing honestly from personal experience. Sometimes it's just flat out saying "blaming women/minorities/genderqueer politics is lazy, and you're better than that." And once (this was in class #tenure), it was "ooh, I'm a lobster or whatever, have some fucking standards for yourself."
46: It's not a solution that scales well, but being a well-read, approachable, irreverent philosophy professor with a lot of patience for conversation is about 99% of it.
||
Unrelated, I get to hang out with this guy all day today!
|>
I genuinely think one of the most effective solutions would involve legalized potmolly.
I genuinely think one of the most effective solutions would involve legalized potmolly^H^H^H^H^Hshrooms.
Are you suggesting that we molly-coddle them?
52: Wow! He's such a fascinating guy.
52: Cool! Do you have common mathematical interest or did you talk football?
I think he's on the job market this year? I'm curious whether anywhere is going to try to hire him tenure track immediately out of Ph.D. You've gotta figure Penn State is working on getting him back there.
He should try for a less criminal school now that he's got an education.
Relatedly, what's with graduate students not listing their advisor's name on their CV or webpage?!?
Anyway, I scratched at the shooter literature and it doesn't look like being a good use of time. I'm moving to something like Ajay's position: OP conflates wide problems that can be addressed by wide social policy, and narrow radicalization problems that can be addressed by a mix of social and law-enforcement policy.
On the last, I think much of the radicalisation problem could be addressed by strengthening (maybe even existing ones would be sufficient) hate-speech laws and giving NSA license to assist DoJ in de-anonymizing the trolls. Noisily prosecute the most influential 1% or so and the entire troll community will be within one degree of separation from someone pleading guilty and doing jail time. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I'd guess the vast majority would shit themselves and just stop. Granted this would take substantial time and money, but I'd guess the intelligence and targeting part can be largely automated. And could also generate a list of targets for social programs, some of whom can be compelled to enter. None of this will ever happen, of course.
62: Not to be all slippery slope or FREE SPEECH!!!, but isn't that a bit risky? I mean, couldn't those same tactics be used against the Uber organizers in yesterday's post?
Of course it's risky, and that's one of the reasons I think it'll never happen. I also think it's absolutely worth doing. Where you are now you have subculture which is contributing to one terrorist attack per day (?), and rising. You could achieve most of the same attack mitigation less dangerously just with gun control, but that's even less likely to happen.
47: The West Coast doesn't seem to have mellowed out from mass shootings yet. Also the legal age is pretty universally 21 where it's legal.
@64 The numbers are not even within an order of magnitude of 1 per day. This whole thread appears to conflate mass murder generally with terrorist killings, when terrorist killings are in fact the least common type of mass murder.
https://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2017-Family-Felony-and-Public-Mass-Murders-in-the-United-States.pdf
Per day, per week. Still too many.
That author bio would have been so much better with added quotation marks.
"Her 'research' interests include homicide, murder-suicide, and serial and mass murder."
@67 Okay. So in the interest of reducing the more common felony mass murder, you would accept the same intensive, population-level scrutiny?
@67 Okay. So in the interest of reducing the more common felony mass murder, you would accept the same intensive, population-level scrutiny?
69/70: Are these non-terrorist mass murderers sitting in communities that toss out death threats like candy? If yes, yes. If no, they would be unaffected by 62. And the scrutiny would hardly be population-level, it would be specified platforms like 8chan. The enabling legislation can require warrants to be pretty narrow. As said above, the active troll population probably isn't huge; I'm saying target 1% of that group. And the targeting would consist mostly in collecting statements these people make voluntarily on the open internet.
And current federal definitions of terrorism are somewhat lacking.
That building in the picture is still empty I think.
PSA to all lurkers (and at least one longtime commenter?): you can totally leave the email address field blank. You don't have to put in a dummy email address along with your pseud.
I haven't put my email in the comments in ages. I figure enough people just know it.
I like my fake email address. And CT makes (made?) you include one.
@71 Before you get too enthusiastic about your narrowly tailored warrants, consider how you feel about mosque surveillance, FBI infiltration of BLM groups, and police monitoring of gang members' social media presence. Would you want this power wielded by Rudy Giuliani? How about Mike Pence?
Consider the history and political utility of the FBI encouraging and entrapping idiots into inane "terrorism" plots. Is this really a road you want to go down?
@71 A dude who shot two NYPD police officers said on Instagram that he was going to put wings on pigs. And the Dallas police shooter described on social media his desire to kill white police officers. James Hodgkinson railed against the Republican party on Facebook, before attempting to assassinate congressional Republicans.
Do you want things like this to become the basis for the FBI running entrapment schemes on BLM groups or left groups?
Maybe the FBI started the "Invade Area 51" thing so they could arrest crazy people and search their computers?
@79
Wouldn't be the first time.
https://www.gq.com/story/matthew-llaneza-alleged-terrorist-fbi-snare
58: mostly math, but mostly of the undergraduate sort. It was a fun evening!
59: spring 2021.
81: Right, but what I was wondering if maybe there aren't enough agents who are Millennials to do it with some style.
A dude who shot two NYPD police officers said on Instagram that he was going to put wings on pigs. And the Dallas police shooter described on social media his desire to kill white police officers. James Hodgkinson railed against the Republican party on Facebook, before attempting to assassinate congressional Republicans.
What do you think about this story?
A report out Wednesday by the San Antonio Express-News found that a gun owner in Texas had sent more than 100 pages of racist and violent letters to the Texas Attorney General's office threatening to kill undocumented immigrants over the course of a year and a half, and that nothing was done to stop him or to communicate the threat to local authorities.
"We will open fire on these thugs," the white man who allegedly sent the messages wrote in an email to the office. "It will be a bloodbath."
Over the same period, local officers in San Antonio responded to 911 calls made by and about the man, and visited his house, on at least 35 occasions. However, because he had never seemingly committed a crime, police did not arrest him or take legal action. Nearby neighbors told the Express-News that the man's home is covered in security cameras and that he often emerged holding a shotgun.
I'm sympathetic to the free speech concerns, but I'd like to think it should be possible for the AGs office to do something in that case.
@84 I think the AG's office should have talked to the local cops. Definite failure of communication. Of course we have no denominator on the amount of crazy shit politicians receive in the mail.
But I am really curious about how the local cops could visit his house 35 times, sometimes in response to 911 calls, and find that he had never committed a crime. What was the subject matter of the 911 calls?
Notice that some of the 911 calls were made by the man and some visits were not in response to 911 calls. The proportions are not broken out. Was it 33 noise complaints, one 911 call by the man and one by a neighbor? Was it 33 911 calls by the man, 1 by a neighbor and one welfare check when he didn't answer the doorbell for a week? The reporter is leading us to an inference, but doesn't provide the data to support that inference. Even though the reporter presumably has access to the relevant data, because they are summarizing it.
And most importantly - once the AG got in touch with the local cops, they started working with the mental health unit to figure out what to do with the guy.
Have him at for a job at The Daily Caller?
as the op seems to be focused on usian mass shooters, interesting to me that the lingering, can't manage to deal with issue of misogyny, when to my understanding the two most overwhelmingly predictive factors for us mass shootings are easy access to guns & ammo and a history of violence towards women. the depressing things one learns when living with an anti gun violence advocate! one of the constant uphill struggles of ca anti-gun violence advocates is extending gvros and related violence prevention tools to law enforcement personnel who are by definition "gainfully" employed and yet commit dv at rates vastly outstripping the rest of the population. so in the us at least we have an "easy" problem to solve - eliminate the fucking guns - and a hard one, treat women like human beings.
Any Rand
We're not particular.
The multi-racial, autistic, 21-year-old, politically radical, culturally bohemian son of a couple of friends-of-friends in the larger Cedar-Riverside/West Bank scene was shot and killed over the weekend by police in front of his grandparents. The gun control people ought to be worrying about is how to subvert the state's monopoly on violence. A vast network of informants continually denouncing the 1%er online troll contingent may seem like a sentimental nod to the Stasi bureaucracy of yore, but if it was you in those databases, you wouldn't think it was so god. damn. cool. Maybe the POS subculture (for which I certainly bear no love) just needs a kick in the ass to start pointing those guns the right way. A society that twists people into inhuman monsters of woman-hatred and catch-as-catch-can racism and xenophobia should not be at all surprised when the chickens come home to roost.
Natilo Paennim:
I'm sorry for your friend's loss, and yours. And for this young man's death. But I'll note that as long as America is awash with guns, we are never going to convince the cops to use Peelian Principles of policing. They're just not going to accept that getting shot and killed is an acceptable risk to run. Removing enough guns that it becomes *unlikely* that a cop faces a gun in his job, is a necessary precondition to then forcing po-po to treat us all as fellow-citizens, and not undiscovered perps.
Anyone who's been masturbating to Robert Mugabe now has one more problem.
To 43 and others, worth remembering that mass shooters in the US are disproportionately male, and disproportionately non-white (vs population distribution). Especially striking given that gun ownership is disproportionately white. Trying to draw a link between some peculiarly white pathology and mass shootings may not therefore be the right approach.
And, of course, very very few mass shooters, and only a small minority of the extreme right, have any connection to online dirtbag culture. There is a judge in Texas who railed from the bench about kikes controlling the world before he sentenced a Jewish defendant to death. I don't think he got that way through Pepe the Frog memes.
My sympathy on the loss of your friend. If it's the correct report I found, he didn't have a gun.
91 is a really good and important point. If you want to disarm the cops, you've got to do something about the guns as a prerequisite. I don't believe for a moment that our police could operate routinely without guns if we had US levels of gun availability (even if Doug Brand did try policing Baghdad without a side arm).
96: we had US levels of gun availability up to about a hundred years ago - guns freely available to all except the insane, for a small licence fee - but the place wasn't awash with weapons. Only 250,000 firearms in private hands in 1914. That's about one 160th of US levels. Partly due to guns being expensive, I suppose.
The police seem to do better at not shooting white people with guns than they do at not shooting black people without real guns.
I think the open carry movement is a barely disguised attempt to restart Jim Crow because there's no way open carry becomes race neutral.
"Gun availability" in the sense of "lots of guns", rather than "lack of regulation".
The number of bullets one person can put into the air at a time has surely gone up since 1914. That's before the Tommy Gun.
What works? It seems insanely stressful to me to engage and coax libertarians into more thoughtful positions.
I can't add anything to Cala's observations on this, but would underline the word "patience." And, of course, patience of this sort is insanely stressful for a lot of us.
Ogged, I think, is getting at something similar to Cala in talking about fathering (or parenting, as you feminist social justice warriors would say). Again: It's about patience; a willingness to honestly listen and generously explain.
I don't see any public policy-type solution for this, so while ajay is superficially correct in accusing ogged of being a Cosby-style scold, the distinction here is that ogged is actually, you know, right.
ajay compared ogged's post to Bill Cosby. Maybe it's more like David Brooks.
102: Also because it's weird for me to think of my teaching style as fatherly.
Ogged, can you say what you mean by 'fathering?'
I read about Joe Rogan and watched some of those penitentiary videos this week, and a lot of what they're telling their audience is pretty basic stuff about how to take care your body, your environment, how to take responsibility for yourself, don't do drugs, etc. I guess it's parenting, but a lot of the advice ("get swole!") is so gendered, I called it fathering.
I think a lot of it is a result of the decline of worker power with respect to capital. When labor is not in demand it is easy for any specific individual to fall through the cracks. It also tends to push back the average age of marriage which leaves people hanging around for an extended period of time.
the service economy shift and weakening of labor power hit the black community first so you get Bill Cosby in the 80s talking to black people the same way peterson et al talk to white people now.
I think the best thing for this would be mandatory sports league membership for every male 13-30. Sport can be anything from basketball to rock climbing, just physical and social. It is provides social bonds and generates a set of in-group and out-group that are not generalizable, and an outlet for aggression. Plus physical activity reduces depression, anxiety, etc.
The weaker kids are the outlet for the aggression of the stronger ones. Unless they all on the least popular.
I think the best thing for this would be mandatory sports league membership for every male 13-30.
If you want a picture of the future of the human race, imagine a middle school PE class, for ever. And it will be for ever, Winston. Or at any rate until you're 30.
JOE BIDEN IS A HELLUVA GUY. PEOPLE WHO WORRY THAT HIS GAFFES REFLECT HIS AGE ARE FORGETTING THAT HE HAS ALWAYS HAD HIS VERBAL STUMBLES. HIS TENDENCY TOWARD CONFABULATION IS NOTHING COMPARED TO TRUMP'S LIES. HIS POLITICAL RECORD IS UNFORTUNATE IN SOME WAYS, BUT HE WAS A PRODUCT OF HIS TIMES, AND TIMES HAVE CHANGED. AFTER HIS EXPERIENCE WITH OBAMA, THERE'S NO WAY HE'S SERIOUS ABOUT COLLABORATING WITH REPUBLICANS.
108 is a dystopia, unless I could have gotten an exemption by signing up for Cala's fatherly teaching style. Mandatory sports in school ages 8-17 was more than enough, thanks; it's not as if being on the team roster is sufficient to get you into the in-group.
108: Mandatory military service is portrayed the same way, and I am skeptical.
(But yeah, surely physical activity, within the limits of one's ability, is an unalloyed boon to human beings.)
The unthinking acceptance that boys and young men are, collectively, a problem that must be solved is one of the most disturbing things about this whole conversation. Writing off an entire demographic like that is really not a good look. (Evan Wright had a good line about the early-1980s cohort being 'America's first disposable generation... all that was asked of them was that they should make it through the educational system without perpetrating too many mass shootings'.)
And, as I've tried to point out earlier, it's based on a really weapons-grade version of the fundamental attribution fallacy. The vast majority of young men in America are not, in fact, economically marginalised, culturally inactive, bigoted, misogynist 4chan users who are just waiting for the opportunity to embark on a shooting spree.
It is provides social bonds and generates a set of in-group and out-group that are not generalizable, and an outlet for aggression.
I certainly can't imagine sports being turned into some sort of proxy for racial or religious rivalry.
115: I do think we all understand that not every young male is a 4chan type. But yeah, boys and young men are, collectively, a problem. Old men, too.
And women, too! And minorities! Everybody has problems that are baked into the culture. Nobody is "writing off" any of these people, though we do acknowledge that fixing these issues is difficult.
Speak for yourself. I wrote off everyone years ago.
119: Yes! You stopped believing in us, and we stopped believing in ourselves.
108. And once again society dreams up a new way to exclude disabled people.
'America's first disposable generation... all that was asked of them was that they should make it through the educational system without perpetrating too many mass shootings'.
Low expectations, but we didn't even get that.
There are mass shootings, but there aren't too many of them.
118: there is a real difference between "women have problems", "some women cause problems", and "women are a problem" though, and I think you need to make sure you stick with the first two.
English girls they're so prissy, I can't stand them on the telephone. Sometimes I take the receiver off the hook. I don't want them to ever call at all.
I am thinking much more of a large set of voluntary league sports, than getting assigned to something.
And I think the idea that most disabled people can't engage in any sporting activity is pretty inaccurate.
THE FATHERING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
123: to be honest this is mostly true; the generation that Wright was talking about were the generation born in the early 1980s. By the time he was writing (2004) they'd finished school and joined 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion. The recent wave of shootings in schools was, more or less, their children.
"boys and young men are, collectively, a problem"
Das Jugendfrage has a nice ring to it.
It strikes me that Unfogged and indeed the USA seems to be working towards consensus on this problem: the answer is either regimentation, or prayer. From the R-side, we have either intrusive surveillance of anyone who has ever been prescribed anxiety pills - ie regimentation - or literal getting on your knees and sticking your hands together to commend your soul to the big fella. From the D-side we have either compulsory sport to improve everyone's morals (so Victorian! honestly, wtf) or else having the education system make them reflect on their fallen and sinful condition (if not actual prayer, something with the same anthropological function).
The flipside of this is that everyone kind of understands that neither of these really work. If you put the levels of resourcing and effort into the first that you do for army recruits, it works well for the ones who are motivated enough to make the effort; the others wash out, or do the minimum to make it through and become disciplinary problems down the line. And the whole point about anything religion-y is that it's about how you obtain forgiveness - that people won't obey the rules is baked into the cake.
A wee bit of realisation would be nice that, as a matter of statistical fact, the current generation of teenagers and 20somethings are actually less likely than previous generations to commit violent crimes, to take drugs, to get pregnant as teenagers, to be in prison, to drop out of college, to hold racist or sexist beliefs and so on. The US does not have a problem with dirtbag teenage boys. It has a problem with dirtbag middle-aged and old people. Unfortunately the people who get to decide "what does the US have a problem with" are the middle-aged and old, si evidentiam requiris circumspice.
And I think the idea that most disabled people can't engage in any sporting activity is pretty inaccurate.
This, directed at chris y, would presumably be... what? Ablesplaining?
Ivan Dimic came down off the flying bridge with an iron bar big as a horse's dick.I mean, really well-played, but surely not necessary.
Now that we have artificial insemination?
On a fishing boat? Only a sadist.
Who's the wrought iron bar that's as big as a horse's dick.
Shaft!
If we're worried that the human race is going to push toward its own extinction, genetically engineering fish with dicks would be a good way to be sure future intelligent life that night evolve would know we were here. All the plastic might be so common they take it for natural, but if just this one species of fish reproduces using external genitals, as soon as they figure out DNA, they'll know what must have been done.
I'm pretty sure it's before noon in Pbg.
This is the time of the day when we do the science.
OT: There's an IT contractor here and he keeps calling me "young man." He's maybe ten years older than me. Can I spit on the strap of his backpack when he's not looking?
