Smoking pot and shooting out the occasional window in a house under construction with a BB gun, hell yes there are kids all over the place doing that.
I remember how 'jenkem' got thrown all over the news (which maybe like 3 people in the US tried, ever), and if kids were weaving around freeways blackout and shooting pedestrians with airsoft guns on any sort of an appreciable scale, I think we would have read about it in the news by now.
I think this kid just grew up in a poorly-supervised household around some really sketchy kids. Glad to see he's doing better, and I hope he finally apologized to Seth. Notice there isn't a shred of remorse in his description of locking his buddy in a room and giving him possibly severe burns.
It's interesting to read these bad hot takes on why while plugging your ears
I honestly think there's something really messed up about American culture. I believe you can draw a direct correlation between what I think it is - people being indoctrinated into selfishness from an early age - and behavior like that.
For context, my wife grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She used to tell me horror stories about high school and I used to dismiss them as maybe be it just being her experience and nobody else's. I changed my mind when one day we went to the wedding of a high school friend and we were sat on the same table with some people who were 'popular' in high school. Their recollection of those years were as bad as my wife's. One woman, when asked about her experience literally told me 'honestly, I try not to think about that time'.
These people grew up in a location that was by far better than my own upbringing in every possible metric: affluent town, very low crime, infinite resources when compared with my developing country schools, access to studying abroad, etc... And they fucking hated high school. That blew my mind.
As you can imagine, my wife and me have had several conversations about how different our experiences going through school were. I've spotted a couple of things in particular that couldn't be more different:
1) Kids in the US tend to move around a lot 2) Schools classes are designed so that kids are with different groups every year/subject 3) Kids who want to go to college are under a lot of pressure from age 14 or so to perform flawlessly or risk their whole live plans being derailed 4) The obsession with popularity ('Prom King/Queen', etc.)
I think all of those lead to very poor bonding between kids. Sure, here and there you'll have kids that'll become life-long friends, but the vast majority of Americans I've met barely talk to high-school friends (they tend to form long-term bonds in college).
I have a theory that's one of the reasons school bullying is so prevalent in the US. Don't get me wrong, there were bullies in my school in South America too, but they were few and far apart and they usually grew out of it by 6th grade. It's easy for a bully to pick individual victims out of a school full of individuals... it's not the same when the kid they try to pick on has been friends for years with the same 10 to 15 people.
In any case, the conclusion we've come to is we don't want our kids to go through the American school system.
Yes, but HN is not a good representation of society at large.
I’m not sure why it’s worth pointing out that few of us have done what the author describes, but it’s probably not uncommon. Some kids egged my car at highway speeds, which could’ve cracked the windshield or caused an accident. Not too much difference between that and baseball bat + tail light.
Maybe not entirely "responsibility bestowed" but also the behavioural differences (distractions available, ability to deal with boredom) that come with the density difference of both things and people and space.
Edit: replaced the word "fact" for a more appropriate description of the truthiness of the situation.
It's actually interesting the effect this has had in society shows how lacking in confidence many parents are, such that they will actually change their parenting behaviours based on such media-guilt-shame fluff. This highlights to me a woefully under-served market in "parenting instruction".
I've smacked my kids when they deserved it, when verbal doesn't work. It was a rare occurrence, but undeniably effective. My kids are great. Flipside: They're still a long way from adulthood and "proving me right", and they're also a single data point in both parenting choices and genetics.
All of them could cause major harm to oneself or others that's not normal, signs of serious underlying problems.
'BASE jumping' or 'stunt plane piloting' is dangerous but that's something altogether different than 'driving down the freeway blindfolded' - which is quasi suicidal and very dangerous to others.
Is it controversial that people who don’t race drunk and blindfolded are better than people who do? Just because they are teenagers doesn’t mean there are zero standards.
Their examples are extreme. I'm not sure if they did it on purpose.
But change it to throwing eggs at people, to baseball batting letter boxes and drink driving going home once or twice from a party and lighting fires for fun, and it'd be considered normal.
The point is young men see the value of the prank and the value of risk to them to exceed the damage to random people.
It's takes a long time to understand what the value of a letterbox might be to some people, that's very complex knowledge. Or how easily a fire gets out of control, or an egg can blind someone when thrown from a car.
The alternative to learning these things is an authoritarian rote learning rules. Free thinking societies have costs, we can try to minimise the costs but we also need to understand that is hard.
It’s not as soon as they are forced to earn and pay or work to reinstall one. And I guess I hung around exceptional people, but I didn’t think it takes genius to recognize the value of a life or limb, especially someone else’s. Anyone past toddler years should be able to comprehend that if they don’t want random violence inflicted on them, they shouldn’t do it to others.
Have you spent time with kids? They love kicking eachother in the balls well past the age of toddler.
Things that seem obvious to adults are not obvious at all to 16 year olds, and often even counterintuitive.
My original point is still that a twisted nipple or graffiti or egging a house is not in the same class as racing black out drunk and shooting pellets at people on bicycles.
The Golden Rule should be abandoned as an ideal. It's a Christian ideal, it's a Western ideal - I support the general effort but I think we've made a mistake. It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
People treat themselves badly all the time don't they. If they are motivated to do this it puts a big hole in lots of social ideas about how humans work. .
The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks - or it might be the rules are made by people to moderate their own actions because they correctly believe they can't control them otherwise. A high agency society doesn't need rules - they are developed for low agency societies.
This is another version of why political Liberalism seems to be getting unhealthy in the United States and the United Kingdom - the assertion all equal before the law would have better results in a homogeneously high agency society.
Are we thinking of the same Golden Rule? In the more archaic form: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It says nothing about how an individual treats himself or herself. It therefore is sensible for both narcissistic and self-loathing individuals. Perhaps the rule is a little odd for masochists, but that's hardly disqualifying as a fraction of the population.
> It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
The scalability is perfect in the version that I know: For everyone with which you personally interact, the overhead is like the amount of time spent with your personal circle. This is fundamentally limited to 24 hours/day of treating people in any way no matter how outgoing the individual. For everyone else, endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live.
Perhaps the breakdown that you are pointing out is that it is difficult to craft Golden-Rule-compliant policies suitable for massive nations posessing many, many unique individuals each with unique needs. I agree there, and I have my own take on how to address it. Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks). Now, my policy preferences could be awful in another's eyes. But, no one must agree with my preferences as far as the rule is concerned.
> The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks.
This Golden Rule only acts from within the adherent. It is not enforced directly by any government or culture of which I know. Rather, it is about governing one's self accordingly.
We are - you can read the Golden Rule as an ideal to aspire to as you are doing. There is nothing wrong with that - as I mentioned I'm with the general thrust of the idea - but I still contain doubts about it. It can be warped.
The person is intended to ponder the consequences of their behaviour onto other people - to place themselves in another's shoes. This is an appeal to self interest and use of self control by means of empathy. This is sense - if you have agency - this is understood to be an ideal.
Suppose though - the person thinks ill of themselves. They are in a bad place and hate themselves. You mentioned masochistic behaviour as jarring - but it doesn't have to have this specific ritualized sexual nature. You have heard of suicide by cop. Some of these shooting videos are kabuki. If people are tearing their hair out - they may be in a state of self harm and to be harmed by others in response to their provocations may be an informal request to society from something primal deep inside their minds.
This is common with low agency people and locations with low agency people. I would go so far as to say some people and some groups of people are constantly sending out signals to the society that they want to be attacked. That is their ideal. That is their ideal. I don't have an origin explanation but it's there.
This is a weird place in the human psychology but it is not rare. Even this morning I read an adult dating advert where a woman wanted to be sexually assaulted and then implied she'd provide her daughter for the same - age unknown - but a troubling impulse - and not the first time I've heard of this. I once saw a man advertising he had HIV and wouldn't use protection but it got weird when other people subscribed to his meetups for... reasons. On the internet it is difficult to discern what is real here but I think most of us have seen enough pornography that it is obvious there is a demand for harm - sure this is legal pornography but this is something different and darker to the idealization of sexuality the feminists use as a foil - but it is an idealization.
> Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks).
This is where I come to also. You might mean in jest - but I mean it seriously. It's not my job to solve another communities problems. It might be my job to get out of the way - but that's it.
I think there exist instances the endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live is a failed project.
It looks to me as if some parts of Chicago are informally monomachy - that is young men dueling over mates, power, money. I say informally in the sense the government could step in with soldiers and kill a lot of them - who I'm sure would go out of their way to get themselves killed - to restore a universal order. It is easier to let them kill themselves chaotically - I'm certain the police came to the conclusion if two assholes subtract each other from the system - who cares, nobody to blame but themselves.
Official recognition of an underpolicing policy with this intended affect will never happen because the Liberal (R+D) faction has a strong desire to not send in soldiers - admitting policy failure and also has a strong desire to punish those who don't conform to universal norms - so informal monomachy it becomes.
The honest answer might be formal monomachy - which was used to regulate some medieval societies and I feel it likely it would be instantly embraced by the culture to solve the problem within itself even as it would be declared immortality by Democrats and Republicans.
In China they are using Social Credit. As they see it - if you break the rules, they begin subtracting off your privileges. Western Liberals are correct this could be abused - no doubt - but are much more reluctant to admit that offering equality under law to all is using as cover by violent criminals.
In my country we used to have outlaws or those beyond the pale. The idea is there were people who broke the law but were still on board with the society. Then there were another category who broke the law but also rejected the society - and for these the protections of the law were removed. If they rejected the premise of the society - it was not economical to continue for the government to pretend they were citizens.
I don't want to claim I know the answers either - but I think this is the conversation we should be having. I seem to be in a minority of agreeing that the BLM sentiments are real but also that it's a problem they're going to have to fix themselves and by that I mean something much more than the nonsense of getting rid of the police or having black police officers. This is repeating the same process and ridiculous soul searching for why it doesn't work. This means you go deeper - and ask yourself if the laws should be the same.
This would be upsetting but it would present a clear choice. Opt into the Liberal Western society with its norms and rules - or don't and make a different choice - then live with this choice. It might have a better equilibrium or it could blow up - it's really not the responsibility of other Americans to convince blacks what road to take - it has to be their own or there is no agency. Agency means giving your citizens the ability to become ex-citizens - maybe.
America is a big space - you can cede some territory for separatists to break off into. I'm sure that sounds crazy to 90% of United States citizens but it's starting to sound less crazy than putting up with the threat of insurrections and everybody gaslighting each other.
At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad parenting.
And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing things to harm others for no reason.