I’m sure you’ve all heard the story and, of course, the rather astounding news that the bus monitor has been lavished with donations from the general public. But there is a bit of a debate on what to do with the kids who did the bullying. So let’s debate – choose one of the following options:
1. Carefully tell them that it was mean to do that and that they shouldn’t do it again.
2. Give them detention so they’ll think about what they did.
3. Send them to jail so they can learn to be first-rate criminal barbarians.
4. Give them psychological counseling so they’ll learn that their bad behavior is someone else’s fault.
5. Spend $100 billion on anti-bullying PSAs.
6. Flog them.
I tend to think that a child, faced with the prospect of having his back laid open with a whip, might decide to behave himself. But, then again, maybe the earnest entreaty by a caring psychologist will get the kid to do the right thing. I mean, after all, we’ve been using the caring, psychological model for 40 years or so now and its turned our schools from places where the biggest problems were chewing gum and running the halls to places where you have to be on guard against rape and murder, so we can see how well child psychology works out as a palliative. I mean, let’s get real here – the bus monitor wasn’t physically assaulted, so the bullies in a sense are right up there as honor students, relatively speaking.
When we add in the rest of the benefits of public schools – illiteracy, teen pregnancy and a lot of self-esteem – it just might be that a larger dose of what we’ve given will work. You never can tell with these things…just one more anti-bullying public service announcement might be all it takes to turn these kids around.
Blogs For Victory 
None of the above? I think it was on talk radio this morning where I heard the “best” answer in my book; however, that would require parents who actually understand parenting.
Basically, snatch them by an ear and drag them to her house and make them look her in the eyes and actually apologize for what they each did. Then make them work the entire summer cutting her grass, cleaning her toilets and those of others donating all monies earned to to a senior living facility.
A parent will know when the child understands the harm they have committed; nevertheless, from my limited following of this incident–it appears that the “parents” feel their children have done enough already by being pointed out on the news as the little a**holes they are, and as a matter of fact–they should be rewarded because they, not generous Americans, have now made this woman much better off.
Then again, she is now in the sights of Obama’s uber-rich ~ how much does she really get to keep after, you know, the required spreading of the wealth around?
db,
Capital idea. I remember being “walked” to the corner store to return the item I had stolen, to apologize, and to offer my services to make amends. The store owner yelled at me, called my father a “$&*#@” for raising such a criminal child (I was 10) and ordered us both out – forever!
My father said to the man, “Thank you, sir and I’m very sorry for the trouble we caused you.” the man pointed to the door and said, “GET OUT!”
We walked home without a word and never spoke of it again.
The humiliation I felt paled in comparison for the shame at putting my father through that.
Would I think carefully about what my father would consider acceptable behavior after that? You betcha!
Yes, the woman did gain financially, it was like winning the lottery but with the unpleasantries of public humilation and harrassment. Thanks to a warm hearted Canadian who organized the on-line donations for her. Yup, Canucks like Mercans so much that they get involved with their travails.
You’re welcome.
Gee, I guess it didn’t occur to most of us that this was done to grandstand Canadian generosity. Thanks for clearing that up.
I guess Americans just don’t think that way, and do things like this just because it is a nice thing to do.
@Amazonia:
Now now, you’re being facetious.
hey mark
easy answer on this
exploit your 2nd amendment rights
arm the bus monitors
they shoot the bullies right on the spot
everyone is happy…..
::((
Jerk, Providing arms to someone or countenancing summary executions isn’t what the Second Amendment says.
Are you seriously that stupid or do you just think your ignorance is amusing?
Yes, baggi does think this kind of mental excrement is oh-so-witty, tee hee, titter titter. It is typical of the nonsense he drags here.
He is a poster child for my commentary on how the RRL, or rather the PL, have no sense of dignity, as they trot out their ignorance and put it on display so often.
nanu nanu dork
works for me…….wait: dont they do that daily in Ubamas chicago??
Mark do you really want a serious discussion of how to solve this problem? It should be obvious to any thoughtful person that the kids who treated this women with such vile remarks learned to do so from some source in their lives. I think that the importance of personal respect for others is best taught in one’s home, and the training in this virtue probably starts early. It probably begins with how the parents treat each other and respect each other in their daily relationships, through the happy times and particularly through the times of tension and discord. And it probably includes the sources of “entertainment” that they watch and the music that they hear. And it may even include how politicians talk about those with whom they disagree and how police officers treat those who are being arrested for possible criminal activity. Bullying is a learned behavior! If you or any of your viewers want a chance for further discussion of this matter see these posts on my blog: http;//christianityetc.org/blog/bullying and http://christianityetc.org/blog/violence-against-women . Let’s have a serious discussion regarding the real cause and cure for this lack of respect for others in our society.
Yes, Bob, we have a pretty good idea of why these kids are so heartless and soulless. But the thread is about what to do with kids like this once they are so damaged. Clearly the parents are not likely to provide any significant penalty for the actions of their little darlings. One of the parents objected to the publicity surrounding the event by whining that he thought his kid had “suffered enough already”.
Really? Just how did he “suffer”? Being called out for being a punk is hardly “suffering” if you are a punk.
And this goes farther than just the kids doing the harassment. Not one person stepped up to defend or protect the victim.
I would have every participant forced into a public hearing, on television, where he is held up to the harshest judgment regarding his character, and I would also have every other person on that bus on the stage to be identified as a coward.
And I would have the judgment at the hearing be a full year of service to the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, with written reports made to the court every week not only on what work was done but what was learned. I would have at least two hours per week of this sentence spent working for the victim. I would put this on the permanent record of the predators, complete with full video.
I would also take a very very hard look at the school system to see how much of its influence has been in the direction of “affirmation” and “self esteem” and such nonsense, and engage in major reforms of what the schools are doing.
If the parents do step up and take action regarding their kids, I would publicly thank them, putting the doting parents who don’t in the spotlight by comparison. If the parents still let their little darlings participate in sports, etc, then there is nothing that can be done but hope the children learn from the mistakes of their upbringing and not from its indulgence.
If this sounds terribly harsh, just remember that there are indicators of future and more serious offenses against humanity and society that start with lesser examples of cruelty and bullying. Does anyone really think that cruelty to a helpless human being would not be part of an overall pattern of cruelty? Remember, cruelty to animals is recognized as an early component of the behavior pattern of serial killers.
The parents don’t raise them right because they, in turn, were not raised right. You’d probably have to get people at least over 50 to find some which were raised correctly – and you won’t have a good certainty of it until you get to people who are 70 years old. Post World War Two, especially, we started turning our kids over to “experts” who knew better than parents…and what they started to teach the kids, in ever increasing doses, is that discipline is wrong and anything that comes to mind is worthy of being done. Of course the roots of this go back quite a ways – Dewey and his intellectual progenitor, Hegel (and going back even further, to the so-called “Enlightenment” of the 18th century).
Fixing it requires stern measures of some sort – because we have to do what, essentially, was done to us over a thousand year period as we rose from barbarism to civilization. It is said, truly, that each generation faces a barbarian invasion – from its children, if from nowhere else. If the children are not instructed in civilized behavior they simply will not learn it. And, so, very large numbers of our children are barbarians (not all, of course; even among the barbarian flood some parents have managed to stem the tide and impart some civilization to their children). It took the de-facto flogging of our people for a thousand years to teach us to be civilized and we will either forcefully re-impose it upon ourselves or after the complete collapse of our society it will be re-imposed upon us by circumstances.
This from a person who never raised a child – you and miss know it all amazona woman. I raised two sons and they are wonderful, respectful young men who now have families of their own and are raising wonderful children. I always love it when childless persons want to give advice on how someone else should raise their children. Way to go.
Ooooh, Vel, you need to cut back on those Spite and Malice pills. You”re starting to ooze.
Okey-dokey, now what has your XXXXXXXL panties in a twist? Just what did I say that, as a woman who has never borne children but who has helped rear many, makes me so dreadfully wrong?
Or is it just your natural hatefulness and antipathy toward me that makes you snap to your default position of snarling at me every time you see that I have posted?
BTW, it is “rear” children. That is, unless you are lifting them up.
So Mumsie thinks her kiddies are sooooo wunnerful. Not necessarily proof that they are, especially when we have seen Mumsie be so profoundly wrong on so many other things.
But whatever——–crime is crime, and there have to be consequences. Sorry you don’t agree with that.
velma, just because you (or anyone else for that matter) squirt out a baby it does not automatically make you an authority on rearing kids.
What Mark and the others said go with common sense, but I can see where that would confuse you and make you become so defensive.
If fertility is all that is needed to be a good parent, then why do we have so many messed-up children? Yet Velma seems to think that something that she had no control over, the ability to procreate, somehow makes her special.
She claims her sons are “respectful”. Assuming that is true, the next question is—“why”? Why are they respectful? Gee, do you think it might be because they were TAUGHT to be respectful? I notice that she didn’t bother to say whether or not she ever had to provide any negative reinforcement for any rules or expectations for these wonderful sons, but I’m betting she did.
She just tossed out some of her well-aged and rancid snot-nuggets and waddled off, without ever saying whether or not she ever had to discipline those lovely boys, whether or not either of them ever misbehaved and had to be corrected, whether or not she or her husband ever had to deal with issues that demanded strong measures to make sure the boys learned a lesson from whatever they did wrong.
Velma’s posting style is ambush—-dart in, drop a stink bomb or two, and scoot off.
“Circumstances” may not be able to reimpose “civilization” upon a society or a world order that has been destroyed by a world-wide nuclear war between “barbarians”. I think that there is a real possibility of our world order degenerating into such a hopeless state of existence. I don’t think that there is much evidence in world affairs that we are becoming more “civilized” in our relationships with each other. If there is, please cite it.
The re-imposition would be done by a new Dark Age.
This story sure is a popular blog topic…I think too many people are weighing everything on parenting. After all, how do we measure who is a good parent, and all kids have different personalities. It is difficult to tell what will work on who. Nevertheless, research shows kids are affected more by their peers than their parents; that makes it difficult for parents to do affective parenting. I would say some serious counseling/psych talk with each child, see if they can determine the source of the child’s behavior and then determine what might be best way to address it…each child might be coming from a different background with different traits. Sadly, I think it is difficult to fully eradicate this type of behavior permanently with every child.
http://www.woman4president.org
jnen
BS
But what we come down to, after all the talktalktalktalktalk and probing into this that and the other regarding how a child FEELS about certain things, is the simple and permanent fact that all the positive reinforcement in the world often has to be balanced with negative reinforcement as well.
Whether it is a swat on the behind, community service, losing a big account, getting fired, getting divorced, or any of the other things that happen when people do the wrong things, our young people are being brought up to believe that there are no consequences for doing the wrong thing.
And then when consequences occur, as they always will in one form or another, it is taken as personal, as an attack, as “hatred”, and instead of being a natural balancing effect they generate anger and resentment and even thoughts of vengeance.
This is not just about a handful of punks. It is about the need for us, as a society, to return to the natural state of consequences for bad behavior.
hey mark
of course
it goes without saying
all here were raised perfect !
and we should be modeling our lives after my fave motherly figure ama!!!
::))
Awww, the bagster tries for a funny!
And misses.
Again.
Parenting is a huge factor no doubt, and dbschmidt’s recommendation is exactly what needs to be done. Those kids need to apologize to her, get to know her as a human being, and spend the summer mowing her lawn, cleaning up around her house, etc, all at the insistence of their parents BECAUSE that is the right thing to do.
But what about our culture? To what extent does the coursening of our culture have to do with this? The music these kids listen to glorifies bad, and rude behavior and the video games they play also glorify violent and rude behavior, so in my opinion, exposure to both of these highly popular cultural mediums also plays a role.
I believe a lot of what is wrong is cause more by absent parenting that bad parenting.
Here’s a different angle: the woman was a bus monitor. What is a bus monitor’s job? Well, <a href = "http://www.paterson.k12.nj.us/staff/job-descriptions/pdfs/4416%20-%20School%20Bus%20Monitor.pdf" among other things, they are to “Assist the bus driver in maintaining good student conduct on the bus” and; “Provide written records of violations of the student code to the Supervisor of Transportation.” She sounds like a very nice lady, but not everyone is suited for every job. And obviously, she wasn’t doing hers to any level of effectiveness. Seriously, would any of the commenters here have just sat and taken the verbal abuse she took? If this happened to some little old lady at some random bus stop or something, I would be much more sympathetic. But she was the bus monitor, for crying out loud.
IMO, this incident doesn’t pass the sniff test. For one thing, it’s the driver that ultimately has control over the vehicle. So there may be some negligence there as well. Plus, not every bus gets an adult monitor (does anyone here remember a monitor on any school bus they ever rode on?), so I suspect there may have been some known behavioral issues involved. I also suspect this wasn’t a one-off kind of thing, but had been building for some time. Anyway, the lady now has over $600K to put into her dream vacation. Not too shabby.
Ill take door # 6
but CANE them like they do in Singapore.
after you follow the counts father’s rule.
this is the result of taking God, the 10 commandments, and all vestiges of restraint and civility out of American culture.
Replacing it with class warfare, radical homosexual agenda, illegal aliens selfishness and division, and no loyalty to anyone but them selves.
the CPUSA and the donk party have done a great job with help straight out of the pit of hell to wreck America…of course this centuries first Anti Christ occupying the white house certainly helping our destruction along.
Psalm 109:8
That was another method used in my upbringing that helped me learn quickly to avoid behavior that would call for it at almost any cost–the switch, and yes, I had to go cut it and switch it myself.
Yeah, db, and it’s a wonder you had time to do it, after plowing the north 40 behind horses, trimming the wicks in your oil lamps, and hand-peeling logs for your cabin.
Because we now know, after being told, that corporal punishment was a relic of Olden Tymes……
Rico,
Congratulations, you found every possible source of the problem without ever mentioning those pleasant, delightful children that actually were the problem. And in typical liberal fashion, blame is placed elsewhere. Well done. .
GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY
another homosexual predator taken off the streets.
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: SANDUSKY CONVICTED ON 45 COUNTS OF CHILD SEX ABUSE…
and we wonder why kids on a school bus act the way they do when people like these are in charge at our schools?
Now they demand to be “leaders” in the scouts….
speaking of bullies and punishment……
im with the judge on this one….
Eye for an eye, hair for hair? Judge orders Price woman to cut off daughter’s ponytail in court
Teen had helped cut hair of 3-year-old girl she met at McDonald’s
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865557954/Judge-orders-Price-woman-to-cut-off-daughters-ponytail-in-court.html
I believe this might be the first time I have been taken to task for not being sufficiently verbose, lol! Anyway, it was not my intent to repeat what has already been said. But if you want me to reiterate, I like the idea dbschmidt heard on the radio the best. It won’t stop all kids from doing stupid things, but it would certainly help. That said, my point is that (besides the parents) there appears to be at least one other individual in this story who didn’t do their job — and weirdly, that individual was subsequently richly rewarded for it. I mean come on, the lady (however nice) was in a job where her apparent level of passivity was the absolute worst characteristic a person could have. Ditto the bus driver (allegedly, lol!). Pointing that out doesn’t strike me as a particularly liberal POV. Far from it.
My other point is that there is at least some reason to believe that the kids involved were already identified as not being “pleasant, delightful children”. And that, combined with the fact that middle school aged kids are the most susceptible to unacceptable group behavior in the absence of adult supervision (i.e., exactly the group of kids involved in the incident), brings up an interesting question that I think merits additional scrutiny: if/when the parents fail, what happens then? IMO, that’s the part that doesn’t pass the sniff test. And perhaps this is where my pragmatic side comes to the fore. Some suggest corporal punishment (a “New Dark Age”, if you will). The problem is that most studies suggest that such punishment leads to more physically abusive behavior later in life. Rather, most studies show that the best (and cheapest) way to avert both juvenile delinquency and later adult delinquency is to prevent juvenile delinquency from happening in the first place. That, I admit, is a more liberal viewpoint. But it is fact-based rather than ideologically-based. See the difference?
rico it’s just more blah blah blah.
“Most studies indicate” is a tipoff to blah blah blah.
Well, corporal punishment was the rule of thumb for centuries for ill-behaved children, and we only started to see such widespread bad behavior when “most studies” decreed it to be a very very bad thing.
I believe “most studies” on the harmful effects of a swat on the beehind came along at about the same time “most studies” started to emphasize the need for “self esteem” without having to actually deserve it.
“…most studies show that the best (and cheapest) way to avert both juvenile delinquency and later adult delinquency is to prevent juvenile delinquency from happening in the first place. ”
Gee. Do ya think?
Whether or not the bus monitor was the right person for the job is irrelevant. The bus monitor could have been a 90-year-old paraplegic and that would not have excused the behavior. And the little thugs were not just misbehaving in front of someone ill-equipped to stop them—-THEY WERE ATTACKING HER .
As for your supposed “liberal” viewpoint, what does blaming the victim have to do with believing that large and powerful central government is preferable to small and restricted federal power and authority?
Or do you MEAN small-L “liberal” which could mean darned near anything.
“But it is fact-based rather than ideologically-based. See the difference?”
No, it is OPINION based. And what would political ideology have to do with how to discipline out-of-control children? You, who are so clueless about ideology, are probably the last person who should be tossing that word around.
Amazona: Well, corporal punishment was the rule of thumb for centuries for ill-behaved children, and we only started to see such widespread bad behavior when “most studies” decreed it to be a very very bad thing.
For centuries most people lived in rural environments. For centuries most mothers stayed at home. For centuries there were no modern conveniences, like washing machines, sewing machines, and other conveniences (not to mention pre-fabricated clothing you could buy off the shelf), all of which served to keep kids close to home, off city streets, and out of large peer groups. Those too are facts, and all of them suggest your POV is very narrow. The old days were certainly good for many, not so good for others, but that’s beside the point — the old days are gone, and they’re never coming back. There will never again be a time when most kids have to walk 1/4 of a mile to visit their closest neighbor. There will never be a time when most kids can count on their fingers and toes the number of people in their graduating class. And there will certainly never be a time when a kid has to write a letter to communicate with their pen pal in Sudan, or where ever — or even the predator in the next county. All of those things make a difference. How big a difference? I dunno. Let’s see what the studies indicate.
But wait, Amazona thinks studies are BS! — certainly any that don’t agree with her preconceived notions. That, my friends, is the quintessential difference between an ideologue and a pragmatist.
Let me say it again: a pragmatist changes their beliefs when reality requires it. An ideologue changes reality when their beliefs require it. I used to follow that up with the caveat that, because reality is so complex and fuzzy, most times it’s hard to tell one from the other. But Amazona seems determined to make the distinction crystal clear. You go, girl! I couldn’t have a better foil.
That’s right, rico—you just keep telling yourself I am a foil for your brilliance. And you hurt my hand when you hit it with your nose…..
Nice stroll down Memory Lane. Silly, irrelevant, but it evidently met some need of yours.
However even a cursory examination of your silliness would show that kids have been receiving corporal punishment while a man was walking on the moon, after we got cell phones and computers, etc. You tried to get away with the silly straw man of pretending that I was referring to a time long long ago, and possibly even in a galaxy far far away.
But you see I did not say, hint or imply that corporal punishment was ONLY in the past. How did you arrive at that conclusion? I merely said that it has worked for centuries. How that spun you into a weird account of walking a quarter of a mile to visit a neighbor, etc., is beyond me. But then your whole thought process is a mystery to me.
You have conjured up an elaborate justification for not committing to an ideology—-which evidently consists of a belief that ideology is bad and being perennially vacillating is a sign of mental and moral superiority. Great. If that’s what you have to do to get through the day, so be it. If you have to cram this square peg into a round hole every now and then, such as having to pretend that “ideology” has something to do with evolution or objecting to the belief that there should be consequences for actions then you just go right ahead and pound away at that, too.
You’ve got your little script, in which pretending to examine all avenues while committing to none is not weakness but is really “pragmatism”, in which you can spout nonsense cliches such as “a pragmatist changes their beliefs when reality requires it. An ideologue changes reality when their beliefs require it” with garbled syntax, in which you can dismiss any comment disagreeing with you as rigid ideology and therefore of no value, etc. You need it, you depend on it, and no one is going to nudge you away from it.
But the fact remains that you blamed the victim and downplayed the crime, and in the process told several lies, including the most recent that I “think studies are BS”.
In other words, the same old rico……..
When I was in middle school it would never, ever have occurred to me to speak that way to an adult. I was raised at the tail-end of the time when we raised kids properly (it was already breaking down heavily by the time I went to school, but it wasn’t gone) – it wouldn’t matter what the circumstances were, I just never would have done something like that BECAUSE I WOULD HAVE FEARED GRAVE CONSEQUENCES. That is what is missing – consequences.
The reason I put “flog them” as an option is because I believe that is the only way we can recover from this – and if we won’t start taking extremely stern measures against the kids then our civilization will completely collapse, a new barbarism will take hold…and then in response to that people who will swiftly grow tired of barbarism will start imposing stern measures on those who refuse to act civilized. And here’s the kicker – if we wait to that point, it will be much, much more severe than if we wisely impose it upon ourselves, now.
I don’t want the kids to wind up delinquents on the path to jail; I don’t want cruelty to become the norm…because I want a merciful society I realize that the first requirement is that people behave, in large part, in a decent manner. And how are you going to get them to do that? Certainly, speak to them; reason with them; try to instruct them…but what do you do the second or third time they’ve acted like barbarians and you’ve already spoken to them, reasoned with them and instructed them? Send them to jail? Execute them? No, of course not – but you have to do something to them and it has to be so bad that (a) they’ll never want it to happen again and (b) will serve as an object lesson to their peers.
Some years back you might recall the case of an American kid who was to be flogged in Singapore for vandalism and theft – while it caused shrieks of horror among some here in the United States the plain fact of the matter is that most of the kids arrested in Singapore for such crimes are foreigners who are likely unaware that in Singapore, they don’t take barbaric nonsense from kids. That American kid left Singapore after his flogging (which was only four strokes with a cane on his rear) and over the next few years got in to all sorts of petty legal trouble in the United States…but you note he didn’t do it in Singapore. Absolutely assure you that he’ll never so that sort of stuff in Singapore, again. But in America? He knows he’s not going to be flogged and as a rich kid lawyers can get him off from the rest of the petty – but still socially destructive – crimes.
Give each of those kids who bullied ten lashes across their back (and do it at their school, with the entire student body assembled to witness) and I’ll bet it never occurs to them to do that again…and I’ll bet that lesson sinks in real deep with the rest of the kids in that school, and all around the nation. No, children, you are not allowed to be disrespectful of your elders…and also do it for vandalism (no, children, you are not allowed to spray paint property with your idiot pseudo-gangster symbols)…and also do it for petty theft (no, children, you are not allowed to steal the property of others)…and we’ll dry up the well of juvenile barbarism right quick and at the same time raise up a generation which will carefully instruct their own children in proper behavior.
You are correct Mark – I would have never done anything like this when I was a kid because the person that I would have feared the most would have been my mother. She would have KICKED MY ASS, and I would have been mowing that ladies lawn for the entire summer, that I could have been assured of.
when I was in Jr high the men teachers would stand you against the lockers and paddle you with a frat type paddle made in our wood shop.
believe me 5 whomps with those paddles made you walk the line for the rest of the year. (not that I ever required getting hit….ahem) 🙂
My oldest son was in private school and got the paddle in while in kindergarten, he never got in trouble in school again…..
Mark, today’s parents were reared by the hippies of the 60’s, by the “if it feels good do it” mentality that rejected rules and standards as being too rigid, too confining, to alien to the natural free spirit of mankind, etc. We are seeing the third generation results of the cultural revolution of the 60’s.
Rules and standards are infinitely flexible, dependent on mood and whim. Even the Constitution is seen as nothing more than “guiding principles”. The very idea of a moral compass or societal boundaries is simply appalling. It’s a moral free-for-all in which anyone with standards is dismissed as “rigid”. There is an excuse for anything.
Lately our radio stations in Colorado have been playing a piece in which a whiny woman carries on about her “disease”. She is fat. Her “disease” is obesity. It is not a condition, it is now a “disease”—–something that just happened TO her, I guess, like MS or cancer, poor thing. There is no hint of personal responsibility, no admission that this condition is the result of decisions she made about how to live her life.
“My oldest son was in private school and got the paddle in while in kindergarten, he never got in trouble in school again….”
But then he was too tired to get in trouble in school, what with having to walk a quarter of a mile to visit a friend, walking three miles to school every day uphill both ways, having to hitch up the team to go into town with the egg money………..
Amazona,
But its even worse than that – not only did they infect the parents with absurd ideas of how to raise kids, but the raised up a host of laws, regulations and court decisions which have effectively nullified the authority of adults over kids. What parent would dare to spank a child in 2012? Come on – all that kid has to do is call child services and you’ll have local bureaucrats and the police giving you the once over in minutes…and even if you survived that scrutiny, you’d still be “known” as someone who has a problem and the cops and bureaucrats would keep harassing you forever.
Along with what else we do, we need to legally restore parental authority – what was automatically assumed in earlier times has been destroyed so the only way we can fix it is by legislating what used to be common sense. It has to be spelled out in law that the parents are the ultimate arbiters of what their kids shall and shall not do and only in extreme cases are the authorities to be permitted to intervene. This, also, points us to the heart of the problem in our society: the break down of the family.
Really, it was her own damned fault, and what’s more she got some nice cash out of the deal! She shouldn’t have taken the job, she obviously wasn’t very good at it, she didn’t pass rico’s notoriously rigid sniff test OR some definition of her job he dug up somewhere, she should have stood up for herself, and she got a lot of money. So what’s the big deal, asks those who simply refuse to take a stand on anything. “Not too shabby” opines one.
Perhaps this analysis would be called “pragmatic”.
Okay, let me add some more detail: this incident has all the earmarks of a classic case of what engineers refer to as a “catastrophic failure” in a complex system. In such a case, all of many things have to go wrong before the ultimate failure occurs. That certainly appears to be what happened in this case. Some blame the parents. Others blame the kids. Others blame society because of the parents. And yet no one, except me (albeit not very well), has grappled to even try to understand all of the factors which may have been involved. But that’s what pragmatism is all about — questioning everything, constantly accumulating more facts, and trying to put them into a cohesive logical framework. Yet I’m the rigid one? All I can say is… it must be nice being an ideologue. 🙂
It is quite nice, being an ideologue. Of course, it means taking the time and expending the energy to research and understand the ideologies of the two basic political systems vying for power in the United States today and having the integrity and backbone to pick one, and be ready and willing to explain it and defend it.
And absolutely NONE of this has the slightest possible relationship to the discussion of what to do about young people who act in inhumane and cruel ways to others.
I am completely baffled by your insistence on trying to conflate political ideology (which you clearly do not understand, on either side) and cultural events. All I can come up with is that you are genuinely so befuddled that you simply do not grasp the simple fact that they are not one and the same.
While you preen about your self-described intellectual journey of “….questioning everything, constantly accumulating more facts, and trying to put them into a cohesive logical framework…” you somehow end up with a result that is anything BUT logical and which appears to lack any kind of “framework” at all. Case in point: “the best (and cheapest) way to avert both juvenile delinquency and later adult delinquency is to prevent juvenile delinquency from happening in the first place” Evidently this is what passes for cohesive and logical analysis, at least to you. I have a feeling that most people reading this gobbeldygook would respond, as I did—“Gee—-do ya think?”
I’m thinking of slightly rephrasing this gem and passing it on to the firefighters up near Fort Collins: “The best (and cheapest) way to avert having to fight forest fires is to prevent forest fires from happening in the first place.”
But if you are really trying, in your tortured and convoluted way, to talk about avoiding the very occurrence of juvenile delinquency, I suggest, as have others, that a full awareness of severe consequences for this kind of behavior is much more effective than the psychobabble of whatever “most studies suggest”.
You might stop patting yourself on the back for a moment to consider that no, you are NOT the only who “….has grappled to even try to understand all of the factors which may have been involved…” You just expounded on them in a very convoluted and pseudo-intellectual way.
The thread is not how did these kids come to act like monsters but what to do with them now that they have. Anyone can rattle on with this theory or that theory about how they got that way but it is all speculation. No one knows anything about their family backgrounds, their upbringing, the way their parents tried to teach them to relate to other people, or anything at all. And at this point it really doesn’t matter because they did what they did.
And what they did is not the fault of the target of their abuse.
What you did, in your first post, was to blame the victim and dismiss at least some of the horror of the attack by blithely pointing out that she got enough money for a nice vacation. Everything since then has been tap-dancing around those facts.
Amazona: It is quite nice, being an ideologue. Of course, it means taking the time and expending the energy to research and understand the ideologies of the two basic political systems vying for power in the United States today and having the integrity and backbone to pick one, and be ready and willing to explain it and defend it.
Boy, what a hard worker you are! Wow, I never realized how hard it was to swallow someone else’s POV and try to make it your own rather than to, you know, forge your own. Silly me. I had guessed the latter route required more integrity and backbone. Gosh, I guess I’ll try to get on the straight and narrow forthwith!
Nah, just kidding. I will never do that.
I’m thinking of slightly rephrasing this gem and passing it on to the firefighters up near Fort Collins: “The best (and cheapest) way to avert having to fight forest fires is to prevent forest fires from happening in the first place.”
You give it a shot, A. I’m guessing they’ll agree in a very big way. That’s not to say they’ll all be on exactly the same page as to what “the studies show”, but I’m quite sure they (the higher ups at least) will have read the studies and will therefore at least constrict the argument as to how prevention could most effectively happen, and for cheaper than no prevention at all. Because there very definitely IS a logical framework. That’s true of fighting juvenile delinquency, too. To think the opposite is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Only the most desperate of ideologues could think that.
Cool, rico. So you’re “forging your own” blueprint for governing the United States? How’s that working for you? It sure helps explain why you think the Constitution isn’t really “rigid” but is infinitely flexible, nothing more than a few “guiding principles”. It would be a lot harder to “forge your own” ideology, which is after all the plan for governance, if you actually have to follow any rules.
Yes, you feel quite smug and superior because you flit from idea to idea, never committing to any because after all you need to remain unfettered by “ideology” so you can go with the flow, spin on a dime, and catch the next wave.
And gee, what a great way to govern a nation! Or a state, or a city, or even a company! Don’t have any rules, just have a few “guiding principles” that can change at any old time.
And you can justify your inability to make a decision, make a commitment, actually take a position, because after all you are NOT just dithering, NOT just too spineless to take a stand, but are really exhibiting vastly superior intellectual powers and assembling data, analyzing data, creating frameworks for your data, reviewing data, collating data, factoring in new data, fussing over whether you have enough data, and issuing pompous pronouncements on how things ought to be.
The whole comment on your “…“the best (and cheapest) way to avert both juvenile delinquency and later adult delinquency is to prevent juvenile delinquency from happening in the first place” ” thing was an observation that you seemed to be competing for the title of Captain Obvious.
The fact that you felt the need to lecture on the obvious was one thing, but the fact that you truly seem to believe that only you have the intellectual capacity to see the obvious is really funny.
What you don’t get, being so wrapped up in your own ego and all, is that what you strain over, and laboriously produce for the admiration of all, was really so obvious that everyone else got it in a flash and moved on. Like the reference to not having fires start, it is such a basic fact that most people don’t find the need to expound upon it.
It’s not that you labored and sweated and strained to produce an actual way to prevent juvenile delinquency—that at least would have indicated some level of thought. No, you just brought forth the brilliant notion that we should not let it happen, and then sat back and waited to be admired for this nugget of genius. Like so many of your pompous proclamations, the first response was just DUH! Do ya think?
And then you labor some more to redefine your dithering as a virtue. Look at me! Look at me! I’m PRAGMATIC!
Most of us have known people like you. We need to paint a room, and most of us quickly evaluate the job and get to work, but the rico in the bunch is too busy analyzing, researching the history of paint, evaluating room temperature and humidity, evaluating the various kinds of paint available, checking into “studies” on paint, making flow charts for how to organize the work, making lists of materials that might possibly be needed, doing elaborate comparisons of paint vs wallpaper, and feeling oh so superior because of his “pragmatic” approach to the project.
In the meantime, everyone else has done the work and gone out for a beer, and rico is alone but patting himself on the back for his vast intellectual superiority, convinced in his own mind that not one of the others knew what they needed to know to get the job done. Silly rigid ideologues, they just did what they were told was the best way to paint a room.
And of course none of them thought that all the posturing and self-congratulatory back-patting over the vast amount of brain work put in by rico was really just a way to excuse not doing a damned thing.
Nah.
what does the study say about this???
Amazona,
I just finished reading Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. You’ll love it. According to Jonah;
Or this;
Linking to profanity is the same as posting profanity. Not allowed. //Moderator
Sorry. My bad. Forgot about the G rating here.
actually ama
found some research and a study
commissioned by a superpac
that said my joke about your perceptual perfection was quite funny
so there….
::))
Oh. It was a joke?
No, a joke is when you make someone laugh.
A joke is SUPPOSED to be when you make someone laugh.
But now that sour surly hatemongers like Bill Maher are excused because they are supposedly “comedians”—-in spite of being savagely unfunny—–it looks like “joke” might be yet another word the Left is redefining.
It’s easier when they have a built-in group of mindless lemmings who laugh hysterically every time the F-bomb is dropped or a vicious comment is made about a conservative. They are told they should find these things funny, they obediently hoot and howl with glee when they hear them, and the mutation of definitions is on the march.