I’ve just read an article in Fox News which has left me both speechless and in a fury:
A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a “patriotic” stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.
It further notes:
Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.
Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of “a war scene.”
This sort of treatment of a young lad for simply being a young lad is incredibly destructive. You can’t repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing ‘paratrooper’ by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can’t stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars – transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.
If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you’d taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse… rape of the soul is forever.
I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo”. I’m sure these morons would have loved me.
At one point we had a long running series of water gun ‘assassinations’ in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the “Nazi’s” and another were “Codename Jericho” and “Operation Bluelight” from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I’d just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both ‘sides’ were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!
We finally caught a ‘double agent’ and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The ‘we’ being all of us zombies who’d already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already ‘dead’ weren’t allowed to take out anyone else.
Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.
These politically correct fruitcakes in New Jersey would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.
This also makes me seethe. The schoolteachers who, no doubt for their own deluded ideological reasons, try to suppress the exhuberance of young boys like this are in fact storing up trouble for the long run.
The desire to be a hero, to vanquish the “bad guys” is in fact a healthy thing and given the proper moral guidance, a redeeming force.
By the way, on a related subject, I wonder how schools in the US and Britain now treat students who express an interest in a military career? When I was a schoolkid about 22 years ago I desperately wanted to follow my dad into the RAF but eventually could not do so for health reasons. I never got the impression from my teachers that such a desire was wrong. I wonder if that has changed as the Guardianistas have strengthened their grip on the schooling system.
Yet another attack on a normal, healthy young male by persons who have no understanding how a normal, healthy young male thinks. I drew elaborate Civil War battles and pictures of guns and muscle cars on my bookcovers. That is what boys do because that is what boys find interesting.
This is one of the myriad reasons that no child of mine will ever, ever attend a public school. Ever.
Dale, Johnathan,
Does this mean that Samizdatistas will now start arguing for women, and certainly working mothers, to be liberated from the workplace and allowed back into the home, where nature intended?
Some women and men may chose to stay at home for some years to educate their kids. Others will chose to make lots of money and pay for a private school. Others will do consulting out of their homes and handle things that way. I don’t see anything about it that is specific to women. Fathers make good teachers too.
No, you’re using a strawman argument. What they’re advocating is that schools should adopt a hands-off approach, rather than preach about what they think should be the PC attitude to adopt. Let the children figure it out on their own.
Argh! That reply was to guessedworker, not Dale!
For anyone who might have had any doubts about the point of the PC movement, this is as clear an example of what it is really about as anything I’ve seen. It is thought control, nothing more, nothing less.
The military is violent, therefore wrong. Guns are violent, therefore wrong. All violence is the same, and all violence is wrong. There is no self defense, there are no just wars, nothing is ever worth fighting for, everything is open to negotiation.
None of this applies to any protected class, of course. But boys, as everybody knows, don’t need their rights protected. They might grow up to be oppressors, even soldiers. Can’t have that sort of thing, you know.
Veryretired; very well put… that’s about as concise and apt a summary of PC thinking as I’ve ever seen.
I used to get crap for my drawings, from 6th grade all the way to my senior year in high school. Luckily, the guidance staff and administrators were not iditos like the people who referred me to see them, so it never became too much of a problem.
Lots of laughs in the office, though.
Don’t worry, veryretired, our current generation of youths is getting a grade A education in the use of force, courtesy of those wonderful violent computer games. (turns out they are good for something after all – countering wussifucation)
A stick figure ?
There should be a deal somewhere. For each kid suspended for drawing a violent sketch, they suspend a teacher who saw ‘Bowling for Columbine’.
Let them concentrate on absurd irrelevancies, say I. Better they spend time and effort on the content of children’s drawings–which might well be counterproductive–than more effective forms of behaviour-control.
My brother got to draw all the grotesquely violent stick-figure battles he wanted as a kid. More than enough for me to find it disturbing. It didn’t stop him becoming a genuine sandal-wearing, folk-club-attending anti-globaliser who refuses as a matter of conscience to work for private organisations and thinks Tony Blair is a handmaid of capitalism.
Why do I get the feeling that if he were caught drawing Taliban stick-figures killing U.S. troops, he would have been given an award?
Computer games? Hmmmm…
*thinks about buying Max Payne 2*
Guessedworker asks Dale and Jonathan:
“Does this mean that Samizdatistas will now start arguing for women, and certainly working mothers, to be liberated from the workplace and allowed back into the home, where nature intended?”
My answer: most ‘libertarians’ in Samizdatista are so clueless about evolutionary biology that they probably consider that gays are on average ‘just as good’ at rearing children as the kids’ biological parents. Many of them (at least the neocons) seem to believe that the best place for a woman is in the military, ‘fighting for the cause’ in Iraq.
Guessedworker, these guys are totally out of their depth on these issues. Anyone who is ‘speechless’ at a boy being suspended from school for 14 days on grounds of excessive ‘masculinity’ but quite indifferent when it comes to mothers deserting their children and decorating the scenery in Iraq cannot be taken very seriously.
Some of us out here don’t give a damn about a teleology of what “nature intended”, any more than we care about the “will of God” of theocratic fundamentalists, or the historical process of the Marxists. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t govern my life (or seek to govern others’ lives) according the instincts encoded by the immediate survival needs of an isolated nomadic band 100,000 years ago.
Of course we have to operate within the limitations imposed on us by the natural world, but as shoes and ships and sealing-wax prove, we can change a lot that’s in nature. What matters is whether individuals are able to make the arrangements with nature that are most satisfactory to themselves.
Guy,
Societies who don’t give a damn about what ‘nature intended’ tend to die out and be replaced by those that do. Witness the demographic disaster of Western societies and the demographic success of Islam.
The point is that a woman’s biological function is to reproduce the species and look after her children, normally aided by a male who ‘brings home the bacon’. The fact that that’s what the Bible says is not relevant. What is relevant is that Darwin and co said so — and that it is common sense.
How boring it is to repeat platitudes like this. But clearly, at Samizdata one has to start at Sociobiology 101.
Charles Copeland: You really have no understanding of the real world. If millions and millions of women are acting out of their ‘evolved’ role by not just being baby factories who greet ‘their man’ at the door when they return from hunting/working… you are suggesting somehow this means we don’t understand evolutionary biology. Might I suggest as an alternative explanation what it really means is that your theory has been falsified and is in fact risible.
These are ‘men’ according to Charles, who clearly does not have very good eye sights nor much appreciation for evidence with contradicts his atavistic thesis. Well if those are men, then I suppose I must be gay.
For anyone who wants to express an opinion to the school principal, his email address is showard@tfs.k12.nj.us I can’t think of a better way to demoralise a young boy than to teach him his masculine drive to action is abnormal. These action-oriented instincts are what we rely on to protect us and trying to iron them out is perverted and chilling. It would be interesting to know which sex the teacher who reported him is.
It’s nice to see that Charles and Guessedworker have been off again into the magic woods to consort with the nymphs and fairy folk and pick up their latest set of orders from Mother Nature. Its nice that she so readily appraises you of her ‘intentions’. Did she ask you to collect her dry cleaning from Father Christmas for her as well?
Charles Copeland and Guessworker: Piss off to your caves or evolve.
Ms Cronin writes:
“Charles Copeland and Guessedworker: Piss off to your caves or evolve.”
The funny thing is, I think we’d find Dale Amon in those caves before us — I mean, you can’t repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing ‘paratrooper’ by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can’t stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars – transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.
If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you’d taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse… rape of the soul is forever.
I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo”. I’m sure these morons would have loved me.
Funny, I’ve a feeling I read that somewhere before.
Honest, Guessedworker, Dale and myself — are we perhaps monozygotic triplets – at least when it comes to ‘boys will be boys’?
Oh, I forgot to add that at one point we had a long running series of water gun ‘assassinations’ in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the “Nazi’s” and another were “Codename Jericho” and “Operation Bluelight” from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I’d just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both ‘sides’ were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!
We finally caught a ‘double agent’ and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The ‘we’ being all of us zombies who’d already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already ‘dead’ weren’t allowed to take out anyone else.
Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.
These politically correct fruitcakes such as Adriana Cronin and Perry de Havilland at least when it comes to the subject of women in the military would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.
Geddit? Geddit?
By the way,
Thanks Perry for those really gruesome pics of women on the front line! Boy, was that exciting! The blood! The gore! The mangled limbs! The body parts — just like the picture in that ‘Sbarro’ exhibition the Palestinians organised last year. Here a hand, there a leg, here a head, there a torso.
An article you might like to read: – Hoon warned that women aren’t tough enough for the front line .
Get real about war.
As the lyrics in “Top Gun” say: “Girls play too”.
Since I was talking about how my high school buddies did things that would have pissed off the PC, I didn’t bother with other stories.
In our years between about 8-14, my much elder sister always visited with her kids for a month in the summer. This coincided nicely with the neighborhood baseball season. There were a *lot* of kids in our old small town neighborhood. And guess what? When it came to chosing up sides, there was always a bidding war to see who got Neil, Debbie and myself because we were the best players on the block. No one thought it fair if myself and my relations were all on the same side because we’d simply walk over the other team. Debbie was simply one of the best ballplayers and no one cared that she was a girl. We cared about winning so we’d have neighborhood bragging rights for the day.
Girls will simply do whatever they can do and want to do. It is nobodies business to tell them what they will or must do. Sorry Mr Copeland. You can’t force them out of their shoes and into the nursery at gunpoint.
I hope you find a woman who suits your particular fantasy world. You certainly won’t find me or many of the others here in competition with you. Those demure, naive, old-fashioned hyper-dependant types bore me silly. No, more than that. They send me running for the exit as fast as my legs will carry me.
That was ‘was’ not “wasn’t”. I corrected my text here.
I’m sure Adriana and Perry would both have been part of my circle of friends in high school, right there with us when we turned out our own underground Mad Magazine like newspaper with the used mimeo we bought for $20; and I’m quite sure Adriana would have been armed with a very large water pistol during the corridor ‘wars’ 😉
I would also suspect she’d have been quite good in our neighborhood wide hunter-killer team games which spawned at least one specops member.
Just because boys and girls are somewhat more likely to be one way than another at play doesn’t mean that all are or need to be forced to be. Just let people be what *they* want to be.
Man, I thought this was a libertarian blog. You people are conservatives. You’ve already f’ed up the Republican party, please don’t mess with the libertarians.
Charles,
Anyone who prattles on about nature’s ‘intentions’ as you do clearly hasn’t the first beginning of understanding about Darwin at all. I don’t know what books you read but you seem not to understand any of them very well.
At what point in evolution does ‘random mutation’ become a normative ‘intention’?
Paul, very briefly (I must now dash back to my Commission office to continue building the Europe of tomorrow):
The term ‘Nature’s intention’ is of course just an ironic turn of phrase. Or do you really think I haven’t read Dawkin’s classic ‘The Blind Watchmaker’? Indeed, ever since Adam Smith and Mandeville most reasonably well informed people have understood the distinction between individual ‘intentions’ and the social consequences of behaviour.
It pays to brush up your ‘methodological individualism’
Cheers,
Charles
Yes, dude, it is. We just have a few persons who hang out here but don’t seem to recognize:
“Freedom is for everyone” – Russell Means
So it really doesn’t matter diddly squat what Mr Copeland believes or doesn’t believe. The gals can just give him the finger and go about doing whatever they *CHOSE* to do. And if it were a libertarian society we were in, and if he tried to go beyond asking them *nicely* to agree with him, he’d just get himself shot.
A very large number of libertarian ladies are armed to the teeth. And they damn well know how to use them.
So at the end of the day, this is just a diversion. In our world Mr Copeland would be living out in a small and dirt poor ‘village’ where those of his beliefs bought property and got together with what few number of women would put up with it.
I suspect Darwin would weed them out. Female mate selection is a very important part of the equation. I think he fell off the end of the curve about 4 or 5 decades ago.
Charles,
“The term ‘Nature’s intention’ is of course just an ironic turn of phrase.”
I hadn’t noticed any ‘irony’ in the various ravings from you or your chum Guessedworker. Perhaps what you meant to say was “Yes Paul, you’re absolutely right, you’ve caught me bang to rights talking out of my arse, I’ll try and do better next time.”
I doubt that Guessedworker will cave in on this point as readily as you however, he is forever telling us what nature’s ‘intentions’ and at the same time demanding that his portentious mythologising be taken seriously.
I also wonder how a man who proffers the opinion that:
“The point is that a woman’s biological function is to reproduce the species and look after her children”
is in a position to give anyone lessons on methodological individualism.
Until you and your boneheaded friend learn that no amount of scientific analysis of the natural world will tell you how humans _ought_ to behave will you come anywhere near offering a coherent argument.
Excellent post, Dale.
Imagine the horror a pre-teen Kevin Connors would cause if time-transported to the present day. Along with things like internal combustion engines and architectural structures, I used to like to draw exploded and cut-away views of various fully automatic weapons.
Paul,
Can’t you distinguish between facts, values, and instumental reason? Surely you’ve heard of Hume’s fork. Of course you have — but you’re so passionately libertarian that you’ve forgotten a bit.
All I’m saying is that if you WANT a society to survive, you have to ensure that women reproduce. Perhaps it is better that they shouldn’t and that society should end up with zero members. After all, whether society should or should not survive is a value judgment.
Perhaps all women should stop having children and focus on self-actualisation, like Ms Cronin and co.
Or perhaps we can eventually do it all Brave New World style, and set up the Hatcheries. Remember? Soma tablets? That dirty word, mother?
I’m not awfully good at that ‘should’ stuff – for me, it’s just a gut feeling (like my gut feeling that a libertarian society is infinitely preferable to an egalitarian one, but that if you have to have a dose of sexual repression for that libertarian society to survive, I’ll fire ahead and repress. Shame, guilt, remorse, scarlet letters on adultresses — gimme the lot, if it has to be, it has to be).
But at least with you one can almost have something like a rational argument (occasionally).
Cheers,
Charles
P.S. I presume you’re beyond the ‘objectivism’ phase …
Atlas mugged?
The more stories like this appear, the more people will just pull their kids from public schools, and the sooner the whole stinking pile will collapse: teachers unions, bureaucracy, PC instruction, and all.
The largest school district in the United States is over 2 million kids in number. They’re called “home-scholars”, and already their influence on our society is becoming painfully apparent.
They’re smart, educated, conservative and have a built-in bullshit detector when it comes to liberal AND conservative statism.
I’m pleased to say that we’re raising three of them.
Hello Charles,
You have the unfair advantage of being a trained psychologist, so go easy on these guys. Aside from Paul, possibly, they “actively” will not grasp the sense in which they are the prisoners of cultural fashion. If you try to force the issue it will be ignored or denied or worse. Witness Adriana’s unfortunate use of language and Perry’s really pointless pictures.
The plain, unavoidable fact is that it’s a deep personal affront for people to hear that they are not masters of their own intellectual universe. They will NOT question their more culturally-rooted notions because there must be no hint of shallowness and certainly no misguidedness. In any case, these notions connect them to the wider world. They are sociological coinage. They confer modernity, prestige, smartness.
I really don’t see an answer to it, Charles. It’s probably no better to bang on from a positive angle about thinkers who work from the ground up … making mistakes, corrections, but are fundamentally too rebellious or too indominitable to follow herd ways. (Darwin is the archetype. But the same qualities informed “late” Rothbard, perhaps and a very few politicians like Churchill, Thatcher). I don’t think Perry and Co will get it because they think they are the finished human article, needing only the liberating medium of a politically-driven personal sovereignty.
But, anyway, I certainly got a straight answer to my original question, didn’t I?
Women (and libertarians) should have only minimal influence in the education and extra-curricular activities of boys. Homosexuals should not be involved at all.
Re: libertarian ladies armed to the teeth who know how to use those guns ….
count this 52 year old mother / wife of 30 years among them, along with the female military cadets I teach who will be commissioned officers shortly. Talk with me about what war is like after you’ve served alongside some of our recent women graduates, Charles.
Yours from one of the US military academies —
Not Buying It (and Also Trained in a Fair Amount of Psychology Too)
Whether or not women want to reproduce(and how many children) should be up to them, not the government. I’ve seen firsthand what government intervention in that area did, and I’m still laughing over the results(unintended consequences indeed!)…
The point is, if a society wants to go the route of full female empowerment, that is its own choice. If they die out because of their own policies, that is their choice too.
Freedom to live as one wishes includes the freedom to make silly mistakes and maybe die from them. Can people handle the responsibility? I have my doubts.
From a policy argument viewpoint, perhaps having a fully empowered(and educated!) female population isn’t going to encourage even constant population; in all likelihood, there would be negative growth, expecially if immigration is discounted. So that’s a bad idea. What’s the point of having a society you want if all it’s gonna do is to die out in a few generations?
On the other hand, artificial womb technology can solve the problem quite easily… Take note that there would be consequences of THIS too! Perhaps not to the extent of Brave New World, but possibly a certain social bias between the canister born and the naturals(shades of the clans from Battletech comes to mind)…
While I object to another thread being hijacked by the proponents of socio-biological determinism, better known as “drivel”, it is necessary to point out the egregious error being asserted as “evolutionary”.
Evolution did not end somewhere in the distant past, fixing everyone in their biological/sexual roles for all time. Evolution is an ongoing process, and the choices being made by men and women today will succeed or fail as the process rewards some strategies and penalizes others.
The movement of women into roles that are non-traditional is an evolutionary strategy. The lower birthrate and higher investment per child of develped countries is a strategy. The employment of women as brains, instead of wombs, is a strategy.
For those whose view of the world is locked up, these ideas are threatening and perverse. For those who value human life as an unlimited set of potentials, regardless of sex, these possibilities are exciting and energizing.
As the husband of a very intelligient woman, and mother of three, and the father of a very intelligient, and determined, daughter of 13 who wants to be a scientist, the proposition that all women are meant to be is some type of “Stepford Wife” is grotesque.
It would be best, if one does not even understand the ongoing nature of the evolutionary process, not to make arguments based on evolution. It would be very smart, especially, not to make those arguments face to face with some of the very independent, intelligient women I have met. The consequences would probably require corrective surgery, and the purchase of a truss.
I’d say lowered birthrates and higher child investment is a consequence, not a strategy, of having educated females. Simply observe, which came first?
But that’s a good thing, actually. The only fear is that the population doesn’t level off eventually, and instead declines steadily to… nothing?
Nah… couldn’t happen, could it? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
But I do know my country’s rulers are worried the smart people are being out-reproduced by the ‘dumb’ people… And the ‘dumb’ people don’t seem to be getting brighter…
Look at it from a global perspective, and you might be terrified when you consider that Islamic societies are far outbreeding Western style ones. In fact, a few more decades, and we might just see France as an Islamic state… Sucks to be a libertarian in France by that time, I guess.
This worrying about a lowered birthrate is a pathetic flip-flop on the old “Population Bomb” scare of the past. Sort of like global warming/the coming ice age flip-flop – something for everyone.
There are so many other things coming down the pike that will affect the equation (for both issues) that straight-line extrapolation is a fallacy. For example: extended life span, including extended fertility span, will allow a family to make a pile of money, and *then* raise kids the more intelligent way, with enought cash on hand (and I speak from experience (negative, that is) that having money while raising kids is intelligent – if I had more money, and better health, I would love to raise more kids than the 2 I have).
The singularity is coming – all the old constraints are toast.
Yeah, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the future if we get outbreeded by radicals(especially Islam), who don’t seem to be secularising. And population counts(when voting).
And those dirt poor savages, who happen to be the majority? They’ll vote to oppress the minorities. Charles’ point about Islam’s demographic success and Western demographic failure is a harbinger of the future. Having seen what happened(is happening) in Malaysia, I dread the outcome.
Or maybe I’m just too pessimistic.
Wobby: It is an pessimistic outcome but I don’t think you have the right scenario. Think instead of a vast radical horde of humanity that has been intentionally ‘educated’ into ignorance and superstition.
On the otherside you have a smaller, wealthy, educated, creative population with technological and industrial capabilities beyond even our current imaginings.
With those dynamics you will get a war that will echo down the corridors of time for thousands of years to come. Billions will die. Mostly them, but quite a lot of ‘us’ as well.
If religious ideology becomes a serious threat to the very existence of our Greco-Roman culture, the whole culture of the West will evolve to meet the threat. We might not like what it becomes to do so, but if it becomes evolve or die, the people of the next century will evolve. And they will defeat the threat. Mere ignorant numbers can wreck the havoc of a locust plague, but they are not enough to defeat a modern society.
It’s no matter of “God is on our side” (although that religious meme may well be forced back upon us: in two hundred years we might again have something like a Papal ruler or a Council of Religious Elders. Ideologies beget counter ideologies), it is just a matter that we, as a technological society will be much more efficient and calculating about killing. This is neither a good nor a healthy thing for what our culture will become afterwards, so I very much hope we find a different track through the next century. If we are successful in Iraq in this first decade of the century, we may save several billion lives in the last.
I wish it was that simple. I see it more as tiny pockets of resistance surrounded by hordes of ignorant folks. After all, immigration and reverse assimilation can be particularly effective in subverting entire nations. Isn’t that what some people are claiming to be happening in GB and France now, as the Islamic agenda slowly takes hold?
Say… that gives us all the more impetus to go into space… It’s harder for them to follow us up out there!