The Weekend of Foolish Attention
DATELINE: Saturday, April 16, 2022
The Kids Are Definitely Not Alright
In the seventies, we were idiots. Our parents told us to go outside and not come back until dark. I have a sinking suspicion that, in the beginnings of parental paranoia of kids being abducted back then that my mother secretly hoped I’d get kidnapped for at least a couple of days a week just to give her a break. We were scared of our teachers a little bit. Routinely, as I was a monumental ass-pain for them, I was paddled with big wooden boards and frequently suspended. I was bullied (as were all kids) and through that we learned how to navigate the politics of popularity and the realities of human nature.
Sure, there were some kids who were borderline criminals in training but I can’t recall a single kid who was so nihilistic and savage as to even genuinely think about assaulting a teacher.
Jump cut to forty years later and, wow, what a difference.
Staffers said they’ve been sworn at, called names, punched, slapped, kicked, pushed, shoved, pinched, tripped, head butted, shaken, bitten and spit on.
Students have pulled staffers’ hair out, scratched them until they have bled, kicked them in the groin, and hit them with backpacks and classroom objects, according to the survey.
Students throw rocks, shoes, food, furniture, computers and hand sanitizer bottles at them, the survey said.
Employees have tumbled to the ground and suffered dislocated joints, broken bones, torn muscles and concussions, often in the midst of breaking up fights, according to the survey.
One staffer reported being stabbed with a pencil by a first-grader.
There are a million theories as to how the children of America became such feral creatures. Smartphones in the hands of people whose brains aren’t even close to being fully developed. Social media (accessed by these phones). Helicopter parenting. Absentee parenting. Teacher’s unions. The unequal funding of America’s public schools.
All are likely contributors but for my money, I’m laying odds on the shift from teachers and parents being in alliance to when the relationship shifted to adversaries. The first ten minutes of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy lays it out nicely. The college educated, upwardly mobile couples delayed having children for … reasons. The toothless morons living in trailers, working blue collar jobs, and fucking for recreation spawned masses of unwashed children. At some point, in the non-fictional satire, the highly educated teachers took a look at the parents and decided that the parents were just really bad at parenting.
Teachers lost respect for parents so parents became antagonistic to school in general. I saw the tipping point of this when I taught middle school in the 90s. The more teachers lectured parents on the right and correct ways to raise kids, the more adversarial the parents became. With the teachers and parents battling it out over grades or punishments, the kids were left to sort it all out on their own like the children of bitterly divorcing assholes more concerned with their piece of the alimonial pie than the effect the fighting may have on their wards.
The results are in, gang. It is not a pretty Bob Ross painting.
The Students Can’t Even Tie Their Freaking Shoes
She expected them to show up behind where they should be in academic categories such as reading. But what she hadn’t counted on was that her children would prove unable to do things such as cutting along a dotted line with scissors. Or squeeze a glue bottle to release an appropriately sized dot. Or simply twist a plastic cap off and on.
Chimps are more prepared for the workforce than these kids. Holy Shit! They’ll definitely be ready to TikTok in a few years but will be shoeless and covered in their own shit. No wonder that …
The Students Have Lost Their Minds
Police said the teen had gone to the teacher’s classroom at Eldorado High School on Thursday and became violent.
“[He] began punching the victim and strangled her until she lost consciousness,” police said in a statement.
The Parents Aren’t Substantially Better
A flight attendant tried to help the passenger up after she fell in the aisle, to which she responded by threatening to hurt the flight attendant, pushing them aside and even trying to open the cabin door. Two flight attendants tried to restrain her, but she kept hitting one of them over the head. After the passenger was put in flex cuffs, it still wasn’t over as she continued to head-butt, spit, bite and kick crew members and other passengers. The passenger was arrested when the plane landed in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A buddy of mine and I were hanging out after a delicious breakfast the other, yapping about life. He asked me if I ever thought about going back into teaching.
“Not if I was starving to death.”
Speaking of How Completely Screwy Things Are
Read this:
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
Jonathon Haidt is a smart cookie (and certainly smarter than I am). His connecting of the fable of the Tower of Babel with our current inability to communicate with one another is rather brilliant and worth your time. So read it. I know it’s easier to watch a teenager’s YouTube’s about how he pranked his eighty-eight-year-old grandma but Dianne Feinstein won’t remember anyway.
Elon-gated Social Media?
Oh, Elon. You edge-case troll.
You have issues with the Twitter Admins and their seemingly arbitrary moderation of their private platform. You buy up enough shares to get on their board but they aren’t so enamored of your celebrity-power to acquiesce to your need to control all things in your gaze. You quit the board and offer them $43 billion that you don’t have to buy the whole thing.
Of course the Rage Profiteers on the Left of the World pissed themselves into a froth.
My favorite billionaire, Mark Cuban suggested an excellent idea for the next round of Tweetscape: “Want to see the whole world lose their shit? Get Peter Thiel to partner with Elon and raise the bid for Twitter.”
Yes, Ms. Cullors. Laws Against Theft Are Absolutely Triggering to Thieves
Patrisse Cullors says America’s laws around philanthropies are unsafe and triggering. I have to at least admire her giant P.T. Barnum-sized lady-balls. Using the very language of the Olympiad of Victim Status to evade financial scrutiny is some serious chicanery.
“It is such a trip now to hear the term ‘[IRS Form] 990.’ I'm, like, ugh. It’s, like, triggering,” said the BLM-founder during a talk last week. “This doesn’t seem safe for us, this 990 structure—this nonprofit system structure. This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with.”
With Democrats running from police reform like teachers escaping homeroom and the concept of defunding the police becoming so deeply unpopular as to have the moderate Left screaming about the heightened crime rather than police brutality, has there ever been a Civil Rights movement so quickly disgraced?
Great ideas poorly executed. We might get some police reform by the time I’m in a shallow grave in the desert but I’m not holding my breath.
The Trouble with Your Performative Empathy
We borrow from the tragedy of others to make our empty days feel purposeful and high-stakes. We are emotional parasites. — James Dawes
Empathy is the ability to feel and imagine another person’s emotions and thoughts. Empathy gives meaning to our lives and our relationships. It plays a crucial role to bring people together. It is a vital ingredient to build intimacy in our relationships.
On the other hand, empathy can often lead to truly negative outcomes.
Empathy-based guilt can show up as survivor guilt, in which the person believes their happiness and success has come at the cost of unhappiness and failures of others. Since they falsely believe they are the cause of others’ distress, they also create false beliefs in their minds that they can relieve their suffering. This condition is pathological altruism. Pathological altruism is "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm."
Extending empathy to abstract strangers is a particular challenge for the human mind. Originally described by the Stoics thousands of years ago, the concept of “oikeiōsis” describes how our empathy and affinity for others declines by proximity to our lives. Imagine a series of rings: in the bullseye there’s the self, the innermost ring represents one’s family, the next ring one’s friends, the next one’s neighbors, then one’s tribe or community, then one’s country, and so on.
The problem comes when bad actors hijack these “circles of empathy” to try and sway our behaviors and beliefs. Our natural empathy for those closer and more similar to us can be harnessed to provoke antipathy towards those who are not.
In one study, undergraduates were told about a fellow student in the next room, who was in the running for a cash prize in a mathematics contest against another competitor. The undergraduates were given the opportunity to force that competitor to eat distracting hot sauce before the contest. When empathy for the student was ratcheted up, by emphasizing she was struggling financially, people were more likely to give a greater dose of hot sauce to her innocent opponent.
Politicians and activists on both sides of the spectrum often play to the idea of the Other, an Us vs Them meme, deploying empathy and identifiable victims to make a political case. It underpins some social media campaigns to “cancel” people, allows immigrants to be demonized, and can even stoke hatred and violence against apparent outsiders.
Hey!
Have a phenomenal weekend. Find at least five different things that make you laugh and laugh until it makes the woman in front of in line for condoms uncomfortable.