The popularity of movies like The Hunger Games, and the Korean series Squid Games, I think tell us something.
My oldest son quit college and went into the military. At his graduation from basic he told us how disappointed he was that the challenges were not hard enough... that they had dumbed down the requirements for mental and physical challenges to accommodate overweight, poorly educated and female recruits.
I believe there is a psychological need, probably with some evolutionary biology explanation, for people... especially young people... to face some danger in their lives in order to feel alive.
Historically life itself was more dangerous. Just working for a living one would face risks of harm or death. During school we all got picked on and there were more fist fights.
But here comes the matriarchy. No more bullying. No more fighting. Everyone gets a trophy. Everyone gets an A on their paper. Empathy is delivered in buckets... except, ironically, to those that actually face the risks of harm and death.
I think we are seeing a psychological breakdown of society being too mothered. I think this is all a result of The Great Feminization.
I really worry about AI making this worse. People without struggle and threat as part of a productive system will seek it in other pathways that will be destructive to the system.
The 9-11 Islamist were part of a Saudi cult that developed from the children of oil-rich families. They were shipped to Western universities to get a fine education and then came back to their home country that lacked an economy to provide them challenging work. So, other than mothering, automation combined with over-educating is another catalyst to this breakdown.
I believe that the Romans were brilliant until they were not. The gladiator games were an outlet for people to at least mentally participate in life-and-death struggles while their regular lives progressed to having fewer and fewer life-and-death struggles.
I think one idea would be mandatory one or two years of military service after high school... where the requirements are such that young people would really struggle and have some risks of harm or death. That might be enough to eliminate the otherwise reckless adult behavior we are seeing, or the alternative of years of cognitive behavior therapy.
My focus in undergraduate and graduate school was evolutionary biology. You are right. In the past, the men that were willing and able to fight when their community was attacked by an invading army, were the ones that survived and had children. Women were attracted to these men because they could protect them and care for them during their most vulnerable times, being pregnant and raising young children.
Most of the boys I teach today run to their mothers to get them out of trouble. When I was in school, no boy would ever consider having mommy fight their battles. Being a man meant you handled life without needing mommy to back you up. When I got out of line at school, I owned it and accepted the consequences.
I hated when they went to mixed gender PE in high school. Us boys could no longer play football the way we always had, a bit rough. I did not particularly like football, but I loved the challenge of holding my own with other boys.
Today, most boys are wimps, unable to handle real life.
My wife and I were talking about this tonight. For a very long time we have been protecting people from themselves. Probably the most famous case of this was the lawsuit over spilled coffee. A woman, who was a passenger in a car at the drive through, placed a cup of hot coffee between her legs. She ended up spilling it and getting 3rd degree burns. She claimed it was the fault of McDonalds because the coffee was too hot.
She was the one who ordered coffee. She did something stupid, put it between her legs. Had she placed it a safer location, it likely would not have spilled. She placed herself in the situation.
I was working at a fast food restaurant at this time (working my way through college). After this, we had to drop the temperature of the coffee by 30 degrees. We got so many complaints about the coffee not being hot
When I was in high school, during a shop class I had a metal rod that I wanted to grind one end at a 45 degree angle. It was way too short to safely hold onto even using some sort of clamping device.. I decided to hold it in my hands and proceeded to start grinding on the electric grinder. the moment the tip touched the grinder, It was pulled out of my hand and it sliced my index finger open, down to the bone from the base to the first joint.
My mother was at work, she was an RN. She called my grandfather to pick me up and drive me to the ER. When I told her what happen was, that was your damned fault so I do not feel sorry for you. To add insult to injury, the ER doctor was waiting for a nurse to get free to assist him in cleaning out the wound and stitching it up. My mother told him she could assist, she works at the hospital. He said great and started at it. Even with lidocaine, it was painful because he had to open it up further to clean everything out because there were metal fragments in the wound. He cleaned it out down to the bone. It was painful. My mother looked at me and said you had better hold still and do not even whimper. This is the consequence of doing something stupid.
I stayed at the hospital in the waiting room after I was stitched up. Mom drove me back to school and we went to the shop teacher. I had to apologize to him for not following the safety rules. I then had to clean up the blood that was still on the grinder and on the floor.
This was 1977. The shop teacher thought my mother was going to chew him out. She told him why would he, I was the one that violated the safety rules. I received the natural consequences.
I knew my mother was right. We joked and laughed about for many years after. I did learn though to always follow the safety rules when I am working with dangerous machinery.
If that were to happen today, the mother would have sued the school district. It would have been settled and the shop teacher would face disciplinary action. That is why most public schools have stopped offering shop classes.
My brother and SIL did everything to protect their 4 children from every thing. They enrolled them in a private school that had lower academic standards because trhey did not want kids to feel bad if they struggled. After graduation, they could only go a private college affiliated with the church that ran the private schools. Again, low standards, an emphasis on feeling good, resulted in their 3 boys having all sorts of mental health issues. Only one is able to hold a job, and he is working for the college he graduated from.
Their daughter rebelled against their overprotection. She just did what she wanted. She did sports (mom hated sports because her babies could get hurt). When she turned 18, she took up horseback riding. She got a job to pay for this hobby. Then she started barrel racing and both her parents are appalled. She is good. She is now going to school to become a nurse and she is still able to work to earn her way and do her barrel racing. She can handle life.
We raised our son with high expectations and let him suffer natural consequences when he did stupid things. He went on to earn a Masters in Animal science and is now married and working full time. They just had their first child and are doing well. He has taken up medieval sword fighting with a club. He has been cut a few times, hit hard a few times, cracked a couple of ribs and he said it comes with the sport and deals with it.
When I was a young teen, I took up horseback riding and after a few years was training horses and giving lessons to people. I often worked with horses that people bought, but never had the time to properly train them or work with them several times a week. So when the horse became unmanageable, I was hired to work with the horse so it would be gentle enough to ride. I enjoyed it. I fractured a few bones, was tossed many times and got right back in the saddle. I was very successful at gentling them so they could bet ridden. Usually, I was able to convince the owners to sell the horse to someone who could work with it several days a week rather than riding it once a month and paying the boarding ranch to feed them and care for them all the days they were too busy to be there.
This developed my mental toughness so I really have to be sick or injured to take a day off of work. Pain is a part of life and you deal with it and continue on.
My orthopedic doctor commented that with all my injuries, I should be in a wheelchair. I am walking because even when in pain, I just get out of bed and go to work and get things done. I know the moment I stop moving is the moment I will be in a wheelchair.
I passed that attitude to my son.
I know that if I play stupid games, I win stupid prizes. These leftist protestors are playing stupid and dangerous games and expect everyone else around them to protect them from themselves. Quite frankly, I thing for the most part, LE has been more than patient in dealing with them.
Alas! Trying to talk sense to modern day liberals is about as hopeless as trying to pour water into a globe. Liberals don't give a fig about the law when the law is an obstruction to one or more of their delusions. They only get excited about the law when someone who disagrees with them violates the law. There was a lot about old time liberalism I could agree with. Back when I was a college student liberals were antiwar, were opposed to the military industrial complex, claimed to believe in freedom of speech and to champion ideas, believed that the Bill of Rights meant something when it came to a matter of the criminally accused being guaranteed certain rights and so on. While I was never a liberal (thank God!), I agreed with them on these matters. I still do. But modern so-called "liberals" do not. There's hardly a war on the planet they don't want us involved in. They worship at the altars of the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon. They love and adore war profiteers in the blood industry like Liz Cheney and her repulsive father. They believe their "feelings" are more important than other people's right to freedom of speech. They approve of the mistreatment of the accused when it comes to January 6th arrestees. They have become everything they used to say they opposed. There's no lie so silly that they won't swallow it and peddle it. Last week Mary Louise Kelly who runs National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program "refuted" Trump in his derogatory remarks about Somalia. NPR explained that, far from being a hellhole, Somalia is a veritable 2nd South of France. Why they had a guy named "Mohammad" tell listeners that he was on the beach in Mogadishu and how everyone was enjoying the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and frolicking in the sea. An American journalista came on to relate that she was attending a really hip cool block party in Mogadishu. The neighbors had all turned out to dance folk dances and to chow down on delicious, tasty, home made Somali treats. This was completely absurd as anyone who knows anything about that vile county knows. I think Mary Louise Kelly and journalists like her are conscious liars but the point is that her listeners swallow this nonsense whole...because what they believe is not an opinion. It's not an idea. It's not a belief system. It's not even an ideology. What liberals believe is a RELIGION. It is a nasty, intolerant religion and they are out to save the world by forcing it on others. Every knee must bend and every tongue confess.... Mr. Harkins' remarks are entirely correct. But they can't make a dent in the minds of self-identified liberals. You couldn't pry their minds open with a crowbar.
Good call, John. I will add that her death wasn’t tragic. The outcome of her ideological stupidity was her death. If there’s tragedy it’s the 3 children who lost their mother, though how big a loss it was for them is in question.
Humdeedee: My understanding is that the "lady" lost custody of 2 of her 3 children to their father. Given how strong the pro-mother bias is in divorce case, the father must have had a helluva case for the court to take them away. The 3rd child was indeed in her custody but that child's father has died. What chance would a child have being reared by a mother like her and her "wife?" My guess is that the child will be much better off being reared by an aunt or uncle or put out for adoption.
I agree with both of you, because Rene Good's complete unwillingness to consider the primacy of her responsibility as a mom demonstrate beyond a doubt that expressing her political ideology was more important to her than her maternal duties. I should think the child will do better with someone who puts the child's needs first.
I strongly agree with you. Not every untimely death is a tragedy, and just possibly, maybe likely, her death saved the child in her custody from her poisonous influence, though the poor child’s prospects don’t look good considering she may be left in the perverse care of the woman who was supposedly her mother’s “wife”.
I was glad to see the officer who was hit by Ms. Good had his body camera running. It destroys the Left's narrative in every way. The clown Adam Schiff claiming without a shred of proof that she was on her way to pick up her child? What, he lied again? Who could believe it- clearly not the fools in CA who promoted him for lying about having the the Russiagate smoking gun! There is no truth, logic, or decency left in the Demoncat party, at least none that I can see. Is this just a stooge who willingly sacrificed herself to cloud over the Somali corruption investigation? Are the fanatics on the Left actually willing to die to create chaos that might help them win seats in 2026? It's disturbing on such a fundamental level because it seems to indicate that willingness to go to any lengths to flip seats away from Republicans. I wish them the worst; so no, I really don't feel bad about the death of a tool like Ms. Good, a person so lacking in common sense and soaked in her "girl boss" fantasy that she was willing to lose her life to attempt to hurt an ICE agent and hopefully trigger a George Floyd response. AOC made that connection. Rashida Talib; "every American is at risk of being killed by ICE?" Dumb. And sick. And how about Ms. Gold's partner, before the incident, taunting the agents as if she could take them in a fight or something. Like the champ said; " there's only going to be two hits- me hitting her, and her hitting the ground." Prime example of FAFO. I hate the stupid people of MN at this point; just catch that clown and former governor Jesse Ventura accusing the Republicans of violating the constitution by sending ICE. Throw in Walz and the dumb broad LT gov and the black avenger Keith Ellison and you got yourself a full clown car.
Spot on! Accountability is lost in a lot of these situations, and largely ignored in favor of narrative control.
Good, her wife, and the officer are all accountable but made martyr or murder depending on news source.
But the context will be lost in favor of galvanizing an emotional response.
The popularity of movies like The Hunger Games, and the Korean series Squid Games, I think tell us something.
My oldest son quit college and went into the military. At his graduation from basic he told us how disappointed he was that the challenges were not hard enough... that they had dumbed down the requirements for mental and physical challenges to accommodate overweight, poorly educated and female recruits.
I believe there is a psychological need, probably with some evolutionary biology explanation, for people... especially young people... to face some danger in their lives in order to feel alive.
Historically life itself was more dangerous. Just working for a living one would face risks of harm or death. During school we all got picked on and there were more fist fights.
But here comes the matriarchy. No more bullying. No more fighting. Everyone gets a trophy. Everyone gets an A on their paper. Empathy is delivered in buckets... except, ironically, to those that actually face the risks of harm and death.
I think we are seeing a psychological breakdown of society being too mothered. I think this is all a result of The Great Feminization.
I really worry about AI making this worse. People without struggle and threat as part of a productive system will seek it in other pathways that will be destructive to the system.
The 9-11 Islamist were part of a Saudi cult that developed from the children of oil-rich families. They were shipped to Western universities to get a fine education and then came back to their home country that lacked an economy to provide them challenging work. So, other than mothering, automation combined with over-educating is another catalyst to this breakdown.
I believe that the Romans were brilliant until they were not. The gladiator games were an outlet for people to at least mentally participate in life-and-death struggles while their regular lives progressed to having fewer and fewer life-and-death struggles.
I think one idea would be mandatory one or two years of military service after high school... where the requirements are such that young people would really struggle and have some risks of harm or death. That might be enough to eliminate the otherwise reckless adult behavior we are seeing, or the alternative of years of cognitive behavior therapy.
My focus in undergraduate and graduate school was evolutionary biology. You are right. In the past, the men that were willing and able to fight when their community was attacked by an invading army, were the ones that survived and had children. Women were attracted to these men because they could protect them and care for them during their most vulnerable times, being pregnant and raising young children.
Most of the boys I teach today run to their mothers to get them out of trouble. When I was in school, no boy would ever consider having mommy fight their battles. Being a man meant you handled life without needing mommy to back you up. When I got out of line at school, I owned it and accepted the consequences.
I hated when they went to mixed gender PE in high school. Us boys could no longer play football the way we always had, a bit rough. I did not particularly like football, but I loved the challenge of holding my own with other boys.
Today, most boys are wimps, unable to handle real life.
My wife and I were talking about this tonight. For a very long time we have been protecting people from themselves. Probably the most famous case of this was the lawsuit over spilled coffee. A woman, who was a passenger in a car at the drive through, placed a cup of hot coffee between her legs. She ended up spilling it and getting 3rd degree burns. She claimed it was the fault of McDonalds because the coffee was too hot.
She was the one who ordered coffee. She did something stupid, put it between her legs. Had she placed it a safer location, it likely would not have spilled. She placed herself in the situation.
I was working at a fast food restaurant at this time (working my way through college). After this, we had to drop the temperature of the coffee by 30 degrees. We got so many complaints about the coffee not being hot
When I was in high school, during a shop class I had a metal rod that I wanted to grind one end at a 45 degree angle. It was way too short to safely hold onto even using some sort of clamping device.. I decided to hold it in my hands and proceeded to start grinding on the electric grinder. the moment the tip touched the grinder, It was pulled out of my hand and it sliced my index finger open, down to the bone from the base to the first joint.
My mother was at work, she was an RN. She called my grandfather to pick me up and drive me to the ER. When I told her what happen was, that was your damned fault so I do not feel sorry for you. To add insult to injury, the ER doctor was waiting for a nurse to get free to assist him in cleaning out the wound and stitching it up. My mother told him she could assist, she works at the hospital. He said great and started at it. Even with lidocaine, it was painful because he had to open it up further to clean everything out because there were metal fragments in the wound. He cleaned it out down to the bone. It was painful. My mother looked at me and said you had better hold still and do not even whimper. This is the consequence of doing something stupid.
I stayed at the hospital in the waiting room after I was stitched up. Mom drove me back to school and we went to the shop teacher. I had to apologize to him for not following the safety rules. I then had to clean up the blood that was still on the grinder and on the floor.
This was 1977. The shop teacher thought my mother was going to chew him out. She told him why would he, I was the one that violated the safety rules. I received the natural consequences.
I knew my mother was right. We joked and laughed about for many years after. I did learn though to always follow the safety rules when I am working with dangerous machinery.
If that were to happen today, the mother would have sued the school district. It would have been settled and the shop teacher would face disciplinary action. That is why most public schools have stopped offering shop classes.
My brother and SIL did everything to protect their 4 children from every thing. They enrolled them in a private school that had lower academic standards because trhey did not want kids to feel bad if they struggled. After graduation, they could only go a private college affiliated with the church that ran the private schools. Again, low standards, an emphasis on feeling good, resulted in their 3 boys having all sorts of mental health issues. Only one is able to hold a job, and he is working for the college he graduated from.
Their daughter rebelled against their overprotection. She just did what she wanted. She did sports (mom hated sports because her babies could get hurt). When she turned 18, she took up horseback riding. She got a job to pay for this hobby. Then she started barrel racing and both her parents are appalled. She is good. She is now going to school to become a nurse and she is still able to work to earn her way and do her barrel racing. She can handle life.
We raised our son with high expectations and let him suffer natural consequences when he did stupid things. He went on to earn a Masters in Animal science and is now married and working full time. They just had their first child and are doing well. He has taken up medieval sword fighting with a club. He has been cut a few times, hit hard a few times, cracked a couple of ribs and he said it comes with the sport and deals with it.
When I was a young teen, I took up horseback riding and after a few years was training horses and giving lessons to people. I often worked with horses that people bought, but never had the time to properly train them or work with them several times a week. So when the horse became unmanageable, I was hired to work with the horse so it would be gentle enough to ride. I enjoyed it. I fractured a few bones, was tossed many times and got right back in the saddle. I was very successful at gentling them so they could bet ridden. Usually, I was able to convince the owners to sell the horse to someone who could work with it several days a week rather than riding it once a month and paying the boarding ranch to feed them and care for them all the days they were too busy to be there.
This developed my mental toughness so I really have to be sick or injured to take a day off of work. Pain is a part of life and you deal with it and continue on.
My orthopedic doctor commented that with all my injuries, I should be in a wheelchair. I am walking because even when in pain, I just get out of bed and go to work and get things done. I know the moment I stop moving is the moment I will be in a wheelchair.
I passed that attitude to my son.
I know that if I play stupid games, I win stupid prizes. These leftist protestors are playing stupid and dangerous games and expect everyone else around them to protect them from themselves. Quite frankly, I thing for the most part, LE has been more than patient in dealing with them.
Alas! Trying to talk sense to modern day liberals is about as hopeless as trying to pour water into a globe. Liberals don't give a fig about the law when the law is an obstruction to one or more of their delusions. They only get excited about the law when someone who disagrees with them violates the law. There was a lot about old time liberalism I could agree with. Back when I was a college student liberals were antiwar, were opposed to the military industrial complex, claimed to believe in freedom of speech and to champion ideas, believed that the Bill of Rights meant something when it came to a matter of the criminally accused being guaranteed certain rights and so on. While I was never a liberal (thank God!), I agreed with them on these matters. I still do. But modern so-called "liberals" do not. There's hardly a war on the planet they don't want us involved in. They worship at the altars of the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon. They love and adore war profiteers in the blood industry like Liz Cheney and her repulsive father. They believe their "feelings" are more important than other people's right to freedom of speech. They approve of the mistreatment of the accused when it comes to January 6th arrestees. They have become everything they used to say they opposed. There's no lie so silly that they won't swallow it and peddle it. Last week Mary Louise Kelly who runs National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program "refuted" Trump in his derogatory remarks about Somalia. NPR explained that, far from being a hellhole, Somalia is a veritable 2nd South of France. Why they had a guy named "Mohammad" tell listeners that he was on the beach in Mogadishu and how everyone was enjoying the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and frolicking in the sea. An American journalista came on to relate that she was attending a really hip cool block party in Mogadishu. The neighbors had all turned out to dance folk dances and to chow down on delicious, tasty, home made Somali treats. This was completely absurd as anyone who knows anything about that vile county knows. I think Mary Louise Kelly and journalists like her are conscious liars but the point is that her listeners swallow this nonsense whole...because what they believe is not an opinion. It's not an idea. It's not a belief system. It's not even an ideology. What liberals believe is a RELIGION. It is a nasty, intolerant religion and they are out to save the world by forcing it on others. Every knee must bend and every tongue confess.... Mr. Harkins' remarks are entirely correct. But they can't make a dent in the minds of self-identified liberals. You couldn't pry their minds open with a crowbar.
Sorry for my embarrassing typo. Not Mr. "Harkins" but Mr. Hawkins.
Good call, John. I will add that her death wasn’t tragic. The outcome of her ideological stupidity was her death. If there’s tragedy it’s the 3 children who lost their mother, though how big a loss it was for them is in question.
Humdeedee: My understanding is that the "lady" lost custody of 2 of her 3 children to their father. Given how strong the pro-mother bias is in divorce case, the father must have had a helluva case for the court to take them away. The 3rd child was indeed in her custody but that child's father has died. What chance would a child have being reared by a mother like her and her "wife?" My guess is that the child will be much better off being reared by an aunt or uncle or put out for adoption.
I agree with both of you, because Rene Good's complete unwillingness to consider the primacy of her responsibility as a mom demonstrate beyond a doubt that expressing her political ideology was more important to her than her maternal duties. I should think the child will do better with someone who puts the child's needs first.
I strongly agree with you. Not every untimely death is a tragedy, and just possibly, maybe likely, her death saved the child in her custody from her poisonous influence, though the poor child’s prospects don’t look good considering she may be left in the perverse care of the woman who was supposedly her mother’s “wife”.
I was glad to see the officer who was hit by Ms. Good had his body camera running. It destroys the Left's narrative in every way. The clown Adam Schiff claiming without a shred of proof that she was on her way to pick up her child? What, he lied again? Who could believe it- clearly not the fools in CA who promoted him for lying about having the the Russiagate smoking gun! There is no truth, logic, or decency left in the Demoncat party, at least none that I can see. Is this just a stooge who willingly sacrificed herself to cloud over the Somali corruption investigation? Are the fanatics on the Left actually willing to die to create chaos that might help them win seats in 2026? It's disturbing on such a fundamental level because it seems to indicate that willingness to go to any lengths to flip seats away from Republicans. I wish them the worst; so no, I really don't feel bad about the death of a tool like Ms. Good, a person so lacking in common sense and soaked in her "girl boss" fantasy that she was willing to lose her life to attempt to hurt an ICE agent and hopefully trigger a George Floyd response. AOC made that connection. Rashida Talib; "every American is at risk of being killed by ICE?" Dumb. And sick. And how about Ms. Gold's partner, before the incident, taunting the agents as if she could take them in a fight or something. Like the champ said; " there's only going to be two hits- me hitting her, and her hitting the ground." Prime example of FAFO. I hate the stupid people of MN at this point; just catch that clown and former governor Jesse Ventura accusing the Republicans of violating the constitution by sending ICE. Throw in Walz and the dumb broad LT gov and the black avenger Keith Ellison and you got yourself a full clown car.