Slashdot Mirror
A Unique Perspective on a 'Game-Related' Tragedy
Megnatron writes "Penny Arcade has a letter from the stepmother of one of the kids who was recently charged with killing a homeless man. Her article is an extremely sobering tale of the problems dealing with troubled teen. She explains how, in this situation, the parents did everything they possibly could. And, in a refreshing twist, she absolves the games industry of any blame for the tragedy these kids perpetrated. From her missive: 'Video games DID NOT make this kid who he was, and it's unfortunate that the correlation is there. The thing that really gets me with this whole thing is that the kid knows full well that by equating what he's done to a video game, that he will generate controversy and media coverage. It makes me sick that the media is jumping all over this, because that is exactly the result that he wants. The only good thing (if there is such a thing) that has come out of this whole ordeal is that the kid is behind bars. That is exactly where he needs to be.'" Her letter is a passionate, troubling story, but well worth reading.
My word.
It's quite impressive really, how a web-comic that deliberately sets out to be juvenile and offensive so often ends up involved in a reasonably respectable way in some pretty big news stories.
I know this probably isn't the most appropriate comment, but I this whole thing really does remind me strongly of this book. In fact, the echos are bordering on being uncanny. I guess it all boils down to the question of whether somebody can just be "born bad".
The evidence both from this case (if the account here is to be believed) and my own experiences is "yes, they can". I'm not sure anybody in the political or academic estabishments really want to face up to the implications of this, though.
A situation like this happened with a co-workers step-child which ended up in his divorce from his wife. She couldnt see the kid for what he was and it ended up tearing them apart.
That kids now preparing to go to trial for killing his friend when in a drug haze he ran his car off the road and into a tree.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm wondering, has PA actually verified that this person is related to the kid, or are they just another AC?
sad story but still nice to hear a reasonable voice once in a while.
I realize that most of the dot, myself included, rarely reads articles before commenting on them. This one is very much worth the read, regardless of whether you intend to comment or not.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
But I'm curious how PA has verified that this person is who she claims to be.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
I usually like to blame the parents, as it is often their fault. You read these stories where the parents had no idea what was going on (Colombine: pipe bomb building in the garage???). Or where the parent just defends them ("Little Johnny never would have done that. The other kids made him do it.").
I gotta say reading that was kind of scary. If I had to take a guess I'd say he is a sociopath (literally), but that's just a guess. He is obviously very intelligent (calling people abusers). The fact they kept investigating it doesn't surprise me (what if it was true one of those times) but he knew how to get power. Kids can also act out like that if they are being abused, so that would lend "credibility".
I'm sure the divorces and remarriages in his life didn't help, but if it really is sociopathic, that probably wouldn't matter. I can offer suggestions of things that might have helped him (if he was help-able). Military boot camp, having him sent to jail those times the police came. Making him a ward of the state. Trying to give him possession of his own life (can't remember the term, basically having him declared an independent adult).
She said she tried "everything" so I don't know which of those were done. I'm amazed that she put up with it for so long.
This kid is REALLY the exception to the rule. He would have been exactly the same if this happened in 1960.
Too bad this kid will probably be the example of what video games do to kids that the media trots out constantly.
People like him (from her description, assuming it's true), are one of the things that make me believe in true evil.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
After reading the "stepmother's" reply I have to say yea it probably was the parent's fault. This kid seems to have been tossed back and forth between the "father" and the mother. The stepmother's language in her reply was what I would expect for a high school kid and not a parent of a child. In all the discussion of what they did and didn't do, I at no time heard the word love. I heard hate a lot but not love. Yea this kid might have had issues from the start but I have to say that didn't sound like he had much of a chance with the parents he had.
Yes he was unmanageable at 15 but what about at two? How about at five? How much love and time did he get at seven?
It is possible that even with the best parents in the world he might have still become a killer but it seems far from the perfect family life to me.
Sounds like a few more wasted lives. The poor guy that was killed and the kids that did the killing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Tru.Dat.
Hey now, we don't mind if you beat your kids.. just don't use a gun or the back side of your hand.
At 14, the kid was 6'3" and 200 Lbs. You try beating him. This called for retroactive abortion.
Hey, the authorities do that for a very good reason: an adult can be far more articulate and persuasive than a child accuser. Believe me, the police and social workers erring on the side of caution is a GOOD thing.
Don't think I'm making this up, either. I'm speaking as someone who was abused as a child and was NOT believed when he cried for help. It would have been great if people "took the child's view" thirty years ago -- it would have saved me decades of emotional pain.
That line blaming video games stuck out like a sore thumb. For one, there is no game that is nearly as sick as these kids. Not even in GTA can you smash a homeless man's face in with a brick, rub your shit in his face, destroy his camp, beat him with his grill, and finally shove his head in the grill you beat him with earlier. Secondly, even if could do such a thing in a game, it's still an effing game! It's not the game's fault they have no concept of right vs. wrong or reality vs. fantasy.
The parent post is correct, but neglects the salient point that when I was a kid (i'm 37), a valid response to the conditions noted would be to send the kid to a military school where they'd do the beating for you.
Yeah, those got tamed by the leftist social theorists too.
So basically we have to wait for the pathetic scum to kill innocents before we do anything about it. Great improvement. Kudos to the 60's crowd for doing us a real service, yet again.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I posted in this discussion, and I briefly touched on this (just a few words) but I am torn about it. My belief is either this, or sociopathy. I can understand acting out but a certain point (like the beating up a kid in a wheel chair) I have to wonder if he has a conscience at all. I agree with you that divorces (and shuttling, and new marriages, etc) can really mess with a kid. I'm just debating internally whether he was accidently "pushed" into this, he would have headed in this direction but a normal intact family would have been able to deal with it and "save" him until he straightened out, or he is just a sociopath and "born evil".
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...beating doesn't work either. He's a full blown psychopath, and about all you can do is drug him into a stupor or lock him up. We don't know how to fix them. Would probably be kinder (for him AND the other prisoners) to euthanize him. Much better than graduating him from prison in 15 years...he's going to be a real, grown up monster then, with all that lovely prison lore and culture burned into him. You can blame the liberals AND the conservatives for his continued existence. I think he falls under both of their "sacredness of life" category.
Just because it has a humanoid form does not make it human.
The kid is a sociopath.
People want to believe that any kid can be steered right, that anybody can be reasoned with, and that there are no truly bad people. Unfortunately, kids like this shatter that fairy tale. People like this kid, and several kids I know of personally, aren't reachable by conventional means.
Couldn't something be done? Probably. But society isn't equipped to deal with people who are radically outside the norm. It's much easier to lock them up, place the blame, and move on. Am I saying it's not the kid's fault? No, I'm not. He murdered someone, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
What I'm saying is that he didn't have the mental barriers against killing someone that normal people do. Whatever people have that make them right wasn't present in this kid.
How can society deal with people that either don't fit in with society or reject it entirely? Is it even a solvable problem? I feel that figuring this out, above all else, will be what defines the next great Age of humanity.
That's a great sig for that post. Kittens are cute and fuzzy, remember to beat your kids! :D
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
On the gripping hand - I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Now, I'm not going to lay all the blame on video games - but to pretend that they have no influence at all is ludicrous.
so would you say it was environment or genetics. Both are problems of the family and both could very well be the culprit. Or it could be a little of column 'a' and a little of column 'b'
It has been shown though that adopted children from questionable parents to good parents don't do as well as either natural children of good parents or adopted children from good parents. At least coming from raw numbers.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
"This is what happens when the liberals get their way and you are no longer allowed to beat your kids."
Yet the prisons are full of adults who were beaten as kids.
WTF?
Lots of kids get tossed back and forth between mother and father all the time, and many are raised by mothers who write like highschoolers, and yet very few decide to go out and kill someone for a laugh.
On the other hand, my wife comes from a very loving, stable middle-class family but her brother was a "difficult" child. Fighting a lot, putting other kids into hospital, wilfully destroying property (like pushing his mother's car into a lake,) and no amount of parental love made any difference. Fortunately he was not as bad as this kid (never killed anyone,) and has matured greatly. But really, you have no idea what you're talking about.
What do you expect? shes the kids step mother. Blood doesnt betray blood like obligation would/has.
Not knowing the family history, but you would be amiss to not consider the fact that it was a broken home, could have had something to do with the kids behaviour. For fucks sake people, if you dont love the person you're with DONT HAVE KIDS.
And save me the "im from a broken home YOU INSENSETIVE CLOD! and I am fine". All that proves is you were able to overcome. Some kids arent so lucky. Especially living with someone like this who would sell her "child" out so quick. You can imagine what living with that sort of "parent" would have been like.
sociopathy is a bizarre and tragic disease that causes people like this to exist. the kid simply has no inherent ability to care about anyone or anything but his own desires. no consequence too great, no whim too cruel for a kid like that. i've seen clinical interviews with adult sociopaths, and they do stuff like this with no second thoughts. the scary thing is that lots of them are fairly intelligent, so they find ways to conceal their crimes or ways to exploit the world around them to get away with the shit they pull. the only thing that makes this kid different is that he's smart enough to blame it on the video games, knowing he can play into the hands of idiots like jack thompson
troll or flamebait, I can't decide which.
Remember Abu Ghraib -- we definitely DON'T want these kind of kids in the military!
~
I disagree, I know of at least two children who have seemed to be evil from birth.
My brother's step-son is evil, and looking back he has been that way since he was young. Even since he was small (I met him when he was about 5), he had no concept of empathy. He could not understand that other people had feelings to. If someone made him feel bad, he would hit them. When asked why, he would explain "They made me feel bad." If you tried to explain that hitting someone else would make THEM feel bad, he would look at you with a blank gaze. Then repeat, "But they made ME feel bad."
My brother is the most compassionate person I know. He takes care of another disabled step-son, and both he and the mother have shown nothing but love for all of the children. Even so, the bad son has grown up to be an evil man. He has sexually molested others, has gotten into fights, and still doesn't understand compassion for other human beings from what I have heard.
I also have an aunt who was killed by her adopted son. She adopted three children, all very young when they were adopted, less than 2. Two grew up to be fine, the third was always rebellious. He killed her with a knife one night, he was 14 at the time, after she told him he needed to finish his homework before he played.
I think there are people who are evil. I think for you to say that there must have been a lack of love, or some other deficiency on the parent's part, just judging by tone and limited details in the step-mothers posting (which was written just days after learning that her son-in-law had murdered a man, despite her years of pleading for help from authorities), is judgemental and wrong. I can undertand her being angry and upset now, and would have expected it given the sort of situation she described.
Also, if the family life was so bad, how do you explain the other kid turning out fine? It seems much more likely to me that the child was just not right in the head, as opposed to saying that it was somehow the parent's fault in the way they treated this one child.
After reading the "stepmother's" reply I have to say yea it probably was the parent's fault. This kid seems to have been tossed back and forth between the "father" and the mother. The stepmother's language in her reply was what I would expect for a high school kid and not a parent of a child. In all the discussion of what they did and didn't do, I at no time heard the word love. I heard hate a lot but not love. Yea this kid might have had issues from the start but I have to say that didn't sound like he had much of a chance with the parents he had.
Yes he was unmanageable at 15 but what about at two? How about at five? How much love and time did he get at seven?
Read a bit more closely, and you'll catch this bit:
I am sorry this got so long. I have been reading PA since the very beginning, and I feel that both of you are very much like me. I think we are the same age (29) and I have been a lifelong gamer like the two of you.
If she's 29, then she would have been around 14 when the kid was born -- and remember, she describes herself as a kind-of stepmother. It sounds like she didn't get involved until he was already a teenager -- too late for her to have much impact, especially if she was only in her mid-20's herself.
So we can't draw any conclusions about her bad parenting when he was a baby. Also, note that he was living with his dad until he decided to leave -- and move in with his natural mom, who had even less control over the situation. If we must conclude that nurture had a larger role than nature, then we have to look at her role, long before the letter's author was involved.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
There's some evidence that sociopaths are created by inadequate parental attention very early in life, like with an infant. Read about attachment syndrome. The human brain is so extremely complex, and prejudices and biases in creators of studies so prevalent, that determining the truth is going to take another century.
So apparently you are a retard? What besides obvious love would motivate someone to stick with such a hellish child for so long? Its not like they were being paid to deal with him.
What part of this kid was messed up in the head do you not understand? Do you believe there are no genuine bad seeds? That in each and every case its bad parenting?
And so what that the parents are divorced? Divorce sometimes leads to troubled children, its never an explanation for MURDER.
So are you seriously this stupid or are you just trolling?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I don't want kids, a bunch of my friends don't want kids. We've all taught after schools or summer schools where we interact with children, the vast majority of them do not give a shit about you or their parents. I've seen a sweet little girl, 8 years old, beat up her grandma who came to pick her up. What did we do? Absolutely nothing, us teachers can't even touch her or it would be against the law. So we've come to the conclusion that we should not have kids, we don't need them, when we're old we will just go to a home.
It's nice to think we live in a reasonable world where everything makes sense and all you have to do is act responsibly and do the right thing and everything will work out the way it's supposed to. Most of the time, that's the case. But sometimes, you're fucked no matter what you do.
I suspect that most kids in the juvenile justice system have screwed-up, neglectful, or irresponsible parents. But there are also a few kids in the system who had great parents (and siblings who turned out just fine).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
According to the letter, the writer is 29. I'll take that at face value (despite the fact that many women manage to be "29" for several years...). The kid's 15.
This would have made her 16 when the kid was 2, and 19 when the kid was 5, and finally 21 when the kid was 7. So it's highly unlikely that she saw anything of how the kid grew up.
Given that she's the "stepmother" that means that the kid's mother and father were divorced. I'd have to imagine there's quite a bit of trauma in that kid's life that the letter writer just didn't see. Given that many kids have trouble accepting stepparents into their life, the kid completely ignoring her comes as absolutely no surprise.
So while it may be safe to say there's nothing the letter's author could have really done, that hardly absolves the parents from responsibility.
If I were going to guess, I'd imagine that the kid's parents broke up while he was still growing up. He was probably used to being ignored and learned that his parents really had no control over him at that time.
So, yeah - I doubt the parents intended to cause the kid harm, but from the way I read the account, it's quite likely they in fact did. No matter what the stepmother says, who likely came into the kid's life after the damage had already been done.
Well I read the letter and it seems a bit interesting for a late teen.
Most of the time, he didn't even remember why he was being grounded
We're talking stealing cars, setting fires, drinking, getting picked up for drugs, beating up handicapped kids at school (yes, really)
I see two important things, #1 he has trouble comprehending his actions in some way. #2 This person claims he has a long record of criminal offenses, but hasn't had any real punishment.
He likely just thought he could get away with it, like he had with everything else for YEARS. At some point the government should help out a bit, maybe put him in jail. Teaching him he can get away with this type of behaviour is a fatal mistake.
I really don't understand how you can blame the parents based on the information provided. Sure, the parents split up, but there are plenty of parents who divorce or separate and still have well-adjusted children. Beyond that, we simply have no idea what this kid's childhood was like. We also have no idea how long the stepmother has been on the scene, so I don't see how you can expect her to comment on how much love the child received at any specific age, much less support any conclusions based on the presence or absence of the word "love" in a letter.
It seems like a great modern fad (and fallacy) to blame parents for every lousy thing a kid does, as if people have become desperate to take nature out of the classic "nature vs. nurture" argument. But none of us are shaped purely by our environment, as the mention of the kid's younger brother being reasonably well-adjusted supports. We all have judgement and free will, so unless some actual evidence surfaces to support the notion that the parents somehow meaningfully contributed to these horrible acts, let's place blame back on the kid who committed them, shall we?
Some people are not psychologically designed to respond to stimulus the same way; some are visual learners, some are auditory, some learn better from example and demonstration, some more from reading, some from fidgeting around with things till they understand how it operates.
Some are born completely without the ability to discern cause and effect, and some are born with a complete psychological immunity to corrective tactics.
Some are pathological liars.
Yes, you can be "born bad." I've seen it many times. There are schoolteachers who think "no kid is really a bully" and try to "understand" everyone: these schoolteachers are retarded fucktards who let bullying happen.
The same goes for the retarded fucktards who took the kid's word over the parents who were screaming for protection and help in trying to discipline him.
Word to the cops: if the PARENTS are begging you to put him in jail and prosecute, WHAT THE FUCK do you think you're doing handing him back off?
Those cops should be fired for laziness and incompetence.
Working in a prison myself, I can tell you that prison is also full of adults who weren't beaten as kids.
I have two stepbrothers, and one is normal, if underachieving. The other is, or should be, a diagnosed sociopath. The rules simply do not apply to him. And if the rules are somehow enforced to apply in a particular instance, in his mind, that does nothing to prevent him from doing it again. I'll repeat that - cause and effect has a very tenuous grasp in his mind.
Its not that he's evil, its that he does as he wishes at that moment with no thought as to the consequences to himself or those around him. Morals, laws, rules all apply to other people, but not to him, regardless of the punishments he receives.
The only saving grace for my parents is that he's not quite as clever as the boy in this article, and hadn't pulled the child abuse harassment card. But when the military-style summer camp hands the boy back and says 'we don't want him', you know something is seriously wrong.
Still, if he's not convicted of a violent crime in the next 5 years, I'll be very surprised.
He would have been exactly the same if this happened in 1960.
In 1960 life was very different. His dad wouldn't be "grounding him" he'd have taken him to the wood shed and corrected his attitude. You only have to be course corrected a few times at an early age. The mother's mention of negative reinforcement probably did not include throwing the kid out the door into the street and telling him to only come home once he appecated what he had going for him in the form of a warm bed and three square meals a day.
School teachers in 1960 could beat you with a shaved baseball bat until you're buttocks were bruised so you couldn't sit down. His teacher's or their husbands would likely have been a WWII or Korean War veteran. Why mention that? Because if the little goblin had raised a hand to a teacher, he'd have drawn back a stump. His school Principal would have certainly been a) male and b) unsympathetic to his claim of 'abuse'. His Principal would very likely have a shaved baseball bat and two foot prints painted on the floor in front of his desk.
If none of that registered on him, in 1960, he'd of been shipped off to someplace like "West Texas Boy's Ranch" or "The San Antonio Boy's Town" or "Father Flanagan's Boys Town" or any of the other "homes for boys". He'd have had to work 30-35 hours a week growing the food he ate, tending the stock and still ride the bus 1-2 hours each way to attend school. He'd live in a "bay barracks" style dorm with 30 other kids. He would do laundry, muck out barns, peel potatoes and stack hay. Sunday he'd go to church and get a whole 5-6 hours to reflect the error of his way.
If he ran away and tried to 'go home' the Sheriff would run him down with dogs and drag him back to the county farm for recalcitrant youth or what ever the place was called. Then the keepers would move his bunk to the barn take his mattress and blankets way until he'd earned his spot in the dorm back.
Believe it or not the boy would be different. If this was 1960 he'd be different or he'd be dead.
The same thought occurred to me - Gabe plays the "blame the parents" card (a popular meme, sometimes even true), and here she comes along and explains how much she hated him and wanted him gone.
She plays the don't blame the videogames" card -
What makes me suspicious is when she claims that social workers and counselors that previously took the kid's side are now calling to apologize and say they wish they had believed the parents.
Um, bullshit. Yeah, I'm so sure that some government worker picked up the phone to say, "oh hi, this is Frank. Remember me? I'm the guy who was investigating you for abuse? How are you guys doing? Cool. Cool. Listen, I just wanted to apologize for all that, 'almost sending you to jail' thing ok? Well, take it easy. Please don't sue me. Bye."
She's lying about that part *at the very least*
Too bad she didn't describe how video games related to him at all. She made up her mind that it wasn't relevant, but she's not a professional, and we're left having to trust her even more.
A sociopath is perfectly suited to transmit his genes through a population bottleneck. The anomalous persistence of these poorly adapted (to our cooperative times) eigenexpressions of the human genepool is due to the genetic amplification effect of such population bottlenecks.
Such people are dangerous and need to be restrained from hurting others. Except when things are seriously messed up. Then you want them for allies. Who knows, maybe he'll eat you last.
Blame as such really isn't relevant. It's like whining because there are sharks. Reality doesn't care *how* bad you feel about the necessity to kill the sociopath, lock him up, or bury your loved ones when he's done with them.
--
phunctor
Couldn't agree more... My Mom used to beat me with a hot-wheel track and because of that I love her even more...
(Reply entered a second time because I hit 'submit' rather than 'preview'.)
/. crowd.)
The same thought occurred to me - Gabe plays the "blame the parents" card (a popular meme, sometimes even true), and here she comes along and explains how much she hated him and wanted him gone. Because she plays the don't blame the videogames" card (another popular meme, sometimes even true) - Gabe accepts her letter uncritically at face value.
Huh? Why precisely should we ignore *his* statement, yet accept the statement of someone who is openly antagonistic to him? (Mostly I suspect because it plays to the bias of the PA and
I don't entirely trust the word of criminals. But I don't trust their relatives either. I've seen too many parents of killers loudly insist that their child couldn't possibly be a killer. This situation, while from the opposite end of the spectrum seems too pat. She doesn't want the child in the first place - and doesn't want any shred of sympathy to be directed towards him.
Aside from that I don't buy her claim that someone with his behavior pattern is intelligent enough to know that he can manipulate the media. And no, that someone can manipulate the cops that easily (if she is to be believed) is not evidence of being intelligent enough to perform such manipulation on a meta level. *Especially* when such low level manipulation of individuals and the police is routinely shown in the media. Widely enough that I've seen it shown on King of the Hill... Heck, I've seen it as far back as Our Gang (Little Rascals).
People who are in prison:
(Federal statistic) - 25%+ illegal aliens who came here to commit violent crime like rape. Many are repeat offenders who were merely deported back to Mexshitco the first time.
- People who did a DUI one too many times.
- People who killed someone else.
- People who were involved in violent drug crime.
- People who were involved in major money crimes.
- People who were "beaten" when kids.
- People who were not "beaten" when kids.
People from incredibly rich, what one would think of as advantageous, even loving families can develop into real psychopaths. The Mormons give us Warren Jeffs and his compound full of misogyny. Many "rich and powerful" people develop into serial rapists, murderers, etc.
And yes, some kids are just born "evil", in the sense that for whatever reason, their cognitive development skews towards manipulation and abuse rather than empathy and love. Some come from the same families as incredibly loving, caring people. I've known one family (neighbors up the street) who one of their kids grew up to be a social worker, despite the fact that he was smart enough to go into a lot of other fields and make a ton more money, because he wanted to help people. He sacrifices every day on the shit-salary he gets from the government, in order to try to help kids who are really disadvantaged.
His brother? Probably as objectively "smart", but his smarts he put towards manipulating people from day one. His parents didn't believe till they sent him to college, that his caring younger brother wasn't the one doing the shit around the house that the older brother was blaming on him. Now the older brother's been in and out of prison 4 times, has at least 6 illegitimate kids, and is currently whereabouts-unknown with half a dozen warrants for his arrest.
The older brother is pure evil, yes. Nobody on the street thinks he could have turned out any other way, he's just evil and manipulative. He's a pathological liar and manipulator. Parents a lot of time have blinders on with respect to their kids - and oh, when he was at home, this fucked up kid made it REAL easy for them to believe him over anything else - but even these parents have finally clued in on it.
...and yet still moded informative. ;)
The moment he started telling people they were "abusing" him, it stopped them from doing ANYTHING to try to punish him, because he'd claim it was "part of the abuse" and they would have to admit to doing it.
And the refusal to believe the parents on the part of government officials - especially the COPS who kept returning him after this shit - shows me an entire police dept that ought to be fired for incompetence.
Yeah, he probably did think he could get away with it. After all, the only people who tried to discipline him were his parents, and he figured out a way to go over their heads REAL fucking quick and had a bunch of incompetent, credulous fucktards in the school administration and police dept who'd back him up over his parents any day.
One of my best friends had a cousin named "Milo", in any case Milo was strange since day 1(literally), I have never seen anyone with so much contempt for the things around him it still gives me chills to this day, this crazy fukka did everything(assault, robbery, burglary, drug dealing, and likely a few murders...seriously)He was not a physically intimidating person as he might have been about 5'8 and weighed a buck-thirty; so ask me how he scared the living shit out of anyone that even looked at him, size notwithstanding, and then literally force them into a fight. If he lost *that* fight, he would come back REPEATEDLY for more drama until he won, and if that didn't work he WILL stab or bludgeon you. What makes people like this truly scary is that they are HIGHLY intelligent, to the point where if extracting an algorithm that interpolates star positions to make the jump to lightspeed in a far off sector with an abacus will advance their evil intent, it would be proofed in minutes and I am not playing...some living things are born inherently evil, I can tell you another story about yet another highly intelligent evil person that killed his girlfriend to serve life in jail with a father he never knew...but I think I made my point. I actually have a sneaking theory that every person will encounter 3 truly evil people in their lives.
1. She (love her or hate her) wasn't around when the kid was 2, 5, maybe 7.
2. If one of the kids turned out fine and one blew a screw, one can't exclusively blame the parents, maybe the 'bad' kid acted up so much to get attention from his parents and instead of ever getting solved, it turned into a personality deficiency. I don't know, but I'd hope the counselors that analyzed him would've taken all sides when dealing with him.
3. The "This kid seems to have been tossed back and forth between the "father" and the mother." argument makes absolutely no sense since the article described the boy moved a single time from the fathers to the mothers and furthermore, it was described that the boy -chose- to move. Its not like he was 'tossed'.
What I'm trying to say in a nutshell is that assuming the author is being honest, she talks curtly about the boy now because she's been through the worst of it. If she'd written an article 5 years ago about the boy I bet you'd find a very different tone. If you really 'hate' your future step-kids, you generally don't get married.
Bye!
For that, I love her even more too. ;->
It's not a question of intelligence as much as cunning. Many people with sociopathic tendencies are born manipulators--they learn very early on how to push other people's buttons for their own benefit or amusement. He certainly displayed this ability when he manipulated the child welfare system into harassing his parents. So for him to make a sensational claim that attracts media attention is entirely plausible. It won't convince a judge, or a parole board, but it will get him attention and allow him to exert some control over his environment. Even if nothing concrete comes from it, he probably just enjoys jerking people around. Doesn't require a huge amount of brainpower to know that saying something provocative will get you attention.
Not much to add other than we had this also all the way up to the mid-80s when I finished highschool. When I was a senior, we had our first 'incident' I had ever heard of in our town. At another highschool (in a rougher part of town) one student stabbed another one to death (multiple stab wounds). This shocked everyone. These days, it's at least a school shooting a year.
I agree with you and it's my parents' generation's fault. Coming up through the 60s, they let their kids run around somewhat unsupervised but at least grandparents were around to help guide us some. This, in turn, cause them (my generation) to let their children run even more unsupervised and let the Nintendo, VCR, and TV be the parent. Our parents aren't interested in guiding them either. This only gets worse over time.
For reference, I only mentioned the 60s because video games didn't exist. It had nothing to do with parenting styles and some such. I simply chose that decade for the lack of video-games, and didn't think about it any further.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I think it's adorable that so many claim Slashdot is liberally biased, when garbage like this stays at +5.
"Leftist groupthink"
People always seem to imply that the 'liberals' are unelectable because they all have different opinions on stuff, and can't agree on anything.
So how exactly does 'groupthink' occur when 'leftists' can never agree on anything?
Believe it or not the boy would be different.
After being abused and mistreated for years by people he hated and looked down on, with his strong disregard for other humans?
Yeah, he'd probably have killed a handful of them.
...of all evil in the universe. I knew the liberals hated America, and wanted Osama Bin Ladin to be president, but I hadn't realized that they also wanted bums to be beaten to death. The bastards!
Had the conservative policies been in place, maybe he would have been locked up sooner, but I can guarentee he would have been fucking up kids in Juvie...creating more little monsters out of kids that already had problems. Sooner or later they would have let him out, too. Maybe the life of that bum would have been saved...but only if you lock the kid up forever before he kills anybody. You have to weigh the risk of him doing serious damage against the probablility he's just freaking out on hormones and will straighten out. A potential wasted teenager vs. a potential wasted old bum.
Locking people up with other messed up people doesen't tend to make any of them less messed up...and for the most part you have to let them out someday. Prison does not rehabilitate anybody, or serve as much of a deterrent to crime....all you have to look at is the recividism rates to know that. What comes out is worse than what went in. It's cruel and pointless, and its only done because we as a society can't quite bring ourselves to put down dangerous animals of our own species.
Ideally, we could spend the cash to get our prisons under control, and make a real effort to rehabilitate. If rehabilitation fails, the person is euthanized. Unfortunately, our government is way too incompentant and corrupt to do this in a sane or just manner...so we have...what we have...courtesy of the Prison Guards Union.
So let me get this straight: your chosen ideology is supposed to be all about personal responsibility, but anything wrong with society is blamed on the political left?
mmm-hmm.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
the kid probably watched "A Clockwork Orange" too often. Time to sue Kubrick and Burgess.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Read 'em and weep.
Illegal immigration also produces high levels of crime nationwide. Small towns and large cities alike find themselves plagued by illegal drugs, violence and gang-related activity. Local law enforcement is simply overwhelmed. The percentage of noncitizens in Federal prisons has increased to more than a quarter of the Federal prison population. Most are illegal aliens, half of them convicted of drug dealing and drug trafficking. Either because of mismanagement or a lack of desire, our immigration laws are not being enforced as they should be.
Mexshitco can go to fucking hell.
I mean, with comments like this...
A potential wasted teenager vs. a potential wasted old bum.
You know what? I don't think so.
And you're misstating what I said. Lib policies are always too soft on criminals. It's more about "understanding" them than safeguarding the rest of society.
I don't think all libs want OBL for president. I know plenty who really just hate the fuck out of America, but know goddamn well that if they went elsewhere in the world, they'd be killed for protesting. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
The worst problem with libs is that they only half-think things, then announce they've reached the "solution." They come up with bullshit policies in schools and that let criminals off easy, then congratulate themselves on lowering the prison population while at the same time wondering why the criminals are getting bolder.
What comes out of a prison is worse than what went in because of fucked up prisons in which criminals are given way too much freedom. Most prisons have 1 guard to about 200 inmates, so the inmates run the fucking asylum: no wonder it's the way it is, half their gang buddies or whatever else are right in there with them.
Between that and the just serious nutballs who are wastes of oxygen, yeah, prisons are fucked up. But it's the libs who don't want society to protect itself from fuckers like this.
From what I read, the parents tried to do a lot more than I would have done. They went through counseling and lots of other stuff. Maybe the kid was just bad? As the lady in the article said, he had a brother and the brother turned out fine.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
The way this kid was behaving was much like a meth addict. I have no idea if that's what his problem was because sometimes people just act that way, but reading the letter from his stepmom just screamed meth addict to me.
And evidently rightist groupthink is pretty attractive to an authoritarian fuckwit.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
His mother couldn't do jack shit.
He figured out a way around everything.
And that's a terrible waste, but an inevitable consequence of spending a child's entire adolescence teaching them that they are accountable to someone other than themself, when ultimately, goodness comes from within and true goodness only comes out when you hold yourself accountable above all other people (i.e. Do you do right because you want to do what is right or because you are compelled to by real or implied force?)
The kid didn't care about "right." He did what he felt like doing, and that was that. He was a fucked up sociopath, completely self-centered, manipulative, and abusive. He was a kid born bad and that was that, and doing any less wouldn't have given him any reason to change that or be nicer to anyone else. He wasn't "acting out" to prove that they had no control over him, he already knew that they had no control over him, he could game the system any way he pleased, and that was that.
Maybe if he'd been chucked into juvie, it could have been different. I doubt it, but it could have.
Letting him run amok doing whatever? If you think that would do any good, you just go back to hitting the bong and being a good little moron.
I feel sorry for you, but encourage you to have your parents call CPS again and again till you get control of those kids.
They deserve a better mother than your sister. Once you get the kids, you can boot her out the door. Might work, might not, but it's better than not trying at all.
"I'm curious. Since you seem to be of the opinion that they did things the wrong way, what would have worked better?"
This is a sad story, both for the kid, who is now the hate-object for these parents and the community, and the parents who obviously did everything they could in the situation.
Why should we blame someone? Everybody do what they can do, nobody are _intentionally_ ignorant.
Having said that, the parents would probably go a long way cooperating better. From her story, it seems it was a "mothers house" and "our house" policy. No help or recourse for the mother when things started to go worse. No real connection between the adults besides the phone.
Instead of begging / pleading for help, a good, long talk from the heart should get through to someone at school. It sounds like the kid appeared more powerful than his parents, and they felt helpless facing abuse charges (quite understandably though, its a tough situation for any parents - mostly due to ignorance and stigma).
How familiar are they within the community? Being gamers, I doubt very few really know them.
Ive always wondered how kids would turn out when parents are busy gaming and escapist activities. Guess we now see that. Kids may turn out okay, but with love, care and nurturing by parents that are there in the real world, the weak kids also gets a chance. Family activities, like going out in the woods, hiking, swimming, etc., should give a relief to most kids.
I feel that nobody in this world is evil at the core. This kid included. Some stress, something of the past, made him frustrated. He was not met by anybody who really understood him. Mostly, people took a dualist view: Youre doing wrong, stop it! Hey, lets do something GOOD. Maybe you will feel BETTER? They employed a reactionist tactic: Whenever he did something wrong, he got attention - thus "rewarding" such behaviour. Yes, this is exactly how you can make a kid into a monster - when that is the only love he will get, he will take it.
The pattern that one kid is very mute and silently suffering, while one of the kids are revolting, is very common. Its a sign of deep family issues. It has NOTHING to do with the kids - they are being subject to these issues, which often are inherited generation by generation.
That is a pity. What we need is to learn how to master life. These kids CAN be understood, they NEED love, just like any other human being. However, people must be willing to learn and live life.
However, if you want to blame someone. Blame the whole of society. We are watching violence. Eating junk. Sitting like stiffs. Watching more junk. Discussing irrelevant things. Complaining and doing nothing.
Events with kids acting like this is a cry for help. Its an SOS. Were not living a good life, but often a very over-stimulated and superficial life. Its a sign of a defunct society and community, and most people are not reading the signals, but just blaming someone, and then watching more junk on the TV while eating themselves to bad health.
Time to wake up people!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Jeezus. That is some schweet statistical cherry picking. Not surprising at all that 25% of the FEDERAL prison pop is illegal immigrants, very few crimes that result in incarceration are federal. The vast, vast, vast majority of crimes are violations of state & local laws, and dealt with at the state level. Last week's BOP report says there are 195,248 Federal prisoners. So according to your statistics, that's ~48,000 illegal immigrants in the federal Pen. Now, the last number I can find for both state & federal is for midyear 2005, 1,259,905 people in state prisons and 179,220 in Club Fed. (Reference here). I dunno how many people in state prisons are illegal, probably lots in California and quite a few less in Idaho. But you can't say 25% of the people in prison are illegal based on statistics of the 12% of the prison population that's in the federal system, which is where being here illegally is dealt with, unless you're trying to be intentionally deceitful.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Why not, they did it. It certainly wasn't my idea.
Own up!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Ding ding! Survey says we have a winner!
Also, anybody arrested by the Coast Guard or DEA for drug smuggling will spend time in a federal prison. And (here's a surprise), they're usually not US citizens.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Ive been subject to a few psycopaths in my life. However, I do not believe anybody is truly evil. There is some stress in the system, something of the past, which is hurting - or blocking the emotional pathways. Some people / kids may never be able to recover "normal" emotions, but if met with equal zeal, fearlessness and unimpressiveness about their drama, they can learn to cope. Especially with many new medicines in the market. Some of these are just chemical imbalances - others is a cry for help, love and understanding. But the solution will always be unique to each person - never forget that and try to create general diagnosis.
Yes, its extremely tough, but you get strong by dealing with it.
Frankly, all of science points to the answer being "yes". In fact there are numerous examples of people becoming downright evil from head trauma.
You're right that crime has a strong genetic component. Nevertheless, it's pointless to characterize these people as "bad": if they are genetically incapable of feeling empathy or remorse, they are no more "bad" than a hungry lion. Furthermore, maladaptive as this behavior may be in our society, it's a normal and important variation in biology; after all, many animal are not social animals and will often fight and kill each other on sight, and it's not surprising that that variation also exists among humans.
Why does it matter whether you call these people "bad" or not? Because the question is whether they should be punished or whether our goal should simply be to protect ourselves from them.
I'm torn on whether we should be curing them, or implementing George Carlin's idea and turning the four corner states into a gigantic prison, and just throw them in there.
I don't think a "cure" is possible. Banishment outside civilized society could be an option, but an expensive one and not a very humane one. Another might be electronic monitoring or control. Whatever we do, we should act to minimize suffering, even their suffering.
Some people have made a career out of shopping around this idea of "anti-social personality disorder". In fact, all this is is a list of poorly defined terms.
There are probably many different causes for people to become "anti-social" or criminal, some genetic, some learned. Pretending that this is a single disorder that can be diagnosed with a checklist is doing a disservice to everybody.
If what you were saying were true, there would have been a huge upsurge in violent crime along with the use of "liberal" parenting tactics. In the 1970s (when those 60s-raised kids were in peak crime-committing years), NYC (where i live) was a lot more dangerous than it is now, and so was most of the US. Of course, there's more to that than parenting tactics, but my point is I'm not aware of any actual evidence to support your assertion. In fact, I went to a recent lecture by a pediatrician who talked about punishing children, and most of the scientific research so far suggests that physically punishing children is not more effective than other forms of punishment, and it actually makes them MORE violent. If you think about it, this makes sense.
I know of at least two families of decent, considerate people who raised their kids normally. In both these families, the kids are bright, honest people, except for one sibling (in both cases) who stands out like a sore thumb for his antisocial attitude. Both did time in youth correction then in jail, repeatedly. The parents can hardly be blamed, they tried everything. I think that at least one of the kids has the same psychopathic attitude as the murderer mentioned in TFA.
I really suspect a genetic disorder in these cases. I don't know which one, but I fail to see how the same household could produce such wildly dissimilar siblings. Same parents, same environment, same education... It's got to be genomes.
This is not to absolve the little perps. Except in the most extreme cases, most people with psychopathic tendencies can exercise will power to keep themselves out of trouble. That's why I didn't take a gun in my car, for example. Yet, most of these bastards hogging the freeway during my commute would amply deserve a few high-caliber bursts, let me tell ya. But did I do it? Nope. Sheer will power at work. So I *know* it can be done. You always have a choice unless you are desperately screwed up.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Anecdotes are always kind of dumb, but the only people I remember complaining about their parents were from kids whose parents were together. I knew lots of kids with divorced parents, and they all turned out fine (honor students, even, on occasion), but the two that had issues (a friend and my wife) have parents that ... let's say they don't really like each other, but decided to stay together "for the kids". The friend has told me plainly that one should never stay with a spouse just for the kids; it turns out that makes for a pretty shitty environment to grow up in.
Sorry, I do not live in your fucked-up country. I live in a country which largely follows "my ideals" and which is prospering. If you were honest with yourself, you'd have to try and find a better explanation for your problem than easy scapegoats.
Like, I dunno, extreme social inequalities driving people into crime? A completely ineffective "war on drugs" that is doing nothing to curb the problem, but instead gives more power to criminals and fills up the jails? And so on, and so forth.
No, you're right, let's beat up kids instead, that'll fix it.
I wish I had a reference on hand, because the paper I read about this was absolutely fascinating; it got right into the neurophysiology of the system in question.
Choice and free will aren't even illusory -- the concepts don't even make sense to begin with. And it's ridiculous to suggest that the denial of free will implies that we can't summarily exterminate those who are destructive to the rest of us. It's no different than a pack of rats ganging up on the one rat that goes around biting the rest of them.
Are you fucking stupid? He said that as part of an attempt to get off the hook, and to get all kinds of media attention. And you fell for it like a geriatric in the bathtub.
I, for one, Am glad that lady's son is in Jail. ------- Lol America
If the woman's description was any indication, the kid was a genuine sociopath. No amount of punishment can deter a sociopath -- that's one of their defining traits. They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences. They can lie their way out of almost anything; the fact that they have perfect poker-faces makes this problem particularly acute -- sociopaths don't really display much emotion at all, although they're more than happy to display fake emotions in order to manipulate others.
Most of these people are actually quite stupid (not unlike the morally healthy populaton). But the stupid ones don't last long; sooner or later they get themselves killed or land in prison or juvie. The smart ones last longer, and are vastly more effective at accomplishing the things that they set their minds too; as a result, they leave much deeper impressions on others. Not unlike the way that serial killers, despite being FANTASTICALLY rare, are much more well known than your garden-variety heat-of-the-moment-and-bad-judgement murderer.
I know right-wing nutjobs love to bleat on and on about how terrible it is that you can't give your child a good smack, but it simply isn't true. You're not allowed to beat them to the point where they suffer serious injuries, but parents have never been allowed to do that anyway -- attempted infanticide has generally been regarded as a criminal act by the majority of western societies since time immemorial.
A psychologist was telling me about his ideas once. There's definitely a lot of merit to them. The same philosopher was also apparently one of the first people to champion the notion that eating free-range meat was ethically superior to vegetarianism, because the animals got to enjoy a rich full life rather than the oblivion of non-existence.
In my own hometown, there's a guy being prosecuted for murdering 49 prostitutes. 49 -- no exaggeration whatsoever. The police knew that these women were going missing, and did nothing. It wasn't until womens' advocacy groups started making an really big stink that the police were eventually backed into a corner and forced to investigate. The worst known serial killer in Canadian HISTORY, and the police only investigated when they finally ran out of ways to ignore and dismiss the reports of missing women...
Individual police officers may possess some tiny shred of honour and dignity, somewhere deep underneath the corruption and bigotry. But police forces as a whole do not. If you start trying to hold them accountable for the things they do, you'd pretty much end up having to throw every member of every police force on Earth into prison. The complicity and collusion in these acts is total.
I realize that the original suggestion was made by a comic, but stop and think about the consequences. If people like this are a result of nature, wouldn't the abnormality present itself in offspring? Only worse? Yes, you could implement gender segregation, but how long would that stop 4 states worth of amoral, determined, horny, psychopaths?
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
I can vouch that many kids have real self-esteem issues, which is the main clause of what often come to fruition ultimately as deep and utter hatred of society. Myself not excluded.
I don't know where the lack of self-esteem comes from, but I know that it exists. And most of the time it's completely based in nothing at all, just hormones. I don't think they're crazy, or that they've even lost it. They just snap from anger or and do something that's completely irrational or just plain stupid, like bully other kids or get involved in crime and drugs.
For the most part, kids like this need therapy or need to feel better about themselves and express themselves. Not just bottle it up and eventually explode.
It isn't easy, you've just got to hold in there and eventually you'll be out of high school where you're constantly feeling like shit about yourself and comparing yourself to others.
"They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences"
I disagree. Many do consider the consequences a lot. Not all of them are stupid. And that's how they get into positions of great power.
In fact most would learn to change their behaviour in places where they'd get whacked by Dad for doing the wrong thing just too many times. Pain and fear is usually a good motivator for change[1]. Doesn't matter if they are sociopaths or not - if they learn at an early age that pain follows grave misdeeds (like intentionally hitting someone to cause hurt or harm when repeatedly told not to), they'd avoid doing stuff like that AND that tends to prevent them from ending up in jail (or dead). Basically they have a better chance of surviving long enough to learn how to fit in the system like "normals".
So yeah, maybe whacking a kid is bad after all. Parents should let their ignorant sociopaths self-destruct at an earlier age, rather than giving them a chance to learn more about the fun things they could actually do.
Chance for more than a few to become powerful CEOs and politicians.
Then instead of bashing up and killing just one homeless man, they could actually bash up entire countries.
[1] Doesn't work for sociopaths who don't mind pain, but most do mind it. But many are able to _easily_ endure it to achieve their greater goals - and that's how they rise up the social and economic ladders.
Let me know how the brother turned out in another 40 years. Jeffrey Daumer hadn't killed anybody when he was 20 either.
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Look how well your approach has worked so far. One dead homeless guy, and people howling for video games to be banned as the scourge of all violence.
All the military schools do to bad kids is physically strengthen them and harden their resolve--and just maybe teach them to fight effectively and handle weapons.
Besides, military schools cost money, and always have. They've always been mostly a place to send daddy's bad little spoiled rich boy. Poor or middle class bad kids end up in the real-life military. Or jail.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Reading that letter nearly made me cry. That's just about every parent's (or future parent - I've worried about such things myself and I won't have kids for a couple more years) worst nightmare, a situation where you just have no control over how your kid is turning out at all. At least they can look at his brother and say, "well, we must have been doing something right."
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It's important to remember that she mentions he has a brother who is turning out just fine, even despite the hell that this kid has put the whole family through. So they did something right somewhere along the line. No, they probably were far from perfect, but 90% of people are capable of coming out of an imperfect family without killing someone.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Punishment is fine for normal Humans. A normal kid, if you give him/her a good solid smack on the ass when you catch them misbehaving, will learn REALLY fast. The effect is instantaneous and dramatic.
The sociopathic child doesn't learn. They just don't. That's why most sociopaths end up in juvenile detention centres, jails, and things like that. A handful will understand on a purely intellectual level that they can avoid certain outcomes by behaving in certain ways, but this requires a great deal of intelligence. Children don't even come close to being able to make this leap.
Pain and fear only motivate change in those that can associate that pain and fear with their OWN actions. Sociopaths can not do that. They will associate the pain and fear purely with the person that is causing it. In EXACTLY the same way, they can not associate other people's pain and fear with their own actions, which is why they never develop a sense of empathy (in a normal Human, seeing someone else in pain activates the parts of of our own brain that respond to pain; sociopaths lack this response).
Many people labour under the misconception that sociopaths are these clever, evil people that can get whatever they want and can scam their way out of any trouble they get into. The reality is that only a vanishingly tiny proportion of sociopaths can perform this feat: most just hurt a bunch of people, do a lot of seemingly retarded things, and end up in jail, in a psych hospital, or dead. The overwhelming majority sociopaths behave in exactly the way you would expect a person with no understanding of consequences to act, and they don't last very long.
The only reason people believe otherwise is because of that tiny, tiny fraction who have such a powerful intellect that they can use the rational part of their mind to anticipate and plan. This doesn't sound very significant, but research and real-world evidence have demonstrated that people don't really do much actual conscious thinking. Mostly we rely on our conditioning to let us just kind of blunder through life. We don't ever have to stop and think about why we don't slap our parents (and other authority figures) in the face for no reason, or why we can't take sharp things and throw them at people. Getting caught shoplifting that one time at the age of 13 will prevent us from even considering a repeat attempt. Sociopaths can only avoid doing those things if they do so at a purely intellectual level. Past punishments just don't act as any kind of inhibition whatsoever.
Unlike other kinds of human monsters, sociopaths truly are born, not made. There has to be something missing right from the start to prevent the normal system of moral normalization from working.
Seems that the language of a highschool kid is "Die homeless motherfucker!" Welcome to the real world.
You did read the same letter I read, right? The one full of reactionary measures? The one that was so explicit in describing how her and her husband failed completely to take any foresteps of any sort, but instead waited for the kid to screw up and then tried to do something?
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That's exactly what I thought when I read that. More importantly, it leads to some interesting speculation. For example, assuming the father is anywhere near the age of the stepmother, that means the parents had this kid at a very young age, probably 17 or 18. If that's the case, then this kid was practically doomed from the start. There were a couple more things I read in the article that seemed "off" - like the language of the letter - but that was the most glaring bit.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
If you don't see the massive cognitive dissonance at work there, you could stare into a thermonuclear blast and not even blink.
He was constantly in trouble in school, with the cops, with us, with his mother, and with anyone else who was an authority figure. Not a week went by that the school or the cops wouldn't call us for something. His attitude was basically "fuck you, I don't have to listen to you" said with a shrug.
We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested.
They didn't try beating the living shit out of the little prick. Spare the rod...
Software patents delenda est.
To add to that, I'm sure that the kid was well aware that his stepmother hated him, knowing that the person who's trying to discipline and control you hates your guts has to to an awful lot psychologically. She says she was with the kid for 7 years, which means the kid was 8 years old when she came on the scene. Eight years old, with a broken family and a new mommy who's response to his acting out and bad behavior is to start hating him. That's a great way to turn a little boy into a messed up sociopath.
Additionally, the fact that the father had custody rather than the mother hints that there was probably more going on with the parents than we're being told. Fathers don't normally get full custody in a divorce case unless there's either some reason why the mother is totally unfit, or if the mother doesn't want the child.
Oh yes, and to top it all off, the stepmother is 29, the kid is now 18, which means that she was 19 when she hooked up with his father, and the fact that maybe, just maybe, she was way too young for his father and to be trying to raise a messed up stepchild just might have contributed to poor disciplinary decisions.
There's more to this story than meets the eye.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Deuteronomy 21:18-20 --> In case a man happens to have a son who is stubborn and rebellious, he not listening to the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and they have corrected him but he will not listen to them, 19 his father and his mother must also take hold of him and bring him out to the older men of his city and to the gate of his place, 20 and they must say to the older men of his city, 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he is not listening to our voice, being a glutton and a drunkard.' 21 Then all the men of his city must pelt him with stones, and he must die. So you must clear away what is bad from your midst, and all Israel will hear and indeed become afraid.
It's an articulate, personal brutally frank account of a horrible situation.
It's a sad reality that there are kids who are either bad from the moment they're born, or become that way for whatever reason. I don't care about the reason this kid was a rotten egg though, not in the context of what I have to say because it's irrelevent to the point I feel has to be made on this. She alleges that everyone sided with the kid regardless of the fact they wanted him gone for his actions, even the police said they had to take him back despite them seeking protection from him with them, I've been at ground zero here myself, 2 years ago my friend's eldest son threw a tantrum and stormed out of the house over being grounded for something he'd done (I can't remember what exactly now he'd been grounded for a lot of things in the short time he lived with my friend [mother took him away shortly after birth and there had been little contact until John decided to live with his father at the age of 14] including smoking, general disobedience, disrespect, wagging school, fighting at school, sneaking out of the house, well it was a long list). My friend finally had had enough and began to pack all of John's belongings and during the course of this found a few grams of marijuana (this is a negliable amount by any standards but the bag it was in had definitely contained a lot more previously) in one of his drawers, we'd suspected he might be getting drugs from someone but had only suspicions no actual proof, my friend called the police (I was here at the time and had been a witness to him discovering the bag, when the officers arrived the events were explained leading upto the discovery, and where to find John as best as we knew. Later they returned and told my friend to take John back under his roof and basically the way they said the lot he was to blame, despite the fact John had previously been in trouble with the police for drugs and other illegal activities. While he was under my friend's roof he was continually breaking the rules, and no method of punishment had succeeded, including one time when he had been publicly misbehaving had been taken to the police station and handed over to the officer responsible for juveniles, the only thing that was never done to him was striking him. One time when he tried a temper tantrum on me while supervising him because I refused to let him watch a movie that was unsuitable for him to watch (I'd been called to get him from his school on behalf of his father who was stuck outside of town due to work, he'd verbally assaulted a teacher after a fight with another student) he pulled a knife out of the kitchen drawer and threatened me with it (for reference I'm 6'1" and 240 lbs and practice several forms of martial arts and have experience as a security officer and John is about 5'1" and not nearly as fast moving as his father or myself), in all honesty if I hadn't been afraid of having my security license revoked I would probably have been quite content to let him try his luck and then hand him over to the police for assault with a deadly weapon. I don't believe either of his parents are to blame for his actions, as much as his mother is dislikable and definitely not one of my favourite people and quite nasty in nature at times as evidenced by the way she left his father and treated him subsequently (I've known her ex all my life blaming his actions for her leaving him is not possible as other ex-girlfriends of his have confirmed he's never mistreated any of them), I do know that when he went to live with his father she was overjoyed to be rid of him as she had no means of keeping him in line either. I don't blame video games for his actions, I don't even blame drugs though his taking of various drugs both controlled and illegal has probably not helped. So what is there left? Was he bad from birth? Doubtful, he was a pretty nice and intelligent young kid 10 years ago when his father had access for a short period before his mother disappeared again with him. Some of his friends have definitely contributed to his attitude now (the same ones who provided him with drugs who also have
(I've always wondered: wth is the "lameness filter" maybe my id isn't low enough?...)
---k--
</stupid>
I've experienced this in real life and heard of it so many times I know the genesis of the fairy tale. It's not an insight into the kids life it's an insight into that woman and what story she's willing to tell to damage the kid's reputation.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Society? Parents are a part of the society. Kids are a part of the society. Even the people on TV are part of the society.
We are part of the society, and so is the community. So when you say "we", who are you talking about? And if everyone is part of the society, who would this "we" be doing anything for or with?
Ok.. It means: YOU
It is either now, or later if we let things become even worse.
We can only start with ourselves, experience and pass it on.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
This kid should be commended. There are too many fucking bums hanging around the city. All they do is stink and ask for free money. I hate fucking bums. Somebody needs to do something about them. What we should have done instead of locking this kid up is give him a bat and a salary and let him go to town.
Yes, let's argue based on a single extreme example of a person who is obviously psychologically unbalanced. Great idea.
That letter from the supposed 'stepmother' is just too perfect. There's not a single grammatical or spelling error in the whole thing, and far too many uses of the F word for someone who is trying to gain a sympathetic ear. I might even go so far to hazard a guess that the writer is male instead of female.
Also, what are the chances that the stepmother of this miscreant is an avid gamer and Penny Arcade reader? Rather slim, I would think. My guess is it's someone in the gaming industry with an agenda to turn the 'violence in video games' thing right back at the media. As it stands right now, the likes of Jack Thompson could get a lot of mileage out of that kid's quote unless it is somehow undermined/refuted.
I suppose it will have to wait until that letter itself makes its way into the mainstream media, as it inevitably will. Only then would it become visible to someone who might know the family circumstances for sure and be able to debunk it.
By the way, the thing that initially raised my suspicions was an apparent mixing up of the facts: from reading the original CNN article, it was clear that the video games reference was made by the 17-year old Ihrcke, NOT the 15-year old Moore. Yet from the stepmother's letter, it appears that 'the kid' (i.e. her 'stepson') she is referring to all the time is the 15-year old, Moore. A slip-up? Time will tell :-)
Regards,
MetzO'Magic
Believe it or not the boy would be different. If this was 1960 he'd be different or he'd be dead.
So then, you want to explain why Charles Manson is still around?
The Zodiac killings were in the 60s too, as was the Boston Strangler. There were more, but you get my point. This whole "things were different in the 60s" arguments is BS.
Wtf is a "shaved baseball bat?" How exactly do you shave a baseball bat?
Hey! Don't you know that video games are the cause for the most tragic events in world history? Like the holocaust and both world wars! And the cold war! And let's not forget the Kennedy assassination, the colonial expansion period, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, the belltower shootings, the race riots in 1968, the list goes on and on!
Oh wait.
Maybe it's just part of human existence. But how dare I say that! What am I thinking?! Obviously someone took a copy of Vice City back in time and made all these people play it. That MUST be what happened. Ban time travel!
This might be unpopular to say, but damnit... I was thinking of those VERY same things when reading the letter. Call me crass, call me a dinosaur... I really don't care. Suffice to say, I had a father, and a grandfather for that matter who would tan my hide if I had done 1/10000th of the things this kid did... and when I got old enough, I would've lost some teeth.
Sometimes it takes that to prove to a person that the world doesn't revolve around you, and if you insist on taking things that aren't yours, abusing others, and generally being a waste of air... someone's gonna come along who is badder, bigger, and tougher than you and show you that you aren't as tough as you THINK you are.
We have lost that in society today... sometimes a good ass-whipping straightens out the most crooked of lives. I'm not talking about killing, shooting, or whatever "tough" is called these days. I'm talking about a real wake-up call that cost you a broken jaw or some teeth. Don't think it happened in the past? Well, it did. Even in my not-so-distant path... there is ALWAYS a person bigger, badder, meaner, and tougher than you. That's a fact.
This kid obviously will meet the person who's bigger, badder, and tougher than he in prison... but then it's too late. I feel sorry for him when he does meet the man who will trade him around for cigarettes... But he wanted this... now he can reap the consequences... It's a shame a person had to die for him to realize this.
Mod me down as insensitive, reactionary, stupid, out-of-touch, whatever. You kids get off my lawn!
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
How do you figure? The kid clearly didn't care about any punishment given, no matter how harsh. How would a beating have differed?
Really, what you want out of this is someone who doesn't beat up handicapped kids because its f'n WRONG, not because he's worried about the repercussions.
Plus, if *I* had a teenager who weighed 210 and was disturbed as this, I don't think I'd be comfortable at all making my confrontations with him physical. You gotta go to sleep sometime...
f Eh? Having a kid at a young age is hardly a good idea, but it doesn't mean "the kid is doomed". My parents had me when they were 18, and I'm not "doomed" (well unless you think your average Slashdotter nerd is "doomed").
It wasn't nice, they divorced early and I was practically raised by my grandmother, but it doesn't automatically mean the guy was doomed.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
"1. She (love her or hate her) wasn't around when the kid was 2, 5, maybe 7."
I said parents. The woman that wrote the email wasn't even his stepmother. She was his fathers live in girlfriend. She was involved his the kids life and may or may not have acted in the role of a parent.
"2. If one of the kids turned out fine and one blew a screw, one can't exclusively blame the parents,"
Or maybe the other child just happened to be an exceptional person? If you can say that one of the kids was born bad it is just as logical that a child can be born extra good. That the other brother could overcome the less than stellar parenting.
"argument makes absolutely no sense since the article described the boy moved a single time from the fathers to the mothers and furthermore, it was described that the boy -chose- to move. Its not like he was 'tossed'."
He was with his father. That means that his mother a. didn't want him, or b. the father took him from her because of unfitness as a mother. That is the way that it tends tp work when it comes to children and divorce. Yes I am making assumptions based on observations I have made over the years.
"If she'd written an article 5 years ago about the boy I bet you'd find a very different tone. If you really 'hate' your future step-kids, you generally don't get married."
And she never did. If you read the email again you will find that the woman that wrote wasn't his stepmother. She was his fathers live in girl friend.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Though I would argue that it is worse to kill the free range animal because it has more to lose.
Oh, no, not at all. The right is just as bad, if not worse. This particular issue lands in the lap of the lefties though.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I've known several kids like this - single parent mom due either to divorce or death, mom is inches shorter than they are and half or less their weight. Big men marry small women. Genetically, men are bigger than women to start with. It happens.
When a kid gets to be bigger than the parent (or big enough to cause physical harm to the parent), and they are an evil or just problem kid, it causes major problems. That's true whether they're a psychopathic manipulator like this murderous jerk, or just a retarded 20-year-old whose brain stopped developing at age 3 and who understands "ooh, I can reach the top shelf" and will manhandle anything that gets in his way on the way to the cereal box without knowing what he's really doing.
The difference between the two? The psychopathic manipulator is actually evil, because he fully comprehends what he's doing, he just doesn't care.
by recognizing when someone is a waste of oxygen, and revoking their breathing privileges.
I think this kid fits that.
Indeed, the letter reads like hand-wringing, sweep-it-under-the-carpet where it'll cover-your-ass logic.
Like what I said? You might like my music
You've got to be kidding! Is your argument really that crappy kids come from crappy parents? Seriously? By your reasoning, it sounds like we could end entire bloodlines because, heck, they're bad, right? Why even investigate individuals who may have been involved in a crime when we can just compare the kid to their parents! "Oh, the parents were good? Golly, it couldn't have been this kid! Let's start looking somewhere else."
I realize this is a ridiculous extension of your argument, but what I'm trying to remind you of is that kids are not clones of their parents. That is to say, while they certainly inherit genes from their parents, they don't inherit all of them. They inherit a subset from the mother and subset from the father. Different children from the same parents will inherit different subsets, and it's pretty tough to guess whether a combination is going to be "bad" in advance. Further variations are introduced to the physical makeup of the individual during and after pregnancy from nutrients derived from the mother and diet. As a result, children born of the same parents can be remarkably diverse even if raised in nearly identical environments and exposed to similar social pressures.
You can verify my daring "non clone" theory yourself by leaving your home, finding a child and then comparing that child to their parents. Heck, even forgoing such observation and staying entirely within the bounds of the existing discussion, we can see that the other child of the same parents is described as a sweet and well adjusted kid.
He obviously knows more about psychology than I do. What I know I picked up from being the son of a psychologist, so my knowledge is that of an interested layperson, not an expert.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I got the same thing from the letter. It reads like a messy made up alibi. Seems like this kid was troubled from the start but the adults were probably too screwed up to deal with it effectively and let is snowball out of control. How old was this child when the stepmother started hating him? And to top it off she was filled with more hatred of this boy because of what he did, not guilt not shame or remorse but hatred! Her response pales in comparison to the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The stepmother showed no profound sorrow or remorse from that letter just a sounding accusation that it was all his fault and she needn't share in any of the blame or responsibility.
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
Society can abuse you, but you can't abuse society.
Check the lawbooks, ask a cop, ask a lawyer, a judge, or even a social worker -- which is how my stepbrother found out that crying "abuse" wouldn't get him off the hook; the information that the social worker provided was very detailed and informative.
I've seen this first hand. My parents looked after foster children a lot, and I had a stepbrother that was spoiled rotten by his real dad. The foster kids got smacked, my stepbrother got smacked, I got smacked. My stepbrother and the foster kids were both as retarded and ignorant as you are -- they thought that the social workers would put a stop to this. They were very wrong.
The media doesn't bring report about the illegality of corporal punishment because that illegality exists solely in the imaginations of hippies (who are too stupid to tell the difference between what they wish was true and what IS true, or to understand basic psychology) and ultra-conservatives (who are too stupid to successfully perceive reality in any way whatsoever).
Trust me -- you can smack your child. You can yell at your child. As long as your child doesn't require medical attention or tremble at the sound of your footsteps, you're almost certainly still within the bounds of the law.
Look, I know you like being an ultra-conservative, but you need to start being a rational-conservative -- the kind that is at least vaguely aware of reality. Right now you are on exactly the same intellectual level right now as the losers that sit around babbling incoherently about how evil corporations are (a corporation, being a thing, is no more evil than a socket-wrench). Seriously, the real world is nice. Try living in it and understanding it.
Even parents who are at their wits end normally show some sort of sadness or something other than the hatred that this stepmother expressed. No wonder the kid turned out to be a sociopath, look at the examples he had of inappropriate emotional response.
And, for what it's worth, I think that video games did play a role in this, but not in the way that people think--I think that maybe if the stepmom spent a little less time playing video games and a little more time playing with the kid, things might have turned out differently.
Back when I was in highschool, I knew a family who adopted two boys who at the ages of 7 and 5 already appeared to be heading down the sort of path this kid took. The 7yo had already had several run-ins with the law, had been arrested for breaking into a neighbor's garage and setting the neighbor's lawnmower on fire, among other things, yet when I see those kids from time to time around town today, they're not anywhere near the messed up angry little boys they were then, they're polite well-adjusted teenagers. I think the reason that they seem to have turned out ok while that kid didn't is because their adoptive parents didn't just discipline them for their anti-social behavior, they also loved them and didn't treat them like they were monsters who were inherently bad.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
We have all the guns.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Yeah, well, we have, um, wait, let me think, ah, all the movie stars?
Go ahead and kill all us liberals. Who will entertain you then, hmm, smart guy?
What's that? All the action stars are right wing, and that's all you care about anyway? Drat and blast!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton