Being a showrunner is one of the toughest jobs in showbiz. It is easy to be spread too thin. Just because Moffat is not doing great does not mean anyone else can do better. To me, it suggests that they need fresh blood amongst the stable of non-lead writers.
Catherine Tate. I wish they would go with Catherine Tate. As Donna Noble is timelordish already, one can easily imagine another regeneration accident might accomplish the transition.
In fact, I have a pretty good guess. "My guy in the White House is doing well, but it is just good luck of the oil prices, no great choice on his part." "Their guy in the White House is doing badly, but it is just the bad luck of the oil prices, not really the particular policies I dislike." Not the kind of thing anyone would pay a pundit to say. That kind of honesty gets weeded out quickly, if they ever stumble upon the truth. It has lousy narrative value in both the worlds of infotainment and political brawling.
Oil prices relative to historic norm is a quite good predictor of both economic growth in the following year and people's assessment of presidential performance, much more so than the paritcular politics, policies, brain power, or charisma of the man in the White House. As single factor analysis goes, it is vastly better than one would expect. Strangely enough, most political analysts largely ignore it.
Carter was left holding the bag when oil prices hit historic highs. His policies were not fundamentally different from Nixon/Ford, who also suffered in the public's eyes.
Reagan was liked...after the oil prices came down. Perceptions of his competence were not particularly good before oil finally dropped below 50 a barrel.
HBush was actually rather well liked but oil trended upwards during his term, then trended down for Clinton's term.
WBush and Obama are presidents after the rise of China -- we are never going to see the kind of low oil prices we enjoyed in the 90s or 60s again. Never. Thus it would not be surprising if 2-3% growth is the new norm for the good years, into the foreseeable future; as a consequence, Obama and whoever takes office in 2016 are not likely to be greatly popular, even if they walk on water or raise the dead.
Things can change. If China's economy craters, oil price might drift downwards for a while. Whoever is in the White House in 2016 or 2020 might get a free bump there. Also fracking might put some significant downward pressure on energy prices. We shall see.
Perhaps. But laws restricting exploitation of crimes in this manner could be based on a property rights argument, thus sidestepping any 1st Amendment question. You may have a right to free expression, but you do not have a right to publish for your benefit that which you do not own. The fact that someone shows up with something to sell you that he probably does not own is not necessarily a defense.
Gee, if I own a disk drive with a digital copy of Pacific Rim, do I have a right to share that with others? Perhaps gaining revenue from advertising along the way? Obviously not.
A piece of celluloid or tape or a disk drive may give the benefit of the doubt in certain cases, but it is already true that one does not get the benefit of the doubt in all cases. It is an appropriate act of the legislature to expand the property rights and privacy rights of not consenting individuals.
Here is a case where property rights gives us a reasonable answer. The victim never gave consent to be filmed during his murder, the film was made under duress. Those choosing to propagate the film can be presumed to recognize that. Yet they chose to attempt to profit by selling manifestly stolen property. Throw them in jail.
Now if I am following you and trying to find out who you are or what you're doing - that's legal. If you attack me for it - it's not. At that point I need to either get away from that situation (recommended) or defend myself (as a last resort - as I might be pinned to the ground, etc.)
What I find troubling is not the verdict, where reasonable doubt makes enough sense to me, but how we as a society are framing potential confrontations.
You are presuming that Martin attacked Zimmerman. We do not know that. We only know there is reasonable doubt that Zimmerman started a fight that lead to tragedy. Even if if we did, does that resolve the scenario satisfactorily?
Martin has a right to stand his ground, as well. And the moral logic of Stand Your Ground laws implies that applying violence is a legally appropriate means of dealing with any "reasonable fear" of physical harm. Well, having an apparent stalker in the darkness seems like something that creates a reasonable fear to me.
Martin's best choice IMO was definitely to go home and call 911. No doubt there. But why exactly is not picking up a rock and crushing the skull of the person causing a reasonable fear not also an "appropriate" choice? The incentive is to escalate to lethal violence as quickly as possible, where being the only surviving witness to the whole debacle allows you to write the narrative that creates reasonable doubt.
IMO Stand Your Ground haunts the whole case because it implies that both Zimmerman and Martin were basically correct in their actions. It may not be Zimmerman's specific defense of pulling the trigger, but it colors all the actions of both parties before the shooting. That strangers in the night should go for blood is not the lesson a civilized society wants to endorse.
No doubt. Being human, the loudest voices on two sides of a controversy tend not to be saints. The question is how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meritorious arguments from simple frustration & special pleading.
Agreed. I may personally dislike MS, but 7 has a number of incremental improvements over XP and seems solid enough overall. It "bluescreens" and applications crash less than other versions of Windows.
If you want to be married, be married. Marriage is about love, trust and commitment. It's not about inheritance rights, taxes and contracts. Why must you demand that government call your relationship a "marriage" when the "rights" part can be achieved with using that exact word? Their only HONEST response was they wanted to FORCE those bigoted Christians to recognize their marriage.
Perhaps. But why exactly do those bigoted Christian get to own the word marriage, and have that ownership explicitly endorsed by the government? Why is their bigoted sacrament more equal than, say, a Universal Unitarian sacrament, in a nation of laws under the 1st Amendment?
The answer is a certain Christian minority feels entitled to special privileges that "must" be endorsed by the federal government, and if we dare point that out they will whine that we are being narrow-minded because...they want to call us names, lacking an actual defensible rationale. I refuse to accept their claim for special status.
Furthermore, you are wrong. The traditional marriage is about child-creation, child-rearing, inheritance rights, contracts, property, love, lust, household creation, economic sharing. All. Of. The. Above. To accept a narrow definition is to piss on the traditional marriage as understood in practice for thousands of years.
Which is a failure of the Judicial branch of gov't for issuing what you claim is a flawed warrant. At least one sitting federal judge happens to disagree with your legal interpretation. It so happens I personally agree with you that such a warrant is flawed. However, as a matter of law, the Executive can claim this is (at worse) ambiguous, because they are acting under the guidance of both the Judiciary and Congress.
Under our Constitution, it is shared the responsibility of Congress and the Judiciary to clarify these questions.
Which gets back to my larger point. If we desire the president to not walk all over the Constitution, the first thing we need is a Congress that does not lay down like a doormat.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"secure" "effects" "unreasonable" "probable cause" What does these words mean? The Constitution does not say. English Common Law helps with the "probable cause", but not so much the others.
BTW, PRISM does not touch your person, house, or papers. It is only a violation of a broader sense of privacy that is highly ambiguously defined. I would further note that you do not own your Caller Detail Records; those are owned by a corporation, who may choose to keep private or not. By what Constitutional right do you lay claim to the authority to prevent a corporate entity from sharing its property with the government?
My personal opinion is that we should have a right to privacy of our corporate records. How to accomplish that will take an act of Congress. Shouting about the president accomplishes nothing. We need Congress to act first. Proper behavior by the president will follow.
Congress doesn't have the political will. But that has no bearing on whether there should be political will. I don't see how anyone who values the rule of law can argue that Obama doesn't deserve to be impeached for his crimes.
And I would argue that if one values the rule of law, then logically it is Congress' duty to clarify the ambiguities first before we worry over whether the president should be impeached. Otherwise it will always devolve into a "I feel it in my bones" shouting match.
The problem is not one of this particular president. If Congress lays down like a doormat, then the president can walk all over the Constitution, and the Courts will act deferentially.
If you're still with me, all we need are examples of when Obama has failed to defend the constitution. Allowing blanket surveillance without specifically describing the places to be searched and the things to be found is just one. Assassinating a US citizen without due process is another.
Technically, yes, by the letter of the Constitution. But by the traditions such as that exist, such are very weak grounds for putting forth an impeachment proceeding. A key issue here is that these "crimes" are all done with the implicit blessing of Congress. Congress could easily withdraw certain measures that the Administration as used as legal cover, and Congress has (so far) chosen not to.
So, yes, I think a broad reading of the president's positive duties is rational. Yes, it is a political question of whether Congress wishes to proceed. But the problem is that Congress itself does not want to take on the heavy lifting of clarifying the legal situation by the means that the Constitution has put at its disposal.
There are members of Congress that are happy to whine, but the actual majority and minority leadership in both houses are more scared of clarifying their own position to the American people, than they are concerned about the alleged abuses of this president.
First of all, we do not know that Asian culture had anything to do with it. Sometimes the cockpit crew fails to explicitly communicate their concerns or their actions. Air France plowed a perfectly good jumbo into the Atlantic because the crew failed to say out loud what they were each doing, and thought should be done.
Second of all, no one decides "I would rather risk personal death and/or watch 300 people die in fire than maybe embarrass my boss". The information is filtered through other parts of the brain first.
And here comes my main point: "Group-think" is a critical survival tool for a species that is weak in tooth and claw, and our ancestors brains have been subject to strong selection pressure towards group-think for at least a few million years. If the bossy guy in your tribe says south and you believe game is only 50% likely to be there, raising a huge fuss because game is 75% likely to be north might be a fatal error. Being alone in a dangerous world risks unnecessary sudden death. It is not stupidity to be swayed by the group. Under emotional pressure and in the face of ambiguity, older parts of your brain are trying to save your life.
In our technologically advanced world, we need to carefully build conceptual-based habits on how to deal with lots of data and uncertainty. Cockpit resource management is not a new thing. It is clear that this particular crew would get an "F" in cockpit resource management on this particular day. They are hardly the first to get that grade. That situation was drifting away from a stable approach should have been obvious to the crew at 500 feet, when their airspeed was already below target and dropping. Someday, we will probably know what they were thinking.
This argument is not new. The fear that Those People are out breeding the Best Of Us is at least 150+ years old. Collapse is always just over the horizon. In the 19th century it was alleged those dang drunken Irish and Italians were pumping out dumb babies, who would swamp the children of those with accomplished minds and sober values.
IMNSHO 90% of the babies born have more than enough potential mental horsepower, given good nutrition and a good educational environment, to keep a technological society thriving. Whether those key environmental ingredients are provided is a values choice that comes from the culture -- the DNA is but a minor issue.
History suggests there is a big reservoir of potential in every population, even those populations we are inclined to look down on. Put those children of peasants in a good school, and lo! some of them make fine doctors. It has happened over and over again.
The positive benefit of being dumb is a myth. Some degree of obvious intelligence is attractive to most women, even if being super brainy may not be, even if stupidity may be sometimes overlooked. Being above average intelligence is a big boon if you want to make babies.
This, however, may indicate that the race, without some touch of eugenics, is doomed to mediocrity because biologically it does not select for brains (not anymore, at least.) There is no mechanism that would allow a genius to have more children and spread their genes around. Futurists imagined such mechanisms, but the society of today does not have them. To make things worse, geniuses are sidelined and often oppressed because they are different. The society favors the average, not the best.
I think you are committing a False Choice fallacy there. The species does select for manifestly above average intelligence -- there is a powerful positive correlation between an obviously healthy brain and general health. What it does not select for is goofy oddballs, which can be a problem for the extremes, at the high or low end. It is logically possible for a species to be positively selecting for intelligence on the net while selecting against the rare genius. But such geniuses are so rare, their effect on the gene pool could only be small under even the most optimistic scenarios.
Albert is beloved by geeks as an eccentric hero, but it is vastly underestimated how attractive he was to the ladies as a witty young man. Half the great minds in physics of the first half of the 20th century were Germans, Austrians, Hungarians who were well at ease on a rough hiking trail.
I think the figure of 50% of these children are physically abusive to their parents speaks volumes. Outside of untreated schizophrenia, that is a pretty rare behavior...unless you have been coached for years on how to inflict pain to those you love.
I may be less than fully correct, but careful readers will see that the picture is more complex than simple coddling, as multiple posters are so quick to assume.
The simpler explanation is that these children are victims of years and years of brutal emotional abuse, that left them too crippled to figure out how to fend for themselves. And they surely believe that outsiders will simply assume they are losers because they are weak and coddled, so they feel trapped inside their dysfunctional family away from an outside world that will show no pity.
The parents do want their sons to go out in the world, but to simply kick them out would mean both losing control and openly admitting failure as parents. Abusers do not find such a route very attractive.
...about half of hikikomori are violent towards their parents...
That is what we would expect from brutally abused children who reach adulthood. They have been coach for years about how one inflict pain on one's loved ones.
Here is even a partial confession:
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
Parents coddle adult kids. The kids have never been encouraged to fend for themselves, and this is the natural result.
No, the problem is parents do not ALLOW their children to fend for themselves. "For oneself" implies a definition of self that has not been set up for inevitable failure.
Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure. Now the child feels like a loser no matter what he does -- program computers and he is shamed before his family, do what his father wants instead and he is shamed before himself.
Withdrawal is a rational short-term reaction, when one is set up failure by one's family and society. Unfortunately, withdrawal for more than a modest period of time becomes its own self-reinforcing barrier to success.
It may look like coddling from a superficial point of view. From within the closed walls of the family, it is incessant brutal emotional abuse. The hints are there in TFA. The children are physically abusive? That kind of behavior is taught by the parents. There is a partial confession at the end of the article:
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
On both sides of the debate, people create mystery around "hate speech" for good and bad reasons. But, for the most part it boils down to something simple: a very thinly veiled threat of violence is not a traditionally protected form of speech, here in the USA or most anywhere else. Where it gets complicated is where to draw the line, and to what degree such considerations are an aggravating factor in determining punishment. Reasonable people may disagree on the specifics there.
If those trucks are so hard to drive in those conditions, they probably should be going slower. That they are driving so near the edge sounds like a problem with the humans in charge. With computerization, it is plausible to enforce ad hoc safety policies informed by details about exact road conditions. Once you take the human out of the cab and have a 24/7 machine driver, the politics look different because drivers are not screaming about the "right" to drive 55 when all those passenger cars are driving 55 or 65.
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Being a showrunner is one of the toughest jobs in showbiz. It is easy to be spread too thin. Just because Moffat is not doing great does not mean anyone else can do better. To me, it suggests that they need fresh blood amongst the stable of non-lead writers.
Catherine Tate. I wish they would go with Catherine Tate. As Donna Noble is timelordish already, one can easily imagine another regeneration accident might accomplish the transition.
In fact, I have a pretty good guess. "My guy in the White House is doing well, but it is just good luck of the oil prices, no great choice on his part." "Their guy in the White House is doing badly, but it is just the bad luck of the oil prices, not really the particular policies I dislike." Not the kind of thing anyone would pay a pundit to say. That kind of honesty gets weeded out quickly, if they ever stumble upon the truth. It has lousy narrative value in both the worlds of infotainment and political brawling.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and his response was to boycott the 80 Moscow games.
His replacement's plan of using military support to back the Taliban was a great idea that had no long term repercussions for the U.S.
You are both off the mark. Carter quietly sent large amounts of weapons to Afghanistan. Reagan expanded an existing CIA program.
Oil prices relative to historic norm is a quite good predictor of both economic growth in the following year and people's assessment of presidential performance, much more so than the paritcular politics, policies, brain power, or charisma of the man in the White House. As single factor analysis goes, it is vastly better than one would expect. Strangely enough, most political analysts largely ignore it.
Carter was left holding the bag when oil prices hit historic highs. His policies were not fundamentally different from Nixon/Ford, who also suffered in the public's eyes.
Reagan was liked...after the oil prices came down. Perceptions of his competence were not particularly good before oil finally dropped below 50 a barrel.
HBush was actually rather well liked but oil trended upwards during his term, then trended down for Clinton's term.
WBush and Obama are presidents after the rise of China -- we are never going to see the kind of low oil prices we enjoyed in the 90s or 60s again. Never. Thus it would not be surprising if 2-3% growth is the new norm for the good years, into the foreseeable future; as a consequence, Obama and whoever takes office in 2016 are not likely to be greatly popular, even if they walk on water or raise the dead.
Things can change. If China's economy craters, oil price might drift downwards for a while. Whoever is in the White House in 2016 or 2020 might get a free bump there. Also fracking might put some significant downward pressure on energy prices. We shall see.
Perhaps. But laws restricting exploitation of crimes in this manner could be based on a property rights argument, thus sidestepping any 1st Amendment question. You may have a right to free expression, but you do not have a right to publish for your benefit that which you do not own. The fact that someone shows up with something to sell you that he probably does not own is not necessarily a defense.
Gee, if I own a disk drive with a digital copy of Pacific Rim, do I have a right to share that with others? Perhaps gaining revenue from advertising along the way? Obviously not.
A piece of celluloid or tape or a disk drive may give the benefit of the doubt in certain cases, but it is already true that one does not get the benefit of the doubt in all cases. It is an appropriate act of the legislature to expand the property rights and privacy rights of not consenting individuals.
Here is a case where property rights gives us a reasonable answer. The victim never gave consent to be filmed during his murder, the film was made under duress. Those choosing to propagate the film can be presumed to recognize that. Yet they chose to attempt to profit by selling manifestly stolen property. Throw them in jail.
Now if I am following you and trying to find out who you are or what you're doing - that's legal. If you attack me for it - it's not. At that point I need to either get away from that situation (recommended) or defend myself (as a last resort - as I might be pinned to the ground, etc.)
What I find troubling is not the verdict, where reasonable doubt makes enough sense to me, but how we as a society are framing potential confrontations.
You are presuming that Martin attacked Zimmerman. We do not know that. We only know there is reasonable doubt that Zimmerman started a fight that lead to tragedy. Even if if we did, does that resolve the scenario satisfactorily?
Martin has a right to stand his ground, as well. And the moral logic of Stand Your Ground laws implies that applying violence is a legally appropriate means of dealing with any "reasonable fear" of physical harm. Well, having an apparent stalker in the darkness seems like something that creates a reasonable fear to me.
Martin's best choice IMO was definitely to go home and call 911. No doubt there. But why exactly is not picking up a rock and crushing the skull of the person causing a reasonable fear not also an "appropriate" choice? The incentive is to escalate to lethal violence as quickly as possible, where being the only surviving witness to the whole debacle allows you to write the narrative that creates reasonable doubt.
IMO Stand Your Ground haunts the whole case because it implies that both Zimmerman and Martin were basically correct in their actions. It may not be Zimmerman's specific defense of pulling the trigger, but it colors all the actions of both parties before the shooting. That strangers in the night should go for blood is not the lesson a civilized society wants to endorse.
No doubt. Being human, the loudest voices on two sides of a controversy tend not to be saints. The question is how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meritorious arguments from simple frustration & special pleading.
Agreed. I may personally dislike MS, but 7 has a number of incremental improvements over XP and seems solid enough overall. It "bluescreens" and applications crash less than other versions of Windows.
If you want to be married, be married. Marriage is about love, trust and commitment. It's not about inheritance rights, taxes and contracts. Why must you demand that government call your relationship a "marriage" when the "rights" part can be achieved with using that exact word? Their only HONEST response was they wanted to FORCE those bigoted Christians to recognize their marriage.
Perhaps. But why exactly do those bigoted Christian get to own the word marriage, and have that ownership explicitly endorsed by the government? Why is their bigoted sacrament more equal than, say, a Universal Unitarian sacrament, in a nation of laws under the 1st Amendment?
The answer is a certain Christian minority feels entitled to special privileges that "must" be endorsed by the federal government, and if we dare point that out they will whine that we are being narrow-minded because...they want to call us names, lacking an actual defensible rationale. I refuse to accept their claim for special status.
Furthermore, you are wrong. The traditional marriage is about child-creation, child-rearing, inheritance rights, contracts, property, love, lust, household creation, economic sharing. All. Of. The. Above. To accept a narrow definition is to piss on the traditional marriage as understood in practice for thousands of years.
(Responded to wrong comment. See sibling to your comment.)
Which is a failure of the Judicial branch of gov't for issuing what you claim is a flawed warrant. At least one sitting federal judge happens to disagree with your legal interpretation. It so happens I personally agree with you that such a warrant is flawed. However, as a matter of law, the Executive can claim this is (at worse) ambiguous, because they are acting under the guidance of both the Judiciary and Congress.
Under our Constitution, it is shared the responsibility of Congress and the Judiciary to clarify these questions.
Which gets back to my larger point. If we desire the president to not walk all over the Constitution, the first thing we need is a Congress that does not lay down like a doormat.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"secure" "effects" "unreasonable" "probable cause" What does these words mean? The Constitution does not say. English Common Law helps with the "probable cause", but not so much the others.
BTW, PRISM does not touch your person, house, or papers. It is only a violation of a broader sense of privacy that is highly ambiguously defined. I would further note that you do not own your Caller Detail Records; those are owned by a corporation, who may choose to keep private or not. By what Constitutional right do you lay claim to the authority to prevent a corporate entity from sharing its property with the government?
My personal opinion is that we should have a right to privacy of our corporate records. How to accomplish that will take an act of Congress. Shouting about the president accomplishes nothing. We need Congress to act first. Proper behavior by the president will follow.
Congress doesn't have the political will. But that has no bearing on whether there should be political will. I don't see how anyone who values the rule of law can argue that Obama doesn't deserve to be impeached for his crimes.
And I would argue that if one values the rule of law, then logically it is Congress' duty to clarify the ambiguities first before we worry over whether the president should be impeached. Otherwise it will always devolve into a "I feel it in my bones" shouting match.
The problem is not one of this particular president. If Congress lays down like a doormat, then the president can walk all over the Constitution, and the Courts will act deferentially.
If you're still with me, all we need are examples of when Obama has failed to defend the constitution. Allowing blanket surveillance without specifically describing the places to be searched and the things to be found is just one. Assassinating a US citizen without due process is another.
Technically, yes, by the letter of the Constitution. But by the traditions such as that exist, such are very weak grounds for putting forth an impeachment proceeding. A key issue here is that these "crimes" are all done with the implicit blessing of Congress. Congress could easily withdraw certain measures that the Administration as used as legal cover, and Congress has (so far) chosen not to.
So, yes, I think a broad reading of the president's positive duties is rational. Yes, it is a political question of whether Congress wishes to proceed. But the problem is that Congress itself does not want to take on the heavy lifting of clarifying the legal situation by the means that the Constitution has put at its disposal.
There are members of Congress that are happy to whine, but the actual majority and minority leadership in both houses are more scared of clarifying their own position to the American people, than they are concerned about the alleged abuses of this president.
First of all, we do not know that Asian culture had anything to do with it. Sometimes the cockpit crew fails to explicitly communicate their concerns or their actions. Air France plowed a perfectly good jumbo into the Atlantic because the crew failed to say out loud what they were each doing, and thought should be done.
Second of all, no one decides "I would rather risk personal death and/or watch 300 people die in fire than maybe embarrass my boss". The information is filtered through other parts of the brain first.
And here comes my main point: "Group-think" is a critical survival tool for a species that is weak in tooth and claw, and our ancestors brains have been subject to strong selection pressure towards group-think for at least a few million years. If the bossy guy in your tribe says south and you believe game is only 50% likely to be there, raising a huge fuss because game is 75% likely to be north might be a fatal error. Being alone in a dangerous world risks unnecessary sudden death. It is not stupidity to be swayed by the group. Under emotional pressure and in the face of ambiguity, older parts of your brain are trying to save your life.
In our technologically advanced world, we need to carefully build conceptual-based habits on how to deal with lots of data and uncertainty. Cockpit resource management is not a new thing. It is clear that this particular crew would get an "F" in cockpit resource management on this particular day. They are hardly the first to get that grade. That situation was drifting away from a stable approach should have been obvious to the crew at 500 feet, when their airspeed was already below target and dropping. Someday, we will probably know what they were thinking.
This argument is not new. The fear that Those People are out breeding the Best Of Us is at least 150+ years old. Collapse is always just over the horizon. In the 19th century it was alleged those dang drunken Irish and Italians were pumping out dumb babies, who would swamp the children of those with accomplished minds and sober values.
IMNSHO 90% of the babies born have more than enough potential mental horsepower, given good nutrition and a good educational environment, to keep a technological society thriving. Whether those key environmental ingredients are provided is a values choice that comes from the culture -- the DNA is but a minor issue.
History suggests there is a big reservoir of potential in every population, even those populations we are inclined to look down on. Put those children of peasants in a good school, and lo! some of them make fine doctors. It has happened over and over again.
The positive benefit of being dumb is a myth. Some degree of obvious intelligence is attractive to most women, even if being super brainy may not be, even if stupidity may be sometimes overlooked. Being above average intelligence is a big boon if you want to make babies.
This, however, may indicate that the race, without some touch of eugenics, is doomed to mediocrity because biologically it does not select for brains (not anymore, at least.) There is no mechanism that would allow a genius to have more children and spread their genes around. Futurists imagined such mechanisms, but the society of today does not have them. To make things worse, geniuses are sidelined and often oppressed because they are different. The society favors the average, not the best.
I think you are committing a False Choice fallacy there. The species does select for manifestly above average intelligence -- there is a powerful positive correlation between an obviously healthy brain and general health. What it does not select for is goofy oddballs, which can be a problem for the extremes, at the high or low end. It is logically possible for a species to be positively selecting for intelligence on the net while selecting against the rare genius. But such geniuses are so rare, their effect on the gene pool could only be small under even the most optimistic scenarios.
Albert is beloved by geeks as an eccentric hero, but it is vastly underestimated how attractive he was to the ladies as a witty young man. Half the great minds in physics of the first half of the 20th century were Germans, Austrians, Hungarians who were well at ease on a rough hiking trail.
I think the figure of 50% of these children are physically abusive to their parents speaks volumes. Outside of untreated schizophrenia, that is a pretty rare behavior...unless you have been coached for years on how to inflict pain to those you love.
I may be less than fully correct, but careful readers will see that the picture is more complex than simple coddling, as multiple posters are so quick to assume.
The simpler explanation is that these children are victims of years and years of brutal emotional abuse, that left them too crippled to figure out how to fend for themselves. And they surely believe that outsiders will simply assume they are losers because they are weak and coddled, so they feel trapped inside their dysfunctional family away from an outside world that will show no pity.
The parents do want their sons to go out in the world, but to simply kick them out would mean both losing control and openly admitting failure as parents. Abusers do not find such a route very attractive.
...about half of hikikomori are violent towards their parents...
That is what we would expect from brutally abused children who reach adulthood. They have been coach for years about how one inflict pain on one's loved ones.
Here is even a partial confession:
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
Parents coddle adult kids. The kids have never been encouraged to fend for themselves, and this is the natural result.
No, the problem is parents do not ALLOW their children to fend for themselves. "For oneself" implies a definition of self that has not been set up for inevitable failure.
Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure. Now the child feels like a loser no matter what he does -- program computers and he is shamed before his family, do what his father wants instead and he is shamed before himself.
Withdrawal is a rational short-term reaction, when one is set up failure by one's family and society. Unfortunately, withdrawal for more than a modest period of time becomes its own self-reinforcing barrier to success.
It may look like coddling from a superficial point of view. From within the closed walls of the family, it is incessant brutal emotional abuse. The hints are there in TFA. The children are physically abusive? That kind of behavior is taught by the parents. There is a partial confession at the end of the article:
"I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do," she says. "Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it."
On both sides of the debate, people create mystery around "hate speech" for good and bad reasons. But, for the most part it boils down to something simple: a very thinly veiled threat of violence is not a traditionally protected form of speech, here in the USA or most anywhere else. Where it gets complicated is where to draw the line, and to what degree such considerations are an aggravating factor in determining punishment. Reasonable people may disagree on the specifics there.
If those trucks are so hard to drive in those conditions, they probably should be going slower. That they are driving so near the edge sounds like a problem with the humans in charge. With computerization, it is plausible to enforce ad hoc safety policies informed by details about exact road conditions. Once you take the human out of the cab and have a 24/7 machine driver, the politics look different because drivers are not screaming about the "right" to drive 55 when all those passenger cars are driving 55 or 65.
People who do not vote are very safe to ignore, that, at least, is obvious.
sconeu's opinion may be right or wrong. It may matter only a little. But a little is infinitely times bigger than zero.