Hey sports fans...
How long before one of those suicide bombers travels to Liberia, intentionally infects himself with Ebola, and then travels to a crowded venue full of western Europeans and Americans after becoming symptomatic and blows himself into a large cloud of highly infectious mist?
Place your bets.
Most terrorists aren't that bright, domestic or international. The ones we hear the most about (Osama, Eric and Dylan, etc.) are usually more clever and dangerous than the norm.
ReplyDeleteI love your work man but I think this is a bad post, don't want to give nobody any ideas out there.
Also, bio-weapons aren't a great idea- the Black Plague spread from a single siege by the Mongols in less than a century, in today's modern-world a plague in any major area would be a threat to other areas.
I find it difficult to imagine that they haven't thought of it already with "EBOLA OUTBREAK" on the news 47 times a day. The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult was said to have sent people to Africa in search of Ebola. There was a woman I read about a while back who, when she found that she had contracted AIDS had sex with as many men as she could.
ReplyDelete.
I'm not likely to be the source of anyone's actions.
As population and technology expand, so does evil’s power to do damage.
ReplyDeleteAnd today we have a highly tribalistic political/religious/organizational culture, worldwide, which basically expends all its energy blaming the other side for everything bad, instead of actually focusing on brainstorming and debating practical solutions.
Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t by some kind of design - a natural (as in human nature-al) ruse all power overlords use to keep themselves in power. They’d rather keep everybody else confused and fighting each other, instead of actually doing the hard work of facilitating real results.
Anyways, if this isn’t changed... fun times ahead. People will get to live in a world with either: regular human caused catastrophes growing increasingly worse as population and technology grows, or, a police state where every action is watched by... the power overlords themselves.
At the moment it's taboo to admit that bullies are the product of criminally incompetent parents. When the cost of bullying reaches some unknown but critical point that taboo will disappear.
DeleteUnfortunately an awful lot of people are going to suffer and die before that point is reached.
bullies are the product of criminally incompetent parents
DeleteSometimes hard core bullies, whether direct or puppetmaster, are what they are regardless of the parenting. I think it's everybody else that needs to be better parented to know what to look out for and how to respond.
I have lots of personal experiences with people you’d think should be regular guys because their parents are. But they’re not. They just learn how to wear the mask of sanity, to survive. And in todays ignorant culture, they can survive well.
Wild animals are not very controllable, but tame animals are. When you enter its pen a hungry dog will look at you anxiously. A hungry wolf will try to eat you.
I think you’re absolutely right that things have to happen at the “enabler” parenting level, because that’s where the majority is. And those people are relatively tame and trainable... so to speak.
My suburban childhood neighborhood was well populated with families and kids. Here’s a brief description of the families where the troublemakers came from. The children are placed in birth order.
ReplyDelete----
A. Father dweebish civil engineer, mother stern housewife. The children:
1. M, Bookworm geek, mostly kept to himself.
2. F, Social and caring empath.
3. F, Angry, bullying, malcontent. Usually kept to herself.
4. M, Mild mannered honorable athlete.
5, F, Tagalong party girl.
If was virtually impossible to play with #3 without some kind of conflict weirdness happening. She’d physically threaten others, she’d inexplicably flush your toys down the toilet, was always angry always confrontational. The other kids: any conflicts were negotiated and resolved and we’d move on to play another day.
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B. Father tough cop, mother alcoholic housewife. The children:
1. M, Teenage rebel, usually aloof, but never a problem for us.
2. F, Social and caring empath, led younger kids in friendly play.
3. F, So bizzarely sociopathic everybody who knew her avoided her.
4. F, Normal average little girl.
We’d hear a lot of fights happening between father and mother, sometimes kids included. #3 was bookended by normal sisters, who we were always allowed to play with, but #3 herself was a doozy. She routinely bullied, vandalized, tried to entice younger kids into sexual games... to where neighborhood parents declared her off limits for all play. Never reciprocated friendly overtures with normality – everything always had to end with some kind of shit.
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The point to all this, is that the troublemakers were incorrigible despite the example of all the other kids and parents best efforts. What worked best in our little neighborhood culture, was avoiding the troublemakers. The rest of us were always open to change. But they never did.
People can turn out bad in spite of everyone's best efforts just as the most careful motorists can be involved in a serious crash. But the numbers overwhelmingly support the fact that a stable civilized environment has the greatest probability of producing stable civilized adolescents.
DeleteThe environment most likely to produce a sociopath like Richie Incognito is where the parents are harsh, demanding, and genuinely want their children to be feared (ahem...respected) by other people's children.
I guess the sum of the argument is that some people are just naturally born crazy. Those are the minority of cases though.
ReplyDeleteTiny minority. The vast majority of people are the products of their environment.
DeleteTiny minority. The vast majority of people are the products of their environment.
DeleteIf one looks at Switzerland vs Somalia, or the cultures on opposite sides of the Rio Grande (El Paso vs Juarez) this is obviously true. It is a strong variable in the social equation.
But my worst “bullies” were friends (and normal decent guys) of a very well-liked senior associate who I should have been friends with myself. All had been cleverly conned by somebody from that “tiny minority” that I was an enemy who had to be destroyed.
I know the masses are basically ignorant sheep. What I’m trying to figure out is how one can keep a “tiny minority” sociopath from inspiring so much damage.
Without committing a felony?
DeleteIt’s becoming possible to scan brains for physical differences regarding those people. Maybe a device, simpler than “Voight-Kampff”, even handheld, will be the replacement for lie detectors (since psychopaths can pass those). I imagine a plugin phone app but that might be wishing too much...
ReplyDeleteA lot of sociopaths are in positions of power, but we normals have gotten rid of powerful things like slavery, emperors, megalomaniacs... before. I'm sure there'd be a large amount of resistive disinformation spread if such a device became possible for common use.
Of course in lieu of devices, there's changing society. Normal people have to want (need?) to change things.
About my own "tiny minority" sociopath, back in those days my gut instinct was screaming at me but I didn't completely trust it and reacted too slowly. The knowledge wasn't as readily available as it was today. It's everywhere on the internet now. I might have been able to change things if I knew then what I do now. With what little I knew back then, I almost did.
Actually slavery is alive and well, emperors just don't call themselves emperors anymore, and megalomaniacs can be found just about everywhere.
DeleteWith technology going the way it is, it's probably a matter of time before fathers will be able to scan daughters dates for potential of trouble, and the daughter will actually take the results seriously. And employers too... and so on. I’m sure there’d be battles over civil liberties and all that, but we already declare certain citizens to be autistic, ADD, sexual predators, etc...
DeleteAs for the other stuff, slavery may be alive and well, but if you stood on a city street corner petitioning to make it legal you’d probably be mobbed in the not nice way. And emperors and megalomaniacs are freely gulag-ing fewer people to death than they used to.
An easily understood presentation of how things were changed might be good. I know changing the ‘common wisdom’ involves the mob, specifically the ‘ballast’ portion of any society, those 25-50 percent of all humans who I believe inherently, psychologically, follow/respect/demand traditional behaviors and pleasures. Remember, those same people who once publicly embraced slavery as natural, consider it an unacceptable today.
There has to be a way to get them to think differently, before they impulsively and collectively get into the mob behavior that alpha bullies love to take full advantage of.
Ok kid, just pass through the psychological profile machine before meeting my daughter.
DeleteNot likely. It's the environment you're raised in, not your DNA.
Now you've got me confused. Your comment from another thread:
ReplyDelete“We may live in the space age but humans have stone age brains. People have both feet firmly in the jungle. They're just violent animals covered by a thin veneer of civility.”
...implies DNA is at the core of everybody. Environment is the "thin veneer"?
Based on my experience, normal people (median, average, residing in the hump of the population bell curve...) are easier to raise to be civil. Those at the extremes less so.
Humans are just animals, but they have two behavioral characteristics that make them relatively easy to civilize. Humans are very imitative, particularly when they're young and they are also creatures of habit.
DeleteA human animal that spends its adolescence in a civilized environment will tend to imitate the behavior of those around it. Over time, the civilized behavior consistently role modeled and enforced by the adults in its life will become a life long habit.
Family and school, the two social institutions that are supposed to maintain this civilized environment are failing to do their job. In the case of bullies, parents knowingly and intentionally fail to civilize their offspring. They consider civilized behavior to be a sign of weakness. Your children behave themselves because they don't have the strength to do otherwise. This criminal behavior on the part of the bully's parents is supported and reinforced by a culture that rewards violence and cruelty while punishing and shaming those who are not violent. In just about any venue you can observe the least violent or otherwise least powerful male, the one that no one fears is almost always the one with the lowest degree of social status. These individuals are described as "scapegoats" in my Bully Enablers post.
People behave like animals unless purposely conditioned to do otherwise. That's what I meant by my claim that environment was responsible for producing bullies and just about all other criminals. The environments of family and school are failing to civilize adolescents.
In trying to understand why I got mobbed, I learned that there were only 3 instigators out of 100 or so enablers. I believe two were psychopaths, the other more garden-variety sociopathic (bad parenting) in nature. In that situation there was no alpha reward, only that of maintaining their (the 3) control over their own easy money lazy employment. They achieved this by successfully persuading a few highly respected hardworking tribal elders, so to speak, that I was a threat to the tribe, then let their "tribal protection" instincts take over. And the rest of the enabler mob followed. I had no choice but to leave - there was no way possible for me to present my case let alone any investigation or trial.
ReplyDeleteApparently family and schools fail not only in stopping obvious bullying, but in training people how to discern and deal with threats to their organizations. This culture makes bullying doubly easy for the bullies to do.