LA Times Scott Adams on the dangerous young man
One of those times you hope he is wrong but can’t find where he is.
A dismal evaluation from Scott Adams
Published
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum
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I feel badly for Scott and his family. What they went through is tragic. But he has limited his view to what happened to his own. There were several answers from professionals who understood his pain, but tried to get him to see that helplessness is not the answer. There are people out there who have had the same kinds of things happen to them and the outcome was very different.
Again, I have great sympathy for he and his family. But instead of throwing up his hands in despair, why not look for ways to help the next one?
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Troubled kids are frequently the product of troubled parents. Scott Adams is clearly troubled. The stark choice that he says parents face is delusional.
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In this instance, Adams was pretty open about how things came to be. However, the appearance of just giving up is disturbing and having no hope even more so. If I were close to him, I would be reaching out to make sure he is ok. Regularly.
Sometimes the bootstraps break and support is needed. This appears to be the case here.
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It was his stepson, and he was already broken when he got him.
But parenting may be part of it, though I have seen families with good kids and one broken one, so it isn’t all of it.
In any case, I can’t prove Adams is right, but I do think that once the kid is at the facial tatoo phase, it’s probably too late.
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…”it’s probably too late.”…
It doesn’t have to be.
I understand where you are coming from, but that is still a defeatist attitude. I think I know you well enough to know that you would fight like hell to do whatever you could to save your kids/grandkids. I know I would. Some fights are lost and these are the most devastating.
But wouldn’t you want to help prevent the next parent/grandparent from going through what you had? Scott could help himself by helping others. A lost fight is NOT a lost war.
If I appear overly optimistic, forgive me. I have had my fair share of fights in my life. Some too hard to even think about. And not all have been won. But I will never give up the war to save my kids or grandkids. And neither should any one else.
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I want to believe Adams wrong, but so far no one has offered any evidence to the contrary.
Hope is not evidence.
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There is enough evidence that it doesn’t have to be how Scott sees it. He is in a very dark place and understandably so. But anecdotal evidence is not the end.
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Raising children in a complex industrial society is very challenging. Cost alone is huge. Income levels often need daycare with parents or parent working.
Medical care, education, discipline, values are all factors that can increase the stress. And this is for healthy and wanted children. Which really puts a premium on effective family planning.
We are past the Third World status of needing lots of children to ensure that some survive, can work, and take care of parents in old age. Go forth and multiply was necessary in primitive times to have labor and warriors. It makes little sense today.
Hillary Clinton was mocked for “It Takes a Village”, but it is so true, especially in homes where both parents are absent for work or other reasons. Add in the trend of not allow socialization to proceed in play rather than a myriad of structured activities and we get people with little empathy or social skills.
The dark web will take care of the rest.
IMO
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So?
What do we do with these broken young men, regardless of how they got that way?
Isolate them with their own kind and let nature take its course?
It’s a sickening concept but the alternatives seem to be euthanasia or waiting till they take a dozen or so good kids with them.
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“What do we do with these broken young men, regardless of how they got that way?”
For starters we make it much more difficult for them to get a gun. Duh!
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We already have the means for that in place, We have for almost 30 years, but liberal prosecutors and educators keep sabotaging it.
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How about allowing abortion for parents who are too distracted to raise children?
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How do you abort the parent?
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There is a fine line between madness and genius. I know several folks who had serious issues with drugs, booze, promiscuity, and some anti-social behavior when younger, but turned into model, successful citizens when in their 30’s and 40’s.
Every society has them. Only ours arms them with high powered guns before they bloom.
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RE: “What do we do with these broken young men, regardless of how they got that way?”
Isolate them, as you say. Some may be recoverable, others we may learn to recover.
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“Isolate them”
Sure, put them in concentration camps.
We could form committees of local respectable Christians in each town to decide who needs to go. No more troublemakers. No more wearing hoodies. No more misguided youths who don’t want to pray on the 50-yard line. Gone.
That old idea of waiting for a person to commit a crime before sending them to prison is so 20th century.
Brilliant!
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The VA Tech, Parkland, Highland Park shooters and many others had demonstrated they were dangerous by committing crimes which were then not prosecuted to spare them jail or a criminal record, which would have made buying firearms unlawful.
Brilliant!
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The old idea of helping children that can be helped and learning how to help those we can’t is what I have in mind, and stated quite clearly.
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Baloney. Now you are just not willing to own what you actually said.
As a reminder, we were talking about “broken young men” and not children. Your solution – “isolate them.”
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RE: “Now you are just not willing to own what you actually said.”
I won’t own up to your interpretation of my statements.
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“I won’t own up to your interpretation of my statements.”
I know. I just said so.
We have been here before. You frequently post things that you should have thought more about and later just pretend they mean something else.
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Good grief, Paul. You can’t use his own words. IT just confuses him
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Adams, from the article: “When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options…1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son.”
That’s about right, in my (less intense than Adams’) experience. I don’t mean to imply that society has an obligation to anyone, but to stress a truth that too few appreciate: Parents of troubled children who seek help tend to find there isn’t any.
First, it is hard to get a reliable psychiatric diagnosis. That can take months, even years. Then, or in the meantime, it is hard to get a treatment protocol that actually works. There seem to be a million things you can try, but the more you try the more you realize there is nothing you actually can do.
The “dangerous young man problem” is real. It is about time people started facing up to it, instead of pretending it is something else.
Personally, I think culture is the solution that biological evolution gave us for dealing with such things. That is why it is so sad to see our culture so degraded as it is.
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“That is why it is so sad to see our culture so degraded as it is.”
Define “degraded.”
By almost every objective measure our society is better than it was in, say, the 1950s.
I think you are speaking as an old fart who is nearing the end and is not keeping up with changing times. Such griping is ancient as in…
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” – Socrates ~400BC
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RE: “By almost every objective measure our society is better than it was in, say, the 1950s.”
Name one.
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Okay.
Poverty rate.
Crime rate.
Other significant changes are hard to quantify. For example, in the 1950s racial discrimination was legal in many states. Now it is not. In the 1950’s homosexuals lived in constant fear of exposure, prosecution and abuse. Now they don’t. In the 1950s many professions were closed to women. Now they are not.
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Great. Now tell us how the things you mention qualify as objective measures and, specifically, measures that show our society is better than it was.
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You are obviously not capable of an adult conversation.
You asked for one. I gave you two that are quantifiable. I added some more which are real, important but harder to quantify.
Maybe, instead of such childishness you can tell us why you think our culture is “so degraded.” Unless you have something specific in mind, I believe – based on past evidence – that you are referring to the fact that straight white men no longer enjoy unquestioned hegemony as they did in the “good old days.” If that is not right, feel free to set me straight.
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Lynchings are down substantially. Covenants against minority and Jewish home buyers are gone. Lifespan has increased. Child mortality dropped from 40/1000 to 7/1000, better if you don’t live in the Deep South. Maternal mortality also dropped substantially (for now). Still, A/C opened up the South for business.
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Degraded enough that parents of clearly dangerous young men placate them by buying them firearms in the hopes they will shoot someone else.
In my Cajun culture of the 50s. a boy of good character was given a knife when he turned 11. We carried those knives everywhere, including at school.
There were fights between teenage boys, as there always have been, but I never saw one of those knives come out in a fight.
If a boy misbehaved, his father took his knife. Your knife was your sign of your father’s confidence. The only boys who did not carry a knife were those who had lost their father’s trust.
By your definition, we should have been a violent society, but we didn’t cut or shoot anyone.
Go ahead, name the Cajun mass shooter.
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Uh, when you were a boy, nobody could go into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle with 30 round magazines. Let’s return to the good old days!
I do not know about “Cajuns,” but Louisiana has been on the top of the gun violence leader board for decades. So, those armed children of your youth have grown into adults at each other’s throats with guns.
Currently it is number two, just a fraction behind Mississippi. You must be proud! And armed society is a civil society, right?
You know very little if anything about the parents involved. And you have the benefit of hindsight. But, of course, you have to accuse somebody other than those manufacturing, promoting, and selling the kind of mass murder weapons that such pitiful individuals are attracted to and which NOBODY had a legitimate need for.
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“Uh, when you were a boy, nobody could go into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle with 30 round magazines. ”
When I was a boy, you could order one by mail from an ad in the back of a comic book. Standard magazine was 15 rounds but 30 and 50 round drum mags were available
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_carbine#Ammunition
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Uh, you think I do not know the difference between and M1 and an AR15?
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They are both light weight, compact semi-automatic rifles with medium power cartridges.
The Ruger Mini-14 was basically a .223 successor and the AR 15 was a redesign and upgrade.
Perhaps you are confusing the M1 rifle with a .30 -06 high power cartridge and the M1 Carbine whish used a .30 cartridge of about 1/3 the power. The M1 rifle was succeeded by the M14 in .308(7.42mm)
The M-14 was abandoned in favor of the M16 because a soldier could carry many more rounds of .223 ammo and the military determined that is was better to wound an enemy soldier than kill him outright.
But the M1 rifle and M1 Carbine are two entirely different platforms.
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From your source. . .
“Categorizing the M1 carbine series has been the subject of much debate. Although commonly compared to the later German StG 44 and Russian AK-47, the M1 and M2 carbines are under-powered and outclassed.[18] Instead, the carbine falls somewhere between the submachine gun and assault rifle”
I stand by my original comment.
Uh, when you were a boy, nobody could go into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle with 30 round magazines. Let’s return to the good old days!
And Louisiana’s gun death standing puts the lie to your pollyanna claims about an armed society being a civil society. Those armed children of your youth grew up to be a bit more violent than most other Americans.
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Violence in Louisiana. like most states, is concentrated in a few large cities, mostly Greater New Orleans
Cajun country is pretty safe and freindly
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You stand by your original comment?
The one conflating the .30-06 M1 Rifle and the .30 Carbine with about 1/3 the power?
THE .223 used in the AR-15, M-16 and A4 has better performance at longer ranged, but again about 1/3 the power of the .30-06
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“Violence in Louisiana. like most states, is concentrated in a few large cities, mostly Greater New Orleans”
I knew that you would go there. Here is something you seem not to know – almost every state has large cities. One of the safest states – California – has several. So does New York. So does Massachusetts. So does Canada.
There is a culture of violence in the states of the Confederacy. It is – IMO – the aftereffect of slave culture rippling through the generations. I vividly remember my high school days in Georgia where every boy carried and brandished a knife at school, white men carried shotguns to the polls on election day, and my fellow teenagers took pleasure in running down dogs with their cars – my own was killed that way.
You can tell yourself that the violence in Louisiana is limited to those “urban” people you always blame – it isn’t.
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“You stand by your original comment?”
Yes. Read it again. It is true.
Even your own source says that the M1 carbine falls short of the fire power of a modern assault rifle.
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Here is a comparison of a handgun (9mm), M1 Carbine, AK47, AR-15 and M1 Rifle.
9mm Parabellum 390 ft-lbf
M1 carbine energy 967 ft⋅lbf
AK 47 energy 1302 ft-lbf
AR 15 1300 ft-lbf
M1 Rifle 2872 ft-lbf
The M1 Carbine is about 3 times the energy of the handgun, but only about 1/3 of the M1 Rifle. It is a little less than the more modern AK and AR, but in that group. Much more than a handgun and much less than a standard rifle.
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You really think this is about the specs of guns?
It is about the fact that the weapons of war did not used to be marketed to “broken young men” when you were a boy packing a knife in the bayou. Now they are barraged with messages to get their man license renewed by playing army man with an assault rifle.
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Did you bother to read the list?
The M1 carbine available by mail in those days was only marginally less powerful than the ARs. Far more powerful than the handguns used in most shootings.
Yet we didn’t have mass shootings. The weapons haven’t changed much, but people have.
We don’t have a gun problem, we have a responsibility problem.
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