Tuesday, July 24, 2018







Why protecting your kids from failure is not helpful

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment and frustration, and you often have to start again.

While this is logical, it actually has the opposite effect. Children and adolescents in Australia appear less able to cope than ever before.

The problem is, in our efforts to protect children, we take valuable opportunities for learning away from them. Failure provides benefits that cannot be gained any other way. Failure is a gift disguised as a bad experience. Failure is not the absence of success, but the experience of failure on the way to success.

The gift of coping

When we fail, we experience negative emotions such as disappointment or frustration. When children are protected from these feelings they can believe they are powerless and have no control over mastery.

The answer is not to avoid failure, but to learn how to cope with small failures. These low-level challenges have been called "steeling events". Protecting children from these events is more likely to increase their vulnerability than promote resilience. When adults remove failure so children do not have to experience it, they become more vulnerable to future experiences of failure.

The gift of understanding natural consequences

One of the greatest gifts failure brings is we learn natural consequences to our decisions. It's a very simple concept developed by early behaviourists: "when I do X, Y happens". If I don't study, I will fail; if I don't practice, I may lose my spot on the team.

Allowing children to experience these outcomes teaches them the power of their decisions.

When parents and teachers derail this process by protecting children from failure, they also stand in the way of natural consequences. Studies show children who are protected from failure are more depressed and less satisfied with life in adulthood.

The gift of learning

Mistakes are the essence of learning. As we have new experiences and develop competence, it's inevitable we make mistakes. If failure is held as a sign of incompetence and something that should be avoided (rather than a normal thing), children will start to avoid the challenges necessary for learning.

Failure is only a gift if students see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. This depends on their mindset.

Children with a growth mindset believe intelligence is malleable and can be changed with effort. Those with a fixed mindset believe they were born with a certain level of intelligence. So, failure is a signal for growth mindset children to try harder or differently, but a sign they aren't smart enough for children with a fixed mindset.

Praise should be focused on effort

Praise can be used to compensate and help children feel valuable in the face of failure. We see this when children get a participation ribbon in a running race for coming in last.

But research indicates, paradoxically, this inflated praise has the opposite effect. In the study, when parents gave inflated praise ("incredibly" good work) and person-focused praise (such as "you're beautiful", "you're smart" or "you're special"), children's self-esteem decreased.

Praise that is person-focused results in children avoiding failure and challenging tasks to maintain acceptance and self-worth. This is because praise is conditional on "who they are" rather than their efforts.

Praise for effort sounds like "you worked really hard". This is better because children can control how hard they work, but they can't control how smart or special they are. Children need to be free to learn without there being a risk to their sense of worth.

SOURCE






Mass Migration: "The Fatal Solvent of the EU"

Today, 510 million Europeans live in the European Union with 1.3 billion Africans facing them. If the Africans follow the example of other parts of the developing world, such as the Mexicans in the US, "in thirty years... Europe will have between 150 and 200 million Afro-Europeans, compared with 9 million today". Smith calls this scenario "Eurafrique".

The controversial quota system for migrants has already failed. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Hungary for detaining migrants. European governments cannot stop, deport, arrest or repatriate the migrants. What do the authorities in Brussels suggest? Bring everyone to Europe?

French Jews have fallen victim to a form of ethnic cleansing, according to a manifesto signed by, among others, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

"Far from leading to fusion, Europe's migration crisis is leading to fission", Stanford's historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote. "Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU". Week after week, Mr. Ferguson's prediction seems to be turning into a reality.

Not only does Europe continue to fragment as anti-immigration sentiment gathers political strength, but, as a result of the migrant crisis, the EU's border-free internal zone, Europe's most cherished prize after the Second World War, is now defined as "at risk" by the Italian government, among other governments, such and Austria.

Immigration is also redefining the intra-EU contract.

The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the so called "Visegrad Group", recently called for EU border defense. "We have to have a Europe capable of defending us", Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said as well, after he was invited to join the Visegrad meeting.

The new Italian populist government, after Italy saw more than 700,000 migrants arrive on its shores in the past five years, also embraced a hard-line policy. Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini recently closed Italy's ports to migrant vessels. In Germany, after the German chancellor clashed on immigration with her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, migrant policy could also lead to the "end of Merkel's tenure".

"Italy's new populist government signals a major challenge to the European status quo, but not in the way most observers initially expected", the author Walter Russell Mead recently commented in The Wall Street Journal. "The governing coalition has put the challenge to its euro policy on hold. Instead it is turning to a subject on which the European establishment is more vulnerable: migration".

The entire European political consensus is fracturing under the seismic impact of the migrant wave. Migration to Europe has become a political issue "as toxic as ever", the New York Times just noted about the current debate inside the European Union. The EU's current trouble seems to come from a deafness among the policy elites, who refuse to take into account the problems for their citizens that have followed unvetted mass immigration.

Mass migration in the last years has simply created major troubles for Europe's internal stability. First, there has been a security challenge. According to a new report by the Heritage Foundation:

"Almost 1,000 people have been injured or killed in terrorist attacks featuring asylum seekers or refugees since 2014. Over the past four years, 16 percent of Islamist plots in Europe featured asylum seekers or refugees. ISIS has direct connections to the majority of plots, with Germany targeted most often, and Syrians more frequently involved than any other nationality. Nearly three-quarters of plotters carry out, or have their plans thwarted, within two years of arrival in Europe.

...

"Since January 2014, 44 refugees or asylum seekers have been involved in 32 Islamist terror plots in Europe. These plots led to 814 injuries and 182 deaths."

There is also a severe challenge to ethnic and religious coexistence posed by immigration. French Jews have fallen victim to a form of ethnic cleansing, according to a manifesto signed by, among others, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. "Ten per cent of the Jewish citizens of the Paris region have recently been forced to move because they were no longer secure in certain council estates" the manifesto said. "This is a quiet ethnic cleansing".

The threat Europe is facing if it refuses to close and control the borders is examined by Stephen Smith, an expert on Africa and admired by French President Emmanuel Macron, in his new book, The Rush to Europe: Young Africa on the Way to the Old Continent. Today, he notes, 510 million Europeans live in the European Union with 1.3 billion Africans facing them. "In thirty-five years, 450 million Europeans will face some 2.5 billion Africans, five times as many", Smith predicts. If the Africans follow the example of other parts of the developing world, such as the Mexicans in the US, "in thirty years", according to Smith, "Europe will have between 150 and 200 million Afro-Europeans, compared with 9 million today". Smith called this scenario "Eurafrique". Europe's largest migration wave since World War II has also become an increasingly urgent problem as Europe's indigenous populations continue to age and diminish in number.

The controversial quota system for migrants has already failed. The European governments also cannot really deport migrants. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned the Italian government and ordered it to pay thousands of euros to two dozen immigrants it deported to Libya. Italian authorities had intercepted the migrants in the Mediterranean Sea when they were trying to get to the Italian island of Lampedusa from Libya. Three years later, the European Court again condemned the Italian government for deporting migrants. The European Court of Human Rights also condemned Spain in its judgment to expel of a group of 75-80 migrants from the Melilla enclave. The ECHR then condemned Hungary for detaining migrants. Europe cannot stop, deport, arrest and repatriate the migrants. What do the authorities in Brussels suggest? Bring everyone to Europe?

Andrew Michta, dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, recently wrote that, under this mass migration, European democracies risk their own "decomposition". We will not only see the "fission" of the already fragile European Union, but that of the Western civilization as well.

SOURCE






The MAGA Hat That Wasn’t There



Have you heard of an accused killer named Timothy Kinner?

No? Well, it’s not really surprising if you haven’t. Unless you were paying very close attention to the news on July 1, you wouldn’t have noticed the story.

On the evening of June 30 a Mr. Kinner, a resident of Los Angeles, allegedly entered an apartment in a refugee-resettlement complex in Boise, Idaho. He was carrying a knife, and started stabbing people at the party, most of them immigrant children. The nine victims were from Syria, Ethiopia and Iraq. One of them — the 3-year-old birthday girl — later died in the hospital.

With all those puir wee bairns, the attack should have been a top news story for weeks. Especially since the victims were black or brown “refugees”. Their photos should have been shown over and over again on every news broadcast. Nancy Pelosi should have been tut-tutting on the floor of Congress about the puir wee bairns.

But it didn’t happen. The story quickly disappeared. If you’re wondering why, take a look at the photos at the top of this post: Timothy Kinner is the man on the left.

On the other hand, you’re probably aware of a man named Jarrod Warren Ramos, the accused killer of five people at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. Mr. Ramos committed his alleged atrocity just two days before Mr. Kinner’s. The story hit the news big time, and stayed there. It was prominent enough to merit its own Wikipedia page.

Jarrod Ramos is the man on the right in the photo at the top of this post. He and Timothy Kinner share certain characteristics: each has long hair and an apparent sullen attitude. But there are certain significant differences, as you can see.

If Mr. Ramos — or any other white man — had attacked the “refugees” at that birthday party in Boise, the story would still be making above-the-fold headlines every day. Talking heads on all the major media channels would still be discussing it every evening. There would be massive anti-racism protests on the Mall in Washington DC. The photo of the appealing wee bairn would be on everyone’s TV screen all the time. It would be Trayvon Martin on steroids.

But it didn’t happen that way. Once the photo of the sullen man with the dreadlocks appeared, the story disappeared from the national news. I looked for it two weeks later, and it was gone.

When black people kill black people, it just isn’t news.

Black people kill black people nearly every day in Chicago — on some weekends there are six or eight shooting fatalities in the city — and not infrequently little children are victims of stray bullets. But without a white man as perpetrator, there’s zero interest in the story. It merits a couple of lines in the local news, maybe. Ho hum, another shooting in the city. And now for the weather…

And there’s another reason why the Boise story faded away: it can’t be a “hate crime” when a black man kills black people. That’s what the Boise police chief said about Timothy Kinner — no evidence of a hate crime. And without a white man committing a hate crime, it’s not a very interesting story.

But back to Jarrod Ramos. After the massacre in Annapolis, the media were slavering for a Trump supporter as the perp. They knew the shooter was white, so that was a head start. A man named Conor Berry, a reporter for the Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, tweeted that the killer had dropped a MAGA hat in the offices of the Capital Gazette during his shooting spree. It wasn’t true, of course. And it hadn’t even been a rumor — the reporter just made it up out of whole cloth. But if you hang out in progressive circles, it makes sense: the murderer was white, carried a “long gun”, and shot a bunch of people. How could he not be a Trump supporter?

Poor Mr. Berry was forced to resign his position a few days later.

It’s been a pattern in mainstream media ever since Trump won the Republican nomination two years ago: whenever some white guy shoots people, the media snoids immediately speculate that he’s Trump supporter. So far they’ve always been disappointed. Oh, I’m sure an occasional Trump supporter runs a red light or gets drunk and punches somebody. But I’ve haven’t heard about avowed Trump supporters killing people. And if there were any such, you can be sure the media would be shrieking about them.

Funnily enough, there have been several mass killers who were progressives and Obama supporters. For example, the late James Hodgkinson, who shot up the congressional baseball practice session last year. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that he was a “left-wing activist”.

Another one may have been the late Stephen Paddock, the man who massacred 58 people in Las Vegas last fall. Although his ideological leanings are not entirely clear, he was definitely not a Trump supporter.

The left-wingers in the media — which means almost everyone in the media — haven’t given up hope. They’re expecting a Trump supporter to step up any day with an uncontrolled gun and shoot a lot of brown people out of “hate”. They know that a MAGA hat will appear at the crime scene eventually — it’s just a matter of time.

SOURCE





Australia: When Yes means No (?)

"Enthusiastic consent" to sex means "You must explicitly ask for permission to have sex." If it's not an enthusiastic yes, then it's a no.  A lot of perfectly normal sex would become illegal with such a law and consent would still be hard to prove or disprove with such a law.  It would be the ultimate intrusion of government into private life. Even the Fascists did not go that far

A message from Bettina Arndt [bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au]below:


I have just completed a skype interview with Lorraine Finlay, a very brave law lecturer from Murdoch University in Perth, about proposed changes to sexual consent laws in NSW. Lorraine is a former WA State Prosecutor and co-author of the 2015 book “Criminal Law in Australia”.

The NSW Law Reform Commission has been asked to review the laws and the state government is pushing hard to promote these changes. What worries me is that there is hardly anyone involved in the public debate explaining why enthusiastic consent laws are a really bad idea – despite the fact that in America these laws have been in place for decades and the results are very clear. They dramatically shift the burden of proof favouring rape accusers and denying due process rights for young men. Across the United States, legal organisations, law professors and other academics have been speaking out about the damage caused by such laws. Yet, here in Australia, it looks like once again we will allow the feminist narrative to silence proper debate on the issue.

I’ll be letting you know when the Law Reform Commission is seeking further public consultation and hope I can inspire many of you to express your views. Along with this video I am posting some relevant material on my low bar below the video, so you have material you can use to make your arguments. Rest assured that all the women’s organisations will be arguing for enthusiastic consent laws to be introduced – just one more means of pushing for their end goal which is more rape convictions. We need to get active to protect the legal rights of young men. Think of your sons and all the young men you know and love - they will be even more vulnerable if we let these changes go through.  

So here’s the video:



Please help circulate this so we can alert people to what is going on here.


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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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