Monday, January 30, 2023


The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men

Excerpts below from an article in which Tom Nichols describes at length the problem of young men going on murderous rampages. He lists many such events and points out that great anger seems to lie behind them all. He has no solution to the problem they pose however. He can see what the young men are but has no idea of the forces that make them into human timebombs.

Even in his title, however, he goes astray. He refers to them as Narcissists. Narcissism has of course been the subject of much research by psychologists after Freud wrote an influential article on it over a century ago. And Freudian thinking has remained influential. But at least some of it is simply wrong.

And a 1991 study by Paul Wink was very informative about that. He combined three existing measures of narcissism, including the MMPI and CPI, and factor analysed the responses of a heterogeneous sample to them.

The sample responses showed no such thing as as unitary trait of narcissism. Varimax rotated eigenvectors revealed two distinct and uncorrelated traits underlying the "narcissism" questions: Vulnerabiliy and grandiosity.

So it seems that Freud's picture of the narcissist is fiction. The traits he describes do exist but they do not form the coherent syndrome described by him. So talk of narcissism needs to be avoided.

But Nichols is undoubtedly on to something. His use of the term "narcissism" is over-broad but egotism is undoubtedly to be seen in the “Lost Boys” he describes. It has long been my contention that excess ego is at the root of a lot of social problems: Crime generally, for instance. The criminal thinks that what he wants transcends the rights of others.

When (on October 30, 2008) Obama spoke of his intention to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography. He was talking about transforming what he thought American people can and must do. He thought he knew better: Clearly egotistical.

But when we see how widespread the problem of excess ego is, it becomes clear that it is NOT the defining characteristic of the “Lost Boys”. Most egotism does not result in shooting rampages. So we have to look for more than excess ego for our understanding of them.

And a major cause of their disgruntlement is pretty obvious: Men and masculinity are in both the media and the educational system routinely described as "toxic" and men are told that feminine characteristics are the only praiseworthy ones. How would YOU feel if people kept calling you toxic?. Anger is surely an understandable response.

Young men are in effect told by the whole society that they are contemptible. Is it any wonder that some will want to hit back at society as a whole in any way that they can? You reap what you sow.

Most young men do not go on murderous rampages but those who combine great anger with few rewards in life may do so

So the problem is largely traceable to the way feminism of various extremes has become normative thinking in our society. The “Lost Boys” are however only a minor penalty for that thinking. The way feminists have substantially destroyed marriage is the major evil that they have inflicted. Given the punitive divorce laws that have been enacted under feminist influence, it takes a brave or foolish man to get married these days

So no cure for the “Lost Boys” is in sight. But we know what would help. If feminism were to moderate its intolerance of all things masculine, the world would be a much happier place. How about a bit of "equity" for men?


Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.

The NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.

The meeting was held in a classified environment so that the group’s members, representing multiple intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, could more easily share ideas and information. (I was a government employee at the time and held a clearance.) But we could have met in a busy restaurant for all it mattered—the commonalities among these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret. They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace right-wing-extremist conspiracies.

I emerged from the meeting with a lot of interesting puzzle pieces but no answers. Since then, there have been more such attacks, more bodies, more grief—but precious little progress on preventing such incidents. A few recent examples: In 2021, a 15-year-old boy murdered four of his fellow students in his Michigan high school. In 2022, an 18-year-old man carried out a massacre in a Texas school; another, the same age, committed a mass murder in a grocery store in upstate New York. A 21-year-old male attacked a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. A 22-year-old went on a rampage at an LBGTQ nightclub in Colorado.

These attacks are not merely “violence” in some general sense, nor are they similar to other gun crimes classified as “mass shootings” beyond the number of victims. Drug-war shoot-outs and gang vendettas are awful, but they are better-understood problems, in both their origins and possible remedies. The Lost Boys, however, are the perpetrators of out-of-the-blue massacres of innocents. Their actions are not driven by criminal gain, but instead are meant to shock us, to make us grieve, and finally, to force us to acknowledge the miserable existence of the young men behind the triggers.

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"Tinder Translator": taking a swipe at single men

By ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Antonella is an extremely bright and much published writer, now 57, who has had a couple of marriages, so her demolition of a sad misanthropic feminist below is interesting and persuasive.

Perhaps saddest of all is that there are many men who are equally critical of single women. Tolerance of difference seems to be in short supply across the board. My partner and I have huge differences but tolerance of them enables us to have a very enjoyable and probably enduring relationship


A chapter or so into "Tinder Translator: An A-Z of Modern Misogyny", I assumed that author, Aileen Barratt, a British freelance copywriter, was a disillusioned, twenty-something tequila-chugging party beast.

I was startled to discover, as I got further into the book, that she is, in fact, a divorced mother on the cusp of middle age, dedicated to disparaging the men of Tinder, the world’s most popular dating app (67 million annual downloads).

The men on Tinder are, Barratt reports, “dull”.

They are abusive. Angry. Arrogant. Defensive. Degrading.

Entitled. Indifferent. Liars. Mean.

Phobic about commitment. Sexually underwhelming.

Sadistic. Shallow. Shaming. Unloving. Violent.

She refers to them as “douchebags” and “bellends”, “dickheads” and “selfish pricks”. (Imagine the critical response to a dating handbook written by a man who refers to women — “NOT ALL”, as Barratt hurriedly points out — as “whores” and “bimbos”, “gold-diggers” and “bitches”.)

Conversely, women are “f*cking sublime” — “babes” and “goddesses”, if you will. Women, Barrett continues, “are my fortress and my inspiration. Women built and sustain me. Almost all of the most constant, nurturing and joyous figures in my life have been women. The majority of music, art and literature that has shaped me was forged from the souls of wonder women.”

Really?

“Wonder women” like, say, French seminal feminist Simone de Beauvoir, whose sexual hypocrisy led to her breaking the spirits of the underage adolescent girls she sexually groomed for partner Jean-Paul Sartre’s delectation?

“Nurturing” women such as British heiress and child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell?

“Joyous” women such as Rosemary West, who beat, prostituted, and murdered her daughters?

Or another example, from my own life: the woman who beat “and glassed almost to death” her former boyfriend: an artistic, gentle, well-educated son of my friends.

After punching him — he refused to engage — she hurled his PlayStation controller at his forehead and caved in his right temple, viciously abusing him verbally throughout.

By the time the police turned up, the apartment was “soaked” in blood.

My point is that women are just as capable of sexual, and non-sexual abuse as men, particularly with those weaker than themselves and with those they know will not retaliate.

Logic, too, is thin in the book. “I am queer,” Barratt announces, “but I have only ever dated cishet (heterosexual) men.” How, in a world in which language has meaning, is that even possible?

Can one claim to be vegan despite regularly eating meat? Is it possible to self-identify as a murderer if one has never killed anyone? And if it is possible, why does Barrett then pillory married men for self-identifying as single on Tinder (“a special kind of dickhead”)?

Or is self-identification valid only if it doesn’t intrude on Barratt’s joyless romantic exploits?

At the core of the book is Barratt’s frustration at the men she meets online, many of whom apparently have little interest in pursuing relationships with her. They prefer other women. Sometimes, it’s because — incredibly — they don’t want to date a single mother (“When I told another guy I had a kid, he said he wouldn’t be able to meet up for our date after all, because he had to shovel fertiliser into his raised beds”).

It is, to Barratt, incomprehensible that a man may not want a relationship with a time-poor divorcee, that they may not want involvement with the Little Shop of Horrors that co-parenting can become, or to feel responsible for a child that is not theirs. Prior to becoming a single mother, I was this very man: uninterested in domesticity or dating fathers.

I certainly had no interest in further damaging a damaged child.

The fact that I am a woman — biologically, legally, and by inclination — would, according to Barratt’s prejudicial template, justify these desires. I was rebelling against the limited patriarchal behavioural template! But a man expressing the same desires is, in her book, simply a “dickhead” (“Writing ‘no single mums’ on your dating bio is a major fail”).

Like the men Barratt reviles, I had a right to these desires — they were, and remain, reasonable, but her perception is limited.

For example, Barratt understands sex as recreational in essence — something people do with each other when the mood takes them, rather than a significant statement. In one chapter, she recalls that after the usual sex-on-impact, her lover tells her that he has “a heart of stone”. Ignoring this clear statement of indifference, she continues sleeping with him. When, after weeks of casual sex, he asks her to a gig, she excitedly interprets the event as “big”, an indication of his deepening interest.

Of course, he eventually dumps her.

To Barratt, being asked out is an evolution, rather than a precursor, of the most intense intimacy known to mankind. It’s a topsy-turvy universe in which women place themselves in potentially perilous situations with strangers without the basic safeguards of courtship (familiarising yourself with the partner and his social circle before placing yourself in a vulnerable position), and then express surprise when men lie and leave.

“These lone wolves can literally tell you you’re the kind of girl they could see themselves marrying one day and, as long as they have previously stated they don’t want a relationship right now or whatever, still be confused as to how you could have possibly gotten the wrong impression,” she writes.

Failing to see how her own acceptance of trivialisation contributes to her repeated disappointment, Barratt continues blaming men. These feminist tropes not only dilute the social impact of feminism, but serve to further divide, rather than unite, the sexes.

It is a shame, because her stated quest is noble: to encourage women to reject disrespectful behaviour from men when dating online, and to stay safe.

Her means of achieving these aims ensures ultimate failure.

By the end of the book, I was tempted to ghost Barratt myself, repelled by the awful, grinding tone. Rejected and bruised by the dating world, she has constructed a protective verbal carapace she markets as “humour” and as a philosophy to other single women, but far from being a feminist landmark, this book uses male behavioural ineptitude on a dating app to exorcise rage and pain and sadness.

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Juvenile Crime Surges, Reversing Long Decline

Leftist "soft on crime" policies have ratcheted up so it is as we must expect

A 13-year-old boy ran through the Bronx streets one May afternoon last year, chased by two teens on a scooter. Surveillance video showed him frantically trying to open the doors of an assisted-living facility. The scooter peeled onto the sidewalk and sped toward him. A 15-year-old boy riding on the back pointed a handgun and fired multiple times, police say.

Nearby, 11-year-old Kyhara Tay stood outside a beauty salon after school, eating chicken wings and waiting for her friends to finish getting their nails done. A stray bullet struck the pavement in front of her, authorities say. Another pierced her stomach. She was rushed in critical condition to Lincoln Hospital 2 miles away, where she died that night.

Violence among children has soared across the country since 2020, a stark reversal of a decadeslong decline in juvenile crime.

In the U.S., homicides committed by juveniles acting alone rose 30% in 2020 from a year earlier, while those committed by multiple juveniles increased 66%. The number of killings committed by children under 14 was the highest in two decades, according to the most recent federal data.

One consequence is a mounting toll of young victims. The number of juveniles killing other juveniles was the highest it has been in more than two decades, the 2020 federal data show.

Kyhara was one of 153 victims in New York City under the age of 18 shot in 2022, the most in at least six years and more than the 127 total minors shot in 2018 and 2019 combined, according to police data. The 13-year-old boy being pursued was unharmed, authorities say.

In New York City, police said 124 juveniles committed shootings during 2022, up from 62 in 2020 and 48 in 2019.

“The tragedy here is that we’re talking about a gunman who is too young to be called a gunman because he’s 15 years old,” said Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark after Kyhara’s death. “These ages make you weep.”

The jump comes amid an overall wave of violent crime in the first two years of the pandemic—particularly homicides and shootings—that swept through urban and rural areas alike.

Police, prosecutors and community groups attribute much of the youth violence to broad disruptions that started with the pandemic and lockdowns. Schools shut down, depriving students of structure in daily life, as did services for troubled children. Increased stress compounded a swelling mental-health crisis. Social-media conflicts increasingly turned deadly.

Easier access to firearms for juveniles has also played a role, including the rise of homemade ghost guns and a surge in illegal firearms trafficking. Heightened gang activity was a factor too in some places such as New York City, authorities say.

The nationwide wave began to ebb in 2022, but in some communities, shootings involving minors have continued to surge. In Washington, D.C., there were 214 firearm-related arrests of children in 2022, a higher count than each of the prior three years. Sixteen juveniles were shot to death last year in the district, compared with nine in 2021.

Dora Villarreal, the top prosecutor in Rock Island County, Ill., said she has never seen such young teens so frequently involved in shootings and firearms cases in her county of about 143,000. “During Covid, without school being a constant kind of stabilizing structure for many of our kids, that has helped lead unfortunately to this rise in violent crime,” she said.

Since schools reopened, the arrests have continued to rise. Ms. Villarreal said residual impacts of the pandemic—including mental-health issues, drug abuse and the breakdown of routines—have all contributed. In 2020, 36 juveniles were arrested for gun-related cases in her county. As of late December 2022, the number was 64.

A still from surveillance footage released by the New York Police Department shows the alleged gunman in Kyhara Tay’s killing on the back of a scooter on May 16, 2022.

Fourteen-year-old K’Mya Marshall could see the changes among the young people she knew in her West Philadelphia neighborhood over the past two years.

After months of isolation, teens became less able to cope with conflict and more frequently lashed out over small disputes, she said. With less to do, many also drifted deeper into social-media circles where guns and crime were glamorized.

Firearms were seemingly everywhere, as gun sales skyrocketed during the pandemic. Kids got them from family members, purchased them on Instagram for a few hundred dollars, or bought homemade ghost guns from other teens.

“They think it’s cool,” said K’Mya, a team leader at the Young Chances Foundation, a community organization that seeks to prevent violence. “They want that gun to define themselves and for people to be scared of them.”

Late last year, a teenage friend of hers was shot to death walking in their neighborhood. Their school held a 10-second moment of silence a few days later. Such mourning has become increasingly routine in Philadelphia as the number of juveniles murdered jumped to 81 over the past two years, from 52 in all of 2019 and 2020.

“My friend got caught in the crossfire just trying to enjoy her day,” she said.

Last year, a total of 117 juveniles were arrested for shootings in Philadelphia, up from 43 in 2019, according to police. They include a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy both charged with murder after they were allegedly involved in a September gun battle outside a West Philadelphia recreation center in the middle of the day. Tiffany Fletcher, a 41-year-old employee of the center and a mother of three, was outside when she was fatally struck by a stray bullet.

The city council recently made permanent a 10 p.m. summertime curfew for teens from ages 14 to 17. “The new curfew law is meant to protect young people from being victims of crime while the City works towards other measures that reduce gun violence,” said City Councilor Katherine Gilmore Richardson, who proposed the measure, in a written statement.

The rise in juvenile shootings hasn’t been limited to the biggest cities. Peoria, Ill., population 112,000, saw eight juvenile homicide victims in 2021, according to police data. In 2020, there were none.

Stricter punishments

Some prosecutors and law enforcement leaders argue that the shift away from a more punitive approach for juveniles toward intervention programs and rehabilitation has gone too far and corrections are needed.

Ms. Clark, the Bronx district attorney and a Democrat, supported a 2017 New York law that ended the automatic prosecution of 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, raising the age to 18. Most states had already passed similar “Raise the Age” laws.

Now, Ms. Clark said, she wants to be able to try more gun possession cases in criminal court, which would allow her office more authority over what sentences to seek. She said under the Raise the Age law, too many juveniles arrested on gun possession charges are being released quickly because such cases are typically sent to family court—and some of those minors are going on to commit more serious crimes or are being murdered themselves.

Her office cited the case of a 17-year-old who was arrested three separate times on gun possession charges and sent to family court each time, before being arrested for murder, all within 12 months.

“I don’t want to lock them up and throw away the key because they’re young. But at the same time, they have to know the consequences for their actions,” said Ms. Clark.

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Who’s More Irrational, the Religious or the Irreligious?

There are very few things conservatives, liberals, and leftists agree on. But if they are irreligious, they all agree that religious Americans are more irrational than irreligious Americans.

It is a secular axiom that secularism and secular people are rooted in reason, whereas religion and the religious are rooted in irrationality.

This is what almost every college professor believes and what almost every student in America is taught. Among the intelligentsia, it is an unquestioned fact. It helps explain why, after their first or second year at college, many children return to their religious homes alienated from, and frequently contemptuous of, the religion of their parents—and often of the parents themselves.

At the time in their lives when most people are the most easily indoctrinated—approximately ages 18 to 22—young Americans hear only one message: If you want to be a rational person, you must abandon religion and embrace secularism.

Most young Americans are never exposed to a countervailing view at any time in their college life. (That’s why you should expose your college-aged child, grandchild, niece, or nephew to this column.)

Yet, this alleged axiom is not only completely false, it’s backward. The truth is that today, the secular have a virtual monopoly on irrational beliefs.

One proof is that colleges have become the most irrational institutions in the country. Not coincidentally, they are also the most secular institutions in our society. In fact, the former is a result of the latter.

One could provide examples in every area of life. Here are but a few:

Only secular people believe “men give birth.”

Only secular people believe that males—providing, of course, that they say they are females—should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

Only secular people believe that a young girl who says she is a boy or a young boy who says he is a girl should be given puberty-blocking hormones.

Only secular people believe that girls who say they are boys should have their healthy breasts surgically cut off.

Only secular people believe it is good to have men in drag dance (often provocatively) in front of 5-year-olds.

Only secular people agree with Disney’s dropping use of the words “boys and girls” at Disneyland and Disney World.

Only secular people believe that “to be colorblind is to be racist.” That is what is taught at nearly all secular (and religious-in-name-only) colleges in America today.

Only secular people believe that fewer police, fewer prosecutions, and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.

Far more secular Americans than religious Americans believed that the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins needed to change their names because “Indians” and “Redskins” were racist—despite the fact that most Native Americans didn’t even think so.

Who was more likely, secular or religious Americans, to support keeping children out of schools for two years; forcibly masking 2-year-olds on airplanes; and firing unvaccinated police officers, airplane pilots, and members of the military?

How many Western supporters of Josef Stalin—the tyrant who murdered about 30 million people—were irreligious, and how many were religious?

Stanford University, a thoroughly secular institution, just released an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” It informs all Stanford faculty and students of “harmful” words they should avoid and the words that should replace them.

Some examples:

Stanford asks its students and faculty not to call themselves “American.” Rather, they should call themselves a “U.S. citizen.” Why? Because citizens of other countries in North America and South America might be offended.

Is that rational?

Stanford asks its faculty and students not to use the term “blind study.” Why? Because it “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Instead, Stanford faculty and students should say “masked study.”

Two questions: Is Stanford’s claim that being blind is not a disability rational or irrational? And what percentage of those who make this claim are secular?

The list of irrational (and immoral) things secular people believe—and religious people do not believe—is very long. As a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton puts it: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Yet, many people believe that the religious, not the secular, are the irrational people in our time.

That, ironically, is just another irrational belief held by the secular. And, of course, it is self-serving—just as is the belief that more people have been killed by religious people (meaning, essentially, Christians) than by secular people. Yet, that, too, is irrational—and false. In the last century alone, 100 million people were murdered by secular—and anti-religious—regimes.

Yes, religious people have some irrational, or at least non-rational, beliefs.

But two points need to be made in this regard.

One is that the religious beliefs that most people call “irrational” are not irrational; they are unprovable. For example, the beliefs that there is a transcendent Creator and that this Creator is the source of our rights are not irrational; they are unprovable. Atheism—the belief that everything came from nothing—is considerably more irrational than theism.

The other point is that human beings are programmed to believe in the non-rational. Love is often non-rational—love of our children, romantic love, love of music and art, love of a pet. Our willingness to engage in self-sacrifice for another is often non-rational—from the sacrifices children make for parents and parents for children to the sacrifices made by non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

What good religion does is provide its adherents with a moral, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually deep way to express the non-rational. Therefore, they can remain rational everywhere outside religion. The secular, having no religion within which to innocuously express the non-rational, often end up doing so elsewhere in life.

So only the religious believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but they do not believe that men give birth.

Meanwhile, the irreligious don’t believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but only they believe that men give birth.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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