Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
ETA Now that I don’t have a screaming baby on my lap I’d like to note that the column I think is better *also talks about empathy* and, in fact, no one is denying the importance of empathy in these situations at all. It’s just going to be a little difficult for people, I imagine. It is for me.
Yes, they both talk about empathy. I tried to say so two pages ago. And the one you think is better, I think is better too.
-
You know who I've thought about quite a bit? Bailey Junior Kurariki.
By all accounts, he was a bright kid. I wonder what he might have done had his options and luck been better. How did it get to the point where he's a tragic man who exposes his genitals to a visiting journalist?
I think about that in part because I also think about what might have happened to our younger boy if we hadn't held the line in various ways.
I thought about Nicho Waipuka, who was acquitted in the Philip Cottrell case. At the least, he was present at a murderous hate-crime. But you look at him: he has clear signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. He started a long way behind everyone else.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Of course.
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound so terse there. But I’ve had discussions about that word with people who didn’t seem to grasp the immense privilege of being neurotypical in a world designed by and for neurotypicals. It’s just vast.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I think it is a combination of any number of factors – and not just “the decline of men”, as that article I linked to up there. Mental health, abuse, the gun lobby, God, Fox News.
I'm beginning to wonder if there's a real problem somewhere in American schools, tbh.
Also, see the edit on my last comment above. It seems Lanza did have an Asperger diagnosis.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
(And I don’t read that piece as though she’s describing your boys. I’m sorry if I implied that it did.)
She’s somewhat confused about who she’s describing. The names she listed at the top, the young men who have actually committed rampage killings, do look like my boys in many respects, except that my boys are not and will never be rampage killers. I wonder what made those other boys so. “Because: Evil” seems a really rubbish answer to me.
Then she talks about young, poor southern white men with no sense of role or purpose, and that’s a different group. But I don’t think it’s actually an outrage to suppose that they might be adrift because the comfortable roles and social assumptions available to to their fathers are not, for very good reasons, available to them. It’s not a world they made, just one they live in.
Edit: This CBS video is more explicit about Adam Lanza's apparent Asperger status than any other report I've seen. He was bright but apparently only intermittently able to cope in classrooms. He even looks Aspie.
Many people on the spectrum suffer in school environments, but of course nearly all of them don't kill anyone. Can you understand that I have a more direct interest in wondering what the hell happened to this kid than shouting at him about his privilege?
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
Here’s my problem with this idea: let’s say we all agree that testosterone is partly “why” men are more violent than women. Yet we also agree 99.9% of men can squash the urge to go around beating the crap out of things and shooting a bunch of people because: reason; socialisation; humane qualities; not being monstrous. You know, average pleasantness. If most men can do this, why not these men?
Excellent question. What say we take that really seriously and find out what the hell's going on with those men?
Which would involve taking into account a range of factors and not shouting about whether each one is an "excuse" or not. It might even require some empathy.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Keir Leslie,
or you can talk about taking power off the hugely wealthy and empowering most white men (and most black men, and most black women, and most queer people, and so-on.)
Any chance we could squeeze a few differently-abled in the back there?
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
OK, and I ask this sincerely, because I really do want to do something about this, and I genuienly don’t know what, but why does it have to be me? Why isn’t it you guys.
Megan, I am not only the parent of young men, I am the parent of young men whose very nature puts them at the centre of this discussion, fairly or not. I’ve had to develop a strong and literal sense of empathy in order to do that job, because their experience of the world is profoundly different to mine. I understand that difference well enough to be touchy about definitions of privilege.
But I also don’t understand how you can invoke race in a column about gun crime and not mention that young black men are overwhelmingly more likely to die in a gun crime.
Again, I suspect it depends on your approach. If you treat these killings as suicide-by-massacre (and they are arguably that rather than conventional gun crime), you’d perhaps dwell on the fact that the suicide rate of males in the US is four times that of women, and the suicide rate of white males is twice that of African-American males. There may actually be some substance to Wampole’s suppositions:
The suicide rate for African Americans reached a high in 1990 at 12.8 suicides per 100,000 people, but immediately began to drop a year later, with an average decrease of about 0.47 each year for black males.
“Self esteem is higher in African Americans,” said Dr. Amy Weisman, a psychology professor at the University of Miami as an explanation to the differences between minority and white suicide rates.
“African Americans score higher on measures of both individualism and collectivism than do whites. Individualism may give them more self esteem, and collectivistic values offer more community support in times of distress,” Weisman said. “Both of which may play into the lower suicide rates.”
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
If you don’t interpret the column that way, OK. I think there’s a definite argument to be made that it’s an elaborate excuse-away-the-heinousness exercise, though.
It would be fair to say that we are reading it differently, yes.
-
Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Sorta. The words you’ve quoted, inside quote marks, do not appear anywhere in the column you’re quoting.
Um. They really do. The full paragraph:
Gah. I humbly withdraw and apologise to you both. I'm not sure what I did there when I thought I searched for that text on the page.