Category Archives: Etiquette

Cold Turkey For Creepy Kids And Their Even Creepier Parents

Etiquette, Fascism, Intellectualism, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West, The Zeitgeist

Here is a follow up on our pro-civilization, Adult Lives Matter, reclaim-the-childhood crusade. To our dossier on a child-deifying nation, we add the insanity that is the non-dilemma below.

A DRUDGE headline blares today: “Parent: My 8-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse…”

You don’t need to read this drivel in which a dumb parent “shares” his dumber, self-inflicted malady so publicly—public writing has turned into anti-intellectual public advocacy, hasn’t it? Conjure and share your cultivated malady, and abracadabra, you are a hero.

Whinging aside, you already knew the following:

* It’s your fault the little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.

* Who gave the gadget to said snot? You did! Take the iPad away.

* Stop paying for your kids’ cell phones and assorted hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

You and I survived without them. If Creepy kid needs to contact crazy in love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Creepy an opportunity to practice a few civilizing habits you refrained from teaching him:

Knock on her door (it’s never a guy these days). Enter when she says so. Address her as Ma’am or Mrs. Ask if you may call mom or dad, PLEASE.

Alternatively, tell him to wait on the corner until you collect him, just like you, his parent, used to do (we walked home, 4-5km each day).

Oh, and if a stranger sidles up to Creepy … you know the rest.

READING:

“Adult Lives Matter: On Kids And Communism.”

“Reclaiming Childhood: They Don’t Make Kids Like They Use To.”

UPDATE III: Is Justin Trudeau a Trauma Victim? (Left-Liberal Discourse)

Addiction, BAB's A List, Canada, Drug War, Education, Etiquette, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Justin Trudeau is no genius, but he seems to limp along despite what some would consider a traumatic childhood. This Barely a Blog exclusive features Stanton Peele, America’s leading, liberal addiction counterculturist, and fellow crusader against the Drug War.

Is Justin Trudeau a Trauma Victim?
By Stanton Peele

Justin Trudeau seems to be a highly successful survivor of what might be considered a traumatic childhood.

I am often cited for my opposition to famed Vancouver addiction doctor Gabor Maté’s trauma theory of addiction—that all addiction can be traced back to childhood trauma, and vice versa. Maté believes such trauma causes permanent brain damage. I find Gabor’s theory reductive, pessimistic, and fatalistic. Most people, after all, outgrow their childhood traumas, as they do their addictions. (I have argued with Gabor about all of this.)

This debate was brought to mind for me by Justin Trudeau’s election as Canada’s prime minister. Mr. Trudeau, after all, didn’t have a happy childhood. We know this because his mother has written about their fractured family life. Margaret Trudeau, herself the daughter of a Vancouver MP, was depicted as a flower-child. She met Pierre Trudeau when she was 18 and he was the Minister of Defense. She married the much older Mr. Trudeau when she was 22 after Pierre became PM.

Her married experience was deeply unhappy. Despite remaining married for 13 years and having three children together, the couple were habitually at odds; they separated after a half-dozen years of marriage and Margret pursued for a time a jet-set lifestyle. Margaret was often at loose ends both during the marriage and afterwards, as she has described in several memoirs, and was hospitalized for “mental illness.”

There are perhaps three theories for Margaret’s psychological problems: that mental disorders have nothing to do with people’s life experience or personality but are simply inbred, that she was always flighty and unstable. Or, finally, that being in a high-profile marriage with a stern, controlling man thirty years her senior was the worst possible situation for someone with Margaret’s disposition. Or maybe it was all three.

“From the day I became Mrs. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a glass panel was gently lowered into place around me, like a patient in a mental hospital who is no longer considered able to make decisions and who cannot be exposed to a harsh light.”

Not very good to hear, or to experience, coming from your mother.

But Justin seems to have weathered this all rather well. In fact, he seems to be the beneficiary of both his parents’ distinctive assets. In the first place, you need to be intelligent and ambitious to become prime minister of a major nation. [Presumably, Stanton, what you say would apply, by logical extension, to George Bush and other dynastic rulers? Justin Trudeau is a rich boy like Jeb Bush, born to privilege, including easy access to the office of PM—ILANA.]

Yet Justin wears these traits well. He doesn’t seem to think of himself as above everyone else (an attitude his father often conveyed). He, as observers have noted, meets and mingles with everybody and considers every citizen and resident of Canada a person on par with himself. This openness and absence of inflated self-importance would seem to come from his mother.

Margaret Trudeau has weathered her own storms, as she wrote in her most recent memoir, published in 2015, The Time of My Life: Choosing a Vibrant, Joyful Future. I know everyone, Canadian or otherwise, has good feelings about this resolution for Mrs. Trudeau. It seems that people are often able to find their own successful level given the opportunity and support to do so.

Meanwhile, Justin’s becoming PM must be quite a source of pride and achievement for her. The two remain extremely close: a picture of an adoring mother and her newly elected son gazing lovingly at one another affirm this impression. (Pierre died ten years ago.)

For his part, Justin does not present himself as an injured victim, the unhappy product of an unhappy marriage. He seems to have born these stresses, thrust on him as a child through absolutely no desire or effort of his own, without resentment. True, he didn’t immediately rise to the top of society, first working as a bouncer, a boxer, a Santa-shopper, and a snowboard instructor before entering politics. [So would you and yours bounce around the world in a zen-like state if you had the family fortune to fall back on—ILANA.]

On the other hand, becoming Canada’s Prime Minister at age 43 (his father was elected at age 48) doesn’t exactly put him in the slow lane, either. Justin has never given the impression that he feels like an abandoned child, or the son of broken marriage or a traumatic childhood. He seems to recognize and appreciate, rather, that he had a privileged upbringing involving parents with disparate, but distinctive, gifts.

It’s all a matter of outlook, isn’t it?

In particular, Justin didn’t become a drug addict. Rather, unlike the scion of another famous political family who opposes pot legalization due to his own drug problems, Patrick Kennedy, Justin favors marijuana legalization. This attitude too seems to have come from his mother. Margaret was once charged with possession of marijuana for having a package of weed delivered to her home. “I took to marijuana like a duck took to water,” she said.

I don’t think she smokes now.

***
Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., is the author (with Ilse Thompson) of Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict. His Life Process Program is available online. His book Addiction-Proof Your Child is a model for the emerging area of harm reduction in addiction prevention. Stanton has been innovating in the addiction field since writing Love and Addiction with Archie Brodsky, He has been a pioneer in noting addiction across substances and activities, in creating harm reduction therapy, and in the nondisease understanding of addiction, as well as in formulating practical, life-management approaches to treatment and self-help. He has published 12 books, and has won career awards from the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies and Drug Policy Alliance. His website is www.peele.net

UPDATE I: Response to Facebook comments:

We libertarians apply the same set of principles without bias to the political class. Justin Trudeau is manifestly moronic, as is “W” (Jeb is not nearly as dumb as “W” and Justin). All are entitled brats. So what if Justin’s mom and dad fought. Let them all decamp to Africa to experience real suffering. Stanton Peele is, however, hardcore in Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control. A very rigorous book.

UPDATE II: Unable, or unprepared, to courteously address my readers, as to the uneven standards implied in a column submitted by himself to Barely a Blog, Stanton Peele writes:

Liana – Can you remove the piece from your website? It was a bad match, I fear.

The snootiness.

My reply:

The name is ILANA.

And no—not after the time spent inputting, adding links (as you, Stanton, did not provide HTML code) and editing text.

One would think you’d be more appreciative of the feature and the generous mention and promotion of your seminal book, Diseasing.

Unseemly behavior.

ILANA Mercer
Author, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Columnist, WND’s longest-standing, paleolibertarian weekly column,
Contributor, The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine & UK’s Libertarian Alliance,
Fellow, Jerusalem Institute for market Studies (JIMS)
www.ilanamercer.com

UPDATE III (11/1): Jack Kerwick uses precision-guided words and phrases—a “scandalous degree of unprofessionalism and hyper-emotionality,” “academic conformity,” “abuse of power”—to describe the anti-intellectual atmosphere during his Ph.D “sentence” at Temple University, dominated by left-liberals who won’t brook dissent (like the encounter above).

The People’s House Or The Pope’s House?

Etiquette, Foreign Policy, Politics, Propaganda, Religion

What was noted in this space on 01.23.15 and years prior will be reiterated again, today: It was an abomination when Mexican President Felipe Calderon was allowed to address a joint session of Congress in May of 2010, it was as unseemly for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have been permitted to issue forth in the same venue earlier this year, and every bit as improper for the Pontiff to insert himself into American politics by doing the same. Via Vatican City (AFP):

Pope Francis is gearing up for potentially his most politically charged trip yet, an eight-day whirlwind visit which will take him from Havana’s Revolution Square in Cuba to the headquarters of the United Nations.

The Argentine, who will become the first pontiff to address a joint meeting of Congress in Washington, has taken advantage of a summer lull at the Vatican to fine-tune his hotly awaited speeches, sources at the Holy See say. …

The American people’s representatives are the traitors here. For it is they who’ve permitted this reoccurring spectacle; it is they who’ve turned the American People’s House into a House for hire; a one-way exchange program for foreign dignitaries.

Of course, this is purely a no-partisan rule and has nothing to do with the fact that the anti-intellectual Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a dreadful cur.

Megyn Kelly ‘Misses’ Trump’s Reaganesque Mic Moment

Elections, Ethics, Etiquette, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism

The story of “Megyn, Jorge, and a Reaganesque Trump” is on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

Donald Trump’s brusque, plainspoken manner masks a fierce intelligence that should not be underestimated. Myself, I had experienced a momentary lapse in judgment with respect to the quality of Fox News Channel’s journalism, during the first primetime Republican debate, in Cleveland, Ohio. Trump, on the other hand, was never blindsided by the nicely-packaged production that is Megyn Kelly. Kelly, in his plain and simple estimation, “was just not very good or professional.”

Indeed, since returning from her post-spat “vacation,” Kelly’s Trump-free broadcasts have been flat. “Off her game,” Trump tweeted out, right away. And while the celebrity anchor is still drawing ratings, this cannot last, absent the biggest news item: Donald Trump. I expected the anchor to come to her senses, and start working hard to get newsmaker Trump back on The Kelly File. This has yet to transpire.

Kelly’s most recent belly flop came while “interviewing” Jorge Ramos, another celebrity newscaster who has been on the receiving end of Trump’s much-needed, manly ministrations.

Ramos works for the Univision network, catering to Hispanics. Although he poses as a reporter, in reality, Ramos is an identity politics activist. This celebrated mediocrity—Ramos made it as one of Time’s “Most Influential People”—crashed a Trump event, held on Tuesday, in Dubuque, Iowa. It was plain that the “ethnic activist” had materialized not to ask Trump a question; but to protest the candidate’s positions and read him the riot act (in a kind of Pidgin English).

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was chased off a Seattle stage by two militant, “Black Lives Matter” movementarians. Ramos, the head honcho of the more-powerful, “Hispanic Lives Matter (Only)” movement, was staging a similar performance, this time against Trump.

And Trump was having none of it.

As is his wont, Ramos began, Trump explained, “ranting and raving and screaming, like a madman, and honestly being very disrespectful to all the other reporters.” I watched the Ramos rant on CNN. (FNC’s ratings are fated to fall, if the network fails to carry future Trump events.) Trump’s gloriously funny description was also factual.

Whereas Kelly began her “Breaking Tonight” segment—what’s that all about?—by “informing” her viewers that Ramos had been booted from the Trump news conference; hers was only half the truth.

And half-truths in journalism help perpetuate wholesale lies. …

Read the rest. “Megyn, Jorge, and a Reaganesque Trump” is on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.