Category Archives: Family

The Comfort of Strangers

Family, Film, Hollywood, Ilana Mercer, Race, Racism

Thank you all, on Facebook and beyond, for wishing me a happy birthday in so many nice ways.

These many wishes, mostly from strangers, made me think of the one and only message I took away from Gran Torino, an awfully mundane, politically correct flick, in which the white old veteran is depicted as the rank racist; his Hmong neighbors—a South-east Asian minority that contributes significantly to crime in the US—act as founts of multicultural wisdom.

Walt Kowalski, “played with grandstanding gusto and unfakeable star quality by Clint Eastwood,” is treated with callousness by his family and great kindness by the cloistered Hmong, who, paradoxically, attempt to rid the old American of his biases.

Consequently, the veteran character bequeaths his worldly goods, including his prized ride, to his Hmong friends. That made good sense to me.

So often the greatest kindness comes from unrelated strangers.

UPDATE II: Adam Lanza: EVIL, NOT ILL (Guns; There They Go Again)

Crime, Family, GUNS, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

It is at times like this, when news comes of the murder of 20 children and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that I miss my dear friend and intellectual soul-mate Tom Szasz, RIP, more than ever.

One of the last emails he wrote to me—he was a constant in my life for years—was dated Fri 6/29/2012 5:52 PM. It was a response to one of mine. I had complained (kvetched, as we older Jews would say) about the loss of “wisdom, shophia.” He wrote back using the beautiful Greek concept I had invoked.

“As you know I have done that (and so have you). But this is what passes for wisdom now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/abdul-awkal-deemed-mentally-unfit_n_1600273.html
So be it.
Love, Tom.”

Like all brilliant men, Tom was pessimistic. Reality warranted a pessimism of the deepest kind, something we shared. Tom was alluding to the dominant narrative in the Zeitgesit about evil, and the attendant error of medicalizing misconduct.

That ritual has begun. Once again, the true “Mad Hatters”—the self-serving tele-experts, twits of psychology and psychiatry—have gone into high gear.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the exculpation industry has taken its perennial position. And it is that of placing wicked behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions.

To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. These liberals (including most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

As the psychiatric shaman has it, a killer is not evil, but ill. The modern-day witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer.

UPDATE I: CORRECTION. The shooter’s name is Adam Lanza. Media initially named Ryan Lanza, the “suspect’s older brother,” because A. Lanza may have been carrying his brother’s identity document.

UPDATE II: GUNS: THERE THEY GO AGAIN. Displays of evil invariably elicit calls to ban or restrict certain firearms, as these are seen as part of causality. If you’re going to look for root causes, look for the right root causes. I’d look in the direction of permissive, child-centered, progressive parenting, which is conducive to the creation of narcissistic personalities. Progressive, indulgent, child-obsessed parenting is practiced by “conservatives” and liberals alike.

An acrimonious divorce, where the young man was alienated from a father by the Courts, by the mother or by the father himself, or by all the above: these could go toward the making of a monster. However, anti-gun, progressive interests dominate the media, and so one is less likely to hear a rational debate about the role of permissive parenting—where the child is encouraged to think that the universe does and should orbit around him—and the breakdown of the traditional family, in the creation of these monsters.

Here is something I fished out of the Mercer Articles Archive, dated … 2000. The Calgary Herald article I wrote quotes Canadian Professor Marilyn Bowman:

“The prototype aggressor,” explains Bowman, “is a man whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive.” Like all efforts to drum up ignorance, this one can be dangerous.
“…every kind of social problem is analyzed as the outgrowth of low self esteem,” and while “treatment programs to teach people how to love themselves are put forward as the means of raising self-esteem,” not only is “the relationship between emotion and well being not robust, causal or meaningful,” but, on the contrary, there is a dark side to self-esteem.

When Looks Can Kill

Ethics, Family, Islam, Media, Middle East, Morality, Multiculturalism

When honor killings are mentioned in the moron media there is but one narrative: “bad man, good woman – Arab men refuse to let go of patriarchal privilege and power; Arab women are the besieged political class who desperately want to – but can’t – protect their daughters from this fate. But does this represent what is really going on in Arab cultures?”

BBC News reports that a couple in Pakistan-administered Kashmir was arrested for “killing their 15-year old daughter with acid,” for fear that “she would bring dishonour on their family.”

The couple told BBC that the girl had glanced at a boy. The father proceeded to beat the girl, while the mother fetched acid and poured it over her daughter Anusha, who sustained burns on 60% of her body.

Let these events be a lesson to those who think that parental love is a universally shared value.

From “THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FEMINIST” (December 5, 2003):

Here’s what a “Palestinian” woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, did to her child, after the girl – who had been raped and impregnated by her brothers – refused to commit suicide.
Plastic bag, razor, and wooden stick in hand, the mother entered her sleeping daughter’s room. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” the wicked witch announced, before wrapping the bag tightly around the girl’s head. The murderess Qaoud then spent the next 20 minutes slicing away at Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring pleas of “No, mother, no!” Just to be sure, this alleged mother struck her daughter on the head with the stick after the poor child passed out. Yet members of Qaoud’s community are nonplussed – they see the woman as driven by devotion to both community and family.

Anthropologist Ilsa Glaser’s eye-opening work on female aggression in the Palestinian Authority more than confirmed that women were active in instigating the honor killings … yes, of their daughters.

Read on.

UPDATE II: A Statistic That Tells A Lot About America’s Youth (Deifying Kids)

Economy, Education, Etiquette, Family, Labor, Technology

I’ve said it often: “The millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity.”

Via the senior producer at Varney & Co (Jake Novak) comes this startling statistic: “70 percent of all the jobs filled since Jan. 2010 have been filled by people 55 and older.”

Imparted in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” what I’ve gleaned from my sources in the high-tech industry, by way of an example, is that this “workforce—comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent—is manned, generally, by older people with advanced engineering degrees. The hi-tech endeavor is all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”

UPDATE I (9/27): Deifying Kids. Excellent point is made by Tim Malone, on the Facebook thread. How often does one meet upstanding middle-aged parents, and in waltzes The Kid, who bears no resemblance to the parents in terms of manners, work ethic, alertness, etc. Malone makes the best point ever, and that what must be implicated is liberal (and I include most conservatives here, other than hardcore homeschoolers) progressive, child-centered upbringing, in which the parent cowers before the deity, The Child. Moreover, I so often see hardworking parents who seem to think that making the child learn what they do (be it bird-keeping or working on car engines) is below the miserable child’s dignity. Why do you think “your teenager can’t use a hammer”?

UPDATE II: Thanks to his old-school dad, who insisted that he hang out in the garage, doing every single thing the old man did there—from fine wood-work to fixing plumbing and installing window frames—my old man does everything in the house. Saves tons of money; is done to perfection, but it does mean that renovations take years. So what? Check out “the shower that Sean built,” his first tiling job ever: