Category Archives: Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Underpinnings of Murderous Rage In The Age of Entitlement

Ethics, Morality, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

It’s time for the pop-psychology explanations of how an essentially tender soul, Jaylen Fryberg, was pushed to murder classmates at Washington State’s Marysville-Pilchuck High School. First, the carnage, via CNN:

Two girls are in the intensive care unit at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, and two boys are in ICU at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Providence spokeswoman Erin Al-Wazan said.
Three are “very critically ill” with “very serious” injuries, she said. One is in serious condition. One of the boys, age 14, suffered a jaw injury. The other, age 15, was critically injured in the head.

“When the mental health mavens appear on the scene, the narrative expands some, but generally retains its idiotic thrust. Having been played for all it’s worth, the-culture-of-violence causal factor has given way to the more in-vogue bullying theory.

Skin-deep qualities have always determined the pecking order in schools. Still, Janis Ian’s haunting 1975 song, “Seventeen,” would not have been written today. Angry teenagers nowadays are simply less inclined to ruminate about their angst, and more likely to act on it. Social justice, they are taught, pivots on redistribution. And redistribution is achieved by making some pay for the lesser fortunes of others. When taught to reject the harsh reality of inequality, of not having everything one covets—the anger of entitlement easily bubbles to the fore. Be it popularity or pulchritude, there is a sense that someone ought to pay for the pain of being without.

Furthermore, where once kids might have seen dignity in a brave and stoic face, now, the cultural cognoscenti have declared these to be pathologies, symptoms of repression and denial. Is it any wonder that some kids—the bad ones, at least—feel that the culture of share-your-feelings-with-the-group gives them permission to take the rage of entitlement to its deadly conclusion?”

From “Three-Step Program To Moral Unaccountability” ©2000 By Ilana Mercer

Some of this creature’s tweets:

Twerking, Twisted Sister Trojan

Feminism, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

The slightly tangential title of this post was inspired by a news headline. Not only do some women get off on elder abuse; but their weapon of choice is the vibrator, which, no doubt, they keep as close as I keep my Smith and Wesson 686P .357 4″.

To the meat of the post: In search for a golden oldie capturing just how twisted is your average North-American female, I came across “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” in which an assessment of Miley Cyrus was rendered as ealry as 2008.

Sharon Smith Fox had mentioned she’d be interested in my take on Miley. So how about this 2008 prediction? It earned the opprobrium of my extremely conservative editors for … its unfairness to the future twerking Sister Trojan. Come on. The writing was on the bedroom wall.

It’s on the money, as is the rest of “Bomb Them With Bimbos,” except that I believe I consistently underestimate the depravity of distaff American:

You just know that before long we’re going to be forced to partake in the awakening of yet another vacuous narcissist who flaunts her character flaws, and other folds, before millions of video voyeurs. A Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan in the making.

Admittedly, I know very little about “Hannah Montana” and her handlers. What I’ve seen of the overbearing, extremely precocious, brassy, and not very bright Miley Cyrus doesn’t conjure the “wholesome” descriptive. When I think of “wholesome,” I think of, say, Martina McBride. Miley in various states of undress, nestled in the arms of father Billy Ray Cyrus, gazing at him seductively—this may be cringe-making, but not surprising.

As for the whole blame Dad and Disney thing: Adopted by left and right alike, the paternalistic depiction of women as passive agents, demeaned by male-driven appetites, is feminist fiction. Miley Cyrus may be 15, but she’s a single-minded exhibitionist, propelled by the fame thing. She’s been raised like that. In all likelihood, Miley originated the idea of posing for Vanity Fair and would not stop pestering pappy until he relented. The typical American parent treats his teenager like a Delphic oracle. Any parent who has such a demigod under construction knows I’m right.

Those who persist in the he-done-me-wrong routine don’t have teenagers. Or are oblivious to the reversal in parent-child roles that has come to typify the dynamics in the American family.

MORE Bimbos.

Love That Guy’s Gumption; Mandela Sign-Language Guy Rocks

Celebrity, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, South-Africa

I love that guy. I mean the random gesticulator at the Mandela memorial. A very cool, creative guy, if you ask me, and the most original act at the funeral. What gumption! Give the sign-language interpreter an 0-1 Visa. He’s got rhythm. Deaf people can learn a new language. Learn a little tolerance too. The best part is how everyone is beating up on South Africa’s ruling ANCniks for hiring the improv-signer. He’s a great hire. Now give him a name. Stop dehumanizing My Man.

UPDATED: Philip Chism, Killer Kid (Allegedly)

Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason

“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.

Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.

The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.

2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:

the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. 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 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.

This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.

Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”

UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”

More.