Month: July 2005

Cranky Old Man: “These Kids Aren’t Hit Enough”; Baptist Wingnut: “I Want To Raise Violent Children”

Albert Mohler refers with approval to an essay in the Claremont Review of Books which says that we aren’t raising our boys to be upstanding Manly Men and they are therefore becoming “Barbarians and Wimps.” Part of the problem, he thinks, is fear of physical discipline and excessive concern for “self-esteem.”

It pretty much sounds like what adolescent boys have looked like to middle aged men from the beginning of time. “Kids these days are completely unlike the paragons of moral perfection and manly virtue that I and my cohorts were at their age! Why, they’re nasty and spoiled! They need to be smacked around a bit more!”

The following quote is attributed to Socrates in various places, though I don’t know exactly where it comes from, and if it is accurate suggests that there is no crisis here, just the same old bitterness from people growing old about “kids these days.”

“Our youths love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love to chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their household. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers.” — Socrates, Greek philosopher and teacher (470-399 B.C.)

This is via Mefi, which also references “Why I’m Raising Violent Four-Year-Olds., about a Baptist administrator who wants his children to realize that life is spiritual war, and that’s why he takes them to see Star Wars movies. Oooooookayyyy… My 4 year olds haven’t seen Star Wars, but Jim’s has seen the movies dozens of times. My son has slaughtered countless gnorcs and rhynocs in Spyro the Dragon, though. I am influenced not to worry about the “violence” more by the rational discussion in Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones than by a partcular wish to indoctrinate children into a warlike view of reality.

I don’t realy see any value in Baptist-boy’s effort to make “violent” a term of praise though. (“Violent” in his view is good as long as it’s violence he believes to be sanctioned by God, which means “yes” to smiting sinners and the Lord taking vengeance, and “no” to playing Grand Theft Auto…)

Grownups today!

UPDATE: Playing follow-the-link, it turns out all this stuff was linked originaly by the most excellent post here at Howie Luvzus.

It’s Coming Right For Ya! BLAM

First serious “comin’ right for ya” moment on Linux* —

Tonight at about 10 PM my wifi card, which had been working great at four or five different access points, suddenly stops working at home. I had just had a couple minor triumphs — getting it to print to the shared printer hooked up to my imac, and getting the pressure sensitive wacom pad to work. And then suddenly no wifi anymore. Couldn’t even see the access point. What did I do to it? I do not know. I beat my head against the problem for about an hour and gave up.

I got back on my iBook, which I’d been sort of shunning, to write this, and remembered again what a beautiful piece of hardware it is. Beautiful.

And OS X does just work.

Still — pressure sensitive wacom with the GIMP? Sweet! Overall Linux has been pretty awesome to me. I won’t mind using it at work more.

UPDATE: Apparently there is a button on this computer which turns off the internal wifi card. And I accidentally pressed it. Had nothing to do with linux — affected windows too. False alarm.

*from an episode of South Park, where hunters claim that because of bleeding heart liberals, they are required to shout “It’s comin’ right for ya!” before they shoot an animal, thus making it an act of self defense. Mph and I use this expression to describe when a piece of new software unexpectedly angers us, causing us to wish to blow it right off the hard drive.