Lex Anteinternet: A deeply sick society.

Lex Anteinternet: A deeply sick society.: 

A deeply sick society.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.  

C.S. Lewis.

Let's start with a couple of basics.

You were born a man, or a woman.  We all were, and you can't change that.  If you are a man, no amount of surgery or drugs is going to make you bear life and bear all the consequences of the same, from hormonal storms on a monthly basis, to monthly blood loss, to a massive change of life, mid life.

Thinking that you can, and even wanting to makes you deeply mentally ill.

And a society that tolerates that attempt, is deeply sick.

An account I follow on Twitter notes the following:

22 years old Was 17 years old when Covid hitI wonder when he started going down the trans path

It's worth asking that question, and we'll touch on it in a moment. 

Part I.

Robert Westman,¹ who tried to be Robin Westman, but failed.  The photo alone shows you can't choose to be a woman if you are man, and that he was accordingly deeply mentally ill.  "You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows"  Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan.

Robert Westman, mentally ill young man, raged against the reality of life that had tolerated his perverted molestation of himself and lashed out against the existential nature that doomed his molestation to complete failure, and a deeply sick society now will wonder why.  Moreover, even his final act shows how deeply he failed in his effort. Women nearly never resort to mass violence in frustration.

That's a male thing.

And so we start, again by finding myself linking back to some old threads on this blog, unfortunately.  This was the first time I tackled this topic. 

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

And I did again here:

Lex Anteinternet: You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence an...: (Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting...

The first time was intended to be the magnum opus on this, and indeed it likely still is.  It's still worth reading:

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

And on that, I'm going right to this:

Who does these things?

It's pretty apparent that you could go to the average gun owner, and actually equip him with a machinegun, and he'd never do anything with it.  It's also apparent, from a recent mass killing in Casper Wyoming, that if you arm some people with medieval implements, they'll use them for murder.  That's correct; recently in Casper Wyoming, there was an event that fit this pattern that was committed with a bow and arrow and a large knife. Grisly, to be sure, but telling.  It isn't something new in the arms that's causing this, it's something new in the mind. But what?

I'm not qualified to be a psychologist at all, but I am trained to observe human behavior and to analyze it, and there are certain things that seem quite connected here, but which are ignored.  These are the things that need to be looked at prior to our doing anything, as the solutions are to be found here.

What we're seeing in many of these murders is that the killers are mentally unstable in a truly insane sense. The attempted assassin of a politician in the US seems to fit this category.  Others, and here's where the New York Times article is helpful, are not so much insane, but they fit into a category of people who, by some means, are subject to a personality disorder that renders them socially marooned, and it would seem, it renders them also incapable of empathy, but fully capable of despair.

Some of these individuals are quite smart. The recent killer in Newton Connecticut, apparently afflicted with Aspergers Disease, seems to fit this category.  The killer in the Denver theater shootings also very clearly had some sort of personality disorder and was very well educated and intelligent.  Others are not so smart, but a consistent strain of some sort of very pronounced personality disorder runs through these stories.  The killer in the Casper Wyoming murders was self-diagnosed with Aspergers, and based on his personal history, I suspect his self diagnosis was correct.

Does this mean that everyone who has these conditions is a time bomb waiting to go off?  Absolutely and clearly not.  And, if we assume (perhaps quite incorrectly, however) that incidents of these conditions are not increasing in frequency (which they very well may be), what that tells us is something else.  If we've always had people who have been so afflicted, but haven't had this particular set of problems, something else has changed. What could it be?

First, before moving on in this, however, what is it about these conditions that make them unique. That's important. What we know is that the conditions make these people socially awkward. In some cases, they divorce them of empathy.  That seems to be all the more to the conditions that we can discern, that's relevant here.  But, as the vast, vast, majority of people who have these conditions also have moral standards, and usually go on to live fully productive lives, it tells us something is also wrong at the societal level, and not as much the individual one.

And also this:

Maybe the standard was destroyed

There's been a lot of commentary the last few years about the lack of prayer in school, and as recently noted on the Ramblings of a Teacher blog, there's been an email and Facebook item circulating that promotes the return of daily prayer to public schools.  Like the author of that blog, I think that idea misses the mark.

What I do think, however, is that we've seen an evolution from a loosely recognized general standard, which was frankly religion based, into the concept of "tolerance" for other ideas, which has now slipped into complete moral relativism that lacks any standards at all.

This is, I think, fairly demonstrable by history and the result isn't good.  A brief look at that history is instructive.

This is not to suggest that the country had a uniform Christian history and that this suddenly fell apart recently, that wouldn't be true.  And it wouldn't even be true to maintain that the country has been uniformly religiously observant throughout its history.  What would be true, however, is that a loose set of Christian standards was generally recognized, even by those who were not religious, or even a-religious, and even though the degree to which people closely identified with religion has changed varied enormously over the country's history.

Early in the nation's history the country was almost uniformly Protestant, although there was more than one Protestant church that was present in the country, and the doctrinal differences between them were in some instances quite pronounced.  It would be false to claim that they all had the same theological concepts, and indeed some of them had radically different theologies.  Indeed, even those several Protestant faiths that were present in North America had acted to strongly repress each other here, on occasion, and had been involved in some instances in open warfare in the British Isles..  Catholics, and Jews, were largely absent from the early history of the country, except with Catholics nervously present in some very concentrated regions.  The Catholic presence in the country really became pronounced first in the 1840s, as a result of the revolutions in Europe and the Irish Famine.  This actually created huge concern amongst the Protestant sections of the county, who were often very anti Catholic.  This started to wane during the Civil War, however.  Jewish immigrants came in throughout the 19th Century, some from Europe in chief, but many from Imperial Russia, where they sought to escape Russian programs.

The purpose of this is not to do a treatise on religion in the United States, which would be a massive work and which, at this point, would pretty much cease to be illustrative of anything relevant to this discussion, but rather to note something else.  Even though the degree to which the American population was adherent and observant of their Faiths, and even though the country has had, at various points, very strong doctrinal differences in the population, to the extent that it impacted public policy, the country had a culture that loosely recognized a very loose set of Christian principals as social principals.

This was so much the case that everyone, even members of non-Christian faiths, and even those who were members of no faiths at all, recognized what the standards were.  Interestingly, up until quite recently, people who chose to ignore those standards, and in any one era there are plenty of people who do, often recognized that they were breaching the standard and sometimes even that doing so was wrong.  To use a non-violent example, people generally recognized that cheating on a spouse was wrong, even if they did it.  Most people were a little queasy about divorce even if they divorced and remarried.  Nearly everyone regarded cohabitation out of wedlock as morally wrong, even if they did not attend a church.  Sex outside of marriage was generally regarded as wrong, and indeed even the entertainment industry used that fact as part of the risque allure when they depicted that scenario.

The point of this isn't to suggest that various topics regarding marriage and non marriage are somehow related to this topic. Rather, the point is to show that there was more of a concept of such things at work in society, and that's just an easy one to pick up on, as the changes in regards to it have been quite pronounced.  But, if the argument isn't to be extremely strained and fall flat, other examples would have to be given.  So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

The point of this is that, even though there were multiple Faiths, and people of no faith, there was a general concept of a set of standards that were almost universally accepted and they had roots that went way back into the country's early history..  Included in that set of beliefs was that you didn't harm others.  It isn't that people didn't do it, it's that they knew it was wrong to do it.

Starting in the 1960s, however, American society really began to break a global set of standards down.  The concept of "tolerance" came in. Tolerance means to tolerate, not to accept, but over time the two became confused, and it became the American ideal to accept everything.  Even people with strong moral beliefs were told that they must accept behavior that was previously regarded as morally wrong, or even illegal in some places. There are many present examples of this that a person could point to.  The point here is not that toleration is bad, but rather that confusing tolerance with acceptance, and following that a feeling that acceptance must be mute, probably isn't good.  Toleration sort of presupposes the existence of a general standard, or at least that people can debate it.  If they can't openly debate it, that' probably is not a good thing.  If self declared standards must be accepted, rather than subject to debate, all standards become fairly meaningless as a result.

The overall negative effect this has on a society would also be a major treatise in its own right and I'm not qualified to write it..  Most cultures do not experience this, as most are not as diverse as ours. Whether any society can in fact endure an existence without standards is open to question,  and the very few previous examples that creep up on that topic are not happy ones.  It is clear that most people do in fact continue to retain  bits and pieces of the old standard, and perhaps most people are very highly analogous to our predecessors who lived in eras when standards were very generally held, and there were decades of American history that were just like that.  But for some people, who are otherwise self-focused, and with problems relating to other people, the weak nature of the standard is now potentially a problem.  Unable to relate, and in a society that teaches that there are no standards, they only standards they have are self learned, in a self isolation.

But what are they learning then, and how?

No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.

Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace  And, frankly they still are.  That's quite a burden on both, however, as a society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot of the school and the workplace.  Truth be known, there was never an era when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be done there.  Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect.  It's even more unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be taught there, save by individuals through their own examples.  But is there even a workplace to go to? 

There is a school to go to, that much we've made clear.  And as evident, I'm not keen on the trend in some quarters to blame schools.  I doubt very much that the average public school of 1912 was teaching a lot more in the way of a set of standards than the school of 2012.  Kids came into school with one, and as noted, it was re-enforced.  And I'm not keen on expecting schools to teach what parents and society simply earlier did.  I don't even know if that's possible, but it doesn't seem really reasonable.   At any rate, what about after school? That is, after graduation?  What do people graduate into?

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

So what do they do with their time?

As noted, there was once an era when even the severely socially disabled generally worked.  People didn't know not to encourage them to work and having to work was presumed as a given.  Not all work is pleasant by any means, but the irony of this is that many of these people were well suited for fairly meaningful work.  Some men silently operated machine tools day after day in a setting that required a lot of intelligence, but not very much interaction.  Others worked in labs. Some on rail lines, and so on. This isn't to say that everyone who had these jobs fit into this category, which would be absolutely false.  But my guess is that some did.  And some ended up as career privates in the Army, a category that no longer exists, or similar such roles.  They had meaningful work, and that work was a career and a focus.

Now, for some of these individuals, this is all gone. The expectation of work probably isn't, but the ability may very well seem to be. So what do they do?

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Nibelungenlied is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckinpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

All of that is still valid, and in particular, I think, we need to consider again:

I've analyzed that here from time to time, and need to do so more as it related to the changes in society topics I've addressed from time to time, but this is a critical aspect, I suspect, of this overall topic that's been missed.

The recent killer in Casper Wyoming was very intelligent and highly educated, but his lack of an ability to interact meant he couldn't find work. School, didn't fail him.  Something else did.  The killer in Newton was an adult, and he seems to have been fairly intelligent but with severe personality problems.  The killer in Colorado was also very intelligent, but was dropping out of school.  All of this is reflective, to a degree, of modern American economics

Since World War Two we've gone from a manufacturing society to a consumption society. And in doing that, we've sent a lot of manufacturing overseas.  What on earth, you'd be justified in asking, does that have to do with this?  Here's what.  It has completely changed the nature of available American jobs.

Prior to World War Two less than 50% of the American population graduated from high school.  This wasn't seen as a  problem really, as at least the males departing from school had jobs they could generally enter, save for period of economic distress.  And many of the jobs provided for life long careers.  Machinist jobs, for example, and heavy manufacturing jobs, did not require a high school education and they did provide a solid middle class career.  There were a lot of analogous employments.  Indeed, it wasn't until after World War Two that anywhere near the current number of Americans, or Canadians, or Europeans, went on to advanced education

Most of the men who entered these careers were average men, the same guys who take up most jobs today in any one field, but a few of them were not.  There were always a certain percentage of highly intelligent people with bad social skills who were not capable of relating to others who could find meaningful productive work where their talents for detail were applied in a meaningful way.  There were also places for individuals like that on farms and fields.  And in retail, indeed in retail shops they owned themselves.  Even as a kid I can remember a few retail shops owned by people who had next to no social skills, but who were talented in detail work.  The Army and Navy also took a percentage of people who otherwise just couldn't get along, often allowing them to have a career path, even if just at the entry level, which allowed them to retire in 20 or 30 years.

Now, this is all gone.  We live in the age of certification, and that promotes college education for some who are not well suited for the careers that they're studying, and it encourages certification of everything, which requires some social skills. Now even a college degree does not guaranty employment, and worse yet some level of social skills are necessary for most people with a college degree.  This means that some of the class of people we've been discussing are dangerously marooned.  They can get an education, but they have a very hard time doing anything with it. And that leaves them at home, bitter, and highly educated.

Over the coming days and weeks pundits will ponder this event, and mostly spout out blather.  The explanation here may have deeply disturbing aspects to it, but the underlying root of it is not that complicated.  Robert Westman fell into the trap that ensnares some of the young in our society and hoped to completely change his nature by changing the outward morphology of his nature.  He was mentally ill.

A just society treats compassionately the mentally ill.

We do not live in a just society.

By and large, we just turn the mentally ill out into the street to allow their afflictions to grow worse until those afflictions kill them. Go to any big city and you'll see the deranged and deeply addicted out in the street.  This is not a kindness.

Gender Dysphoria is a different type of mental illness, but that's what it is.²

And its deeply delusional.

To put it bluntly to the point of being crude, no man, no matter what they attempt to do, is going to bear children and have the risk of bearing children, bleed monthly, and be subject to the hormonal storms that real women are subject to.  And, frankly, men generally become subject to some, if varying, degrees of drives that are constant and relenting, and never abate.³ 

No woman, no matter what she attempts to do, is going to hit a certain age in their teens have their minds turn to women almost constantly, as men do, in a way that women do not understand, and frankly do not experience the opposite of themselves. 

Indeed, no man really wants to be a woman, or vice versa.  What those engaging in an attempt to pass through a gender barrier seek is something else, and what that more often than not in the case of men likely is to drop out of the heavy male burdens in an age in which it increasingly difficult to meet them.  In spite of everything in the modern world, women remain conceived of as more protected, and therefore not as subject to failure for not meeting societal expectations.

Being a man has never been easy.

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man

And now I've reached that age

I've tried to do all those things the best I can

No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam

Good Times, Bad Times, by Led Zeppelin.

I don't think lectures on what it means to be a man occur anymore.  I  know that I've never delivered one, but I didn't need one to be delivered either.  The examples were clearly around me, including all the duties that entailed.  We knew, growing up, that good men didn't abandon their families, and provided for their families, and were expected to protect women to the point of their own deaths.  Women weren't expected to protect men, at all.

Some men have always sought to escape their obligations, of course, and we all know or new those who did.  Most aged into disrepute over time.  Others got their acts together.  

You can’t be a man at night if you are a boy all day long.

Rev. Wellington Boone.

And some have always descended into madness.  But society didn't tolerate it, and it shouldn't have to.

So what do we know about Westman?

Not that much, but what we do know is revealing:

• He killed himself after his cowardly murders.
• He'd developed an inclination towards violence.⁴
• He once attended the Catholic school whose students he attacked,  leaving in 2017 at the end of Middle School.
• He started identifying as a female in 2019, age 17, and his mother signed the petition to change his name.⁵
• After middle school attended a charter school and then the all-boys school, Saint Thomas Academy, which is a Catholic military school. ⁶
• An uncle said he barely knew him.⁷
• His parents were divorced when he was 13.
• He worked at a cannabis dispensary, but was a poor employee.⁸

What can we tell from this?

Maybe nothing at all, but the keys are that in spite of they're being Catholic, his parents divorced, and his mother thereafter tolerated to some degree his drift into delusion, while at the same time there's evidence they were trying to correct it.  After school, he drifted into drugs, which is what marijuana is.

Blame the parents?  Well, that would be too simple.  But societal tolerance of divorce and transgender delusion is fostering all sorts of societal ills.

It's notable that he struck out at a childhood school.  That may be all the more his violence relates, but probably not.  His mother had worked there.  He was likely striking out at her too.  And he was striking out an institution that doesn't accept that you can change your existential nature, because you cannot.  He likely was fully aware of that, which is why he acted out with rage at it, and then killed himself.

There may, frankly, be an added element to this, although only recently have people in the secular world, such as Ezra Klein, began to discuss it.  Westman may have been possessed.

Members of the American Civil Religion don't like to discuss this at all, and frankly many conventional Christians do not either.  Atheist and near atheist won't acknowledge it all, of course.  But Westman's flirting with perverting nature may have frankly lead him into a really dark place, and not just in the conventional sense.

Part 2. What should we do?

Well, what will be done is nothing.  Something should, however, be done.

The topic of gun control will come up, which brings us back to this:

You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

We're going to hear, from more educated quarters defending the Second Amendment, that firearms have not really changed all that much over the years, society has. This is completely true.

But we're at the point now that we need to acknowledge that society has changed.  And that means a real effort to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill needs to be undertaken.

When the Constitution was written, Americans were overwhelmingly rural.  Agrarianism was the norm everywhere.  People generally lived in a family dwelling that included everyone from infants to the elderly.  Normally the entire community in which a person lived was of one religion, and everyone participated in religious life to some degree.  Even communities that had more than one religion represented, still had everyone being members of a faith.  Divorce was not at all common, and in certain communities not tolerated whatsoever.⁹ 

Westman was mentally ill.  Transgenderism is a mental illness. He was a drug user.  Cannabis is a drug.

In 1789 the mentally ill, if incapable of functioning, would have been taken care of at home by their families.  Transgenderism would not have been conceived of and not tolerated.  Alcohol was in heavy use.  Marijuana was not.  The plethora of narcotics now in circulation were not conceived of.

Yes, this will sound extreme. Am I saying that because a tiny number of transgendered might resort to violence they shouldn't own guns?  Yes, maybe in a society that simply chooses to tolerate mental illness, that's what I'm saying, although it also strikes me that the people who have gone down this deluded path might be amongst those most needing firearms for self protection. So, not really.  I am saying that attention needs to be focused on their mental state.

Am I saying that marijuana users shouldn't own guns?  Yes, that is also what I'm saying, along with other chronic users of drugs, legal and illegal.

And as we choose to simply ignore mental illness, perhaps the time has come to see if a would be gun owners is mentally stable and societally responsible before allowing them to own guns.  People in chronic debt, with violent behavior, with unacknowledged children in need shouldn't be owning firearms.

Of note, at the time the Second Amendment was written, none of these things was easily tolerated.

Part 3. Getting more extreme.

Knowing that none of this will occur, I'll go there anyhow.

Societal tolerance of some species of mental illness should just end. There shouldn't be homeless drug addicts on the street and gender reassignment surgery and drugs should be flat out illegal.

For that matter, in the nature of extreme, plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons should be banned.  Your nose and boobs are fine the way they are, leave them alone.

No fault divorce should end, and for that matter people who have children should be deemed married by the state, with all the duties that implies.  Multiple children by multiple partners should be regarded as engaging in polygamy, which should still be regarded as illegal.

Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial. It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.

St. John Paul II.

Yes, that's rough.

Life is tough for all of us.  Ignoring that fact makes it harder on all of  us.

Part 4. Doesn't this all play into Dementia Don and his Sycophantic Twatwaffles?

Unfortunately, it does.  I fear that this may prove to be the Trump Administration's Reichstag moment.

Indeed, this event is like a gift to people like Stephen Miller who will now assert that this came about due to the liberal policies of Minneapolis, and moreover, as proof that outright attacks on transgendered are needed, the same way the Nazis asserted that dictatorship was necessary in Germany after the Reichstag fire.

Isn't that what' I'm stating?

I am not.

I think we need to address mental illness as a mental illness, and do what we can to treat it.  And rather obviously, what I've stated above doesn't square with Second Amendment hardcore advocates.

And as part of that, we need to get back to acknowledging that the mentally ill are mentally ill, rather than "tolerating" it.  

And we need to quite tolerating "personal freedom" over societal protection, right down to the relationship level.  A married couple produced this kid.  Once they did that, they were in it, and the marriage, for life.  That included the duty not to make dumb ass decisions for their child, like changing Robert's name to Robin.

Part 5.  What will happen?

Absolutely nothing.

People on the right will argue its not the guns, it's the sick society.  People on the left will argue that the society isn't sick, except for the guns, and the guns are all of the problem.

Nothing, therefore, will occur.

Well, maybe.

If anything occurs, it'll be that Dementia Don will use it as an excuse to send the National Guard into Minneapolis.

Footnotes

1.  His name was Robert, not "Robin". The free use of female names for men afflicted by this condition and the press use of "she" for what is properly he, is part of the problem.

2  By gender confusion, I"m referring to Gender Dysphoria, or whatever people are calling it, not homosexuality.  Homosexuals don't fit into this discussion at all.  For one thing, homosexuals are not confused about what gender they are.

3.  This does not advocate for license, although some men argue that it does.  Inclinations are not a pass for immorality.

Anyhow, I'd note that even honest men in cebate professions acknowledge this.  Fr. Joseph Krupp, the podcaster, frequently notes having a crush, for example, on Rachel Weisz.

4.  Again, some women grow violent, but its a minority and, when it occurs, tends to be accompanied by something else.  There are exceptions.

5. I don't know all of the details of his personal life, of course, but that was inexcusable on his mother's part.  I'll note, however, that by this time his parents were divorced and no woman is capable of raising children completely on her own.  Again, I don't know what was going on, but this screams either extreme "progressive" views, or a mostly absent father, or extreme fatigue.

6.  I didn't even know that there were Catholic military schools.  

Military schools have always been institutions for troubled boys, and this suggests that there was an attempt to put him in a masculine atmosphere and hopefully straighten him out. The school had both a religious base and a military nature.  Both of his parents must have participated in this.

7. The modern world fully at work.  People move for work, careers, etc., with the result that nuclear families basically explode, nuclear bomb style.  People more and more are raised in families that are the immediate parental unit, or just one parent, that start to disintegrate the moment children turn 18.  This is not natural, and is part of the problem.

8.  I don't know of course, but I'd guess that in order to be a poor employee at a cannabis dispensary, you have to be a really poor employee. There are bars with bartenders who don't drink, but I bet there aren't any dispensaries with employees that aren't using.

The impacts of marijuana use are very poorly understood, but as it becomes more and more legal, that there are negative psychological impacts for long term and chronic use is pretty clear.

9.  Contrary to widespread belief, not only Catholicism prohibits divorce.  The Anglican Communion does not either, and at that time particularly did not tolerate it.  Divorce occurred, but it was not common.

Also, and we've touched on it before, the United States at the time of its founding was a Christian nation.  It was a Protestant Christian nation, but a Christian nation.  Protestants of the 19th Century would not recognize many Protestant denominations today at all, even if they are theoretically the same.  A 1790s Episcopalian, for example, would be horrified by many Episcopalian congregations today.  In contrast, a Catholic or Orthodox person would find the churches pretty recognizable, save for the languages used for services.

Lex Anteinternet: Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling...

Lex Anteinternet: Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling...: 

Occupational Identity and authenticity, a rambling thread.

Occupational identity refers to the conscious awareness of oneself as a worker. The process of occupational identity formation in modern societies can be difficult and stressful. However, establishing a strong, self-chosen, positive, and flexible occupational identity appears to be an important contributor to occupational success, social adaptation, and psychological well-being. Whereas previous research has demonstrated that the strength and clarity of occupational identity are major determinants of career decision-making and psychosocial adjustment, more attention needs to be paid to its structure and contents. We describe the structure of occupational identity using an extended identity status model, which includes the traditional constructs of moratorium and foreclosure, but also differentiates between identity diffusion and identity confusion as well as between static and dynamic identity achievement. Dynamic identity achievement appears to be the most adaptive occupational identity status, whereas confusion may be particularly problematic. We represent the contents of occupational identity via a theoretical taxonomy of general orientations toward work (Job, Social Ladder, Calling, and Career) determined by the prevailing work motivation (extrinsic vs. intrinsic) and preferred career dynamics (stability vs. growth). There is evidence that perception of work as a calling is associated with positive mental health, whereas perception of work as a career can be highly beneficial in terms of occupational success and satisfaction. We conclude that further research is needed on the structure and contents of occupational identity and we note that there is also an urgent need to address the issues of cross-cultural differences and intervention that have not received sufficient attention in previous research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Skorikov, V. B., & Vondracek, F. W. (2011). Occupational identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research.

How some lawyers apparently want the public to imagine them.

A number of relatively recent experiences has lead me to post this thread.

Posted around town are some billboards by a lawyer who is apparently specializing in plaintiffs' cases and criminal defense.  I don't know him well, but I do know  him.

When I first met him, he came across, quite frankly, as a metrosexual.  I was quite surprised later on when I learned that he'd grown up on a ranch, and that he had a brother who now ran it.  Now, however, he appears on billboards with a huge mustache in Western attire and saddle and portrays himself as a cowboy.

And I guess, by cowboy, I mean both real cowboys and the movie image of a cowboy.

Cowboys, and that is of course a real occupation, have been a popular cultural image since the late 19th Century.  It's really interesting to me, as somebody who is a stockman and who has, accordingly, done a fair amount of cowboying, how cowboys continue to have a sort of wild image that they acquired in that time period.  I love working stock, but most of it isn't anything like what movies portray.  Maybe none of is, which is why  the popular Yellowstone television show tends to anger me.

Of course, being a lawyer isn't anything like portrayed on television either.

Anyhow, I never tell people that "I'm a cowboy", but I find that I"m referred to that way, in the working sense of the word, from time to time.  Or, people will refer to me as a rancher the same way from time to time.  I'm always a bit flattered when they do, as if I'd had my ruthers in the world, which I haven't, that's what I would have done full time.  I can't say its my occupational identity, however, as I'm well aware that I don't do it full time.

Affecting the image, however, miffs me.  It's fake.  If you simply come across that way, as you are naturally that way, that's one thing.  Using it to promote your legal career, however, is bullshit.

Indeed, on real cowboys, not all of which are men, today:

Come As You Are

I guess this gets back in a way to this thread:

A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .

If you are going to be a lawyer, look like one, it's what you actually are.

And, by the way, there's at least one politician in the state that does the same thing, and I'd have the same criticism about.  He's not a lawyer, but a commercial landlord.  

Anyhow, it also gets to the weird association that the law picked up at some point with cowboys around here.  I don't know when this occurred, but it might have been about the time that Gerry Spence's book Gunning for Justice came out.  Spence didn't try to portray himself as a cowboy, but he did take on a Western influenced style, wearing a fringed jacket and a cowboy hat as a matter of course.  Spence being sui generis has been able to consistently pull that off whereas those copying him tend to look absurd.

Anyhow, "Gunning for Justice" is actually a phrase that's been around for awhile and he didn't introduce it, as t his movie poster from 1948 demonstrates:

Spence's use of it, however, seem to have pushed into another sort of use, at least locally.

On this, it's interesting that the cowboy image can be coopted this way, whereas other "manly" professions genuinely cannot.  Fighters (boxers) have been a little bit, and I suppose that was an obviously one, but nobody, for example, talks about "whaling for justice".

Anyhow, dressing up like a cowboy for affect if you are not punching makes you a Rexall Ranger, not a cowboy.

While I'm at it, a Wyoming lawyer has affected the cowboy appearance for her columns on one of the local electronic journals.  In this case, she's gone for the a way too big hat big pushed way up on the forehead so you can see the face look, which to a working stockman looks absolutely absurd.  The same journal actually as a working rancher who wears his hat correctly as a columnist, and up until recently had another who did the same.

As a total side, if you notice in old cowboy portraits they often have their hats pushed to the back of their head, something moderns have wondered about, and for which they've even assumed that must be how they wore them.

No, the cameras were bad.

Isom Dart at Brown’s Hole Wyoming.

If they hadn't pushed them up some, their faces would have been in shadow

On identifies, I had a couple of odd encounters recently, one of which involves mental decline, and the other which involves gender attraction.

I'll start with the latter one first.  There's an older profession that I don't know well, but who've I've been familiar with for a very long time.  Somebody much more familiar with him than me dropped that he's a homosexual.  I was shocked.  Not because homosexuality in general shocks me, but because it was very well closeted for decades.  Indeed, he's married with children.

I suppose that might be the rule for people north of 70, the closteting, that is.

In retrospect, it pretty quickly made sense for some reason.  It just explained some personality quirks that I'd long noticed.  The point of posting it here, however, is that if it's true, he's lived a lifetime with sort of an interesting strained identity.

He's not the only one I know of who is alleged to be in this category.  Frankly a fairly well known person in the region is claimed by some insiders to fit this as well.  In that case, it's more notable for his public opinions on things, which would be generally contrary to this inclination, assuming its true.

Now, I'll note that I have the typically misunderstood Catholic views on homosexuality.  I'll also note that one of these individuals is a co-religious, and the other was.  My only real point in noting all of this is to note that it must be a strain to live an entire life with a sort of false identity, assuming that its true in either case, which I can't really say for sure.

I'll also note that homosexuals of that vintage who did not present themselves as "gay", which is different, may have had a better understanding of marriage than many.  Catholic Answers Hugh Barbour defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman to produce children for the worship of God, which while it may be more than that, that captures a lot of it.  People like to say that before Obergefell homosexuals couldn't marry, but that's simply false, if we consider that marriage is a unique institution between two people capable of reproducing and bound to care for those they create.

Going on to occupations, I've also run across recently a situation in which I've been dealing with somebody whom, once again, I don't know that well but who is still working fulltime and whose clearly suffering from some compression loss in the psychological cylinders.  I'm not their pal or anything but it's sad to watch.  It's also sad to watch, however, somebody whose psychological identify is so closely identified with the practice of law, they can't leave it.

I've known more than one lawyer who practiced into advanced old age with no mental detriment.  But it's also the case quite frankly that a person's physical clockworks, and often their mental ones, start to slip a bit after the hands hit 60 or so.  I'm frankly not convinced at all that allowing people to practice a profession after some point in their 60s is a good thing, and I don't think people should carry on into their 70s.  For one thing, it's just sad.  Surely there was something else that interested them once.

Back to occupational identities.

One of the really minor features of this blog is the M65 Field Jackets in the wild. page.  Minor.

I like M65 field jackets.  When I was in the Guard I had at least six of them due to having bought two and having been issued four more.  The reason I was issued four is that at Ft. Sill the switch from OG-107 to BDU was going on and we were issued OD field jackets. As soon as I got back, we were issued BDU field jackets, and told to keep the old ones.

I gave one of the OD ones to a girlfriend who had need of a jacket while I was in university, and then eventually I just got to big, i.e,. gained weight, or filled out, whatever, and couldn't wear the size I'd been issued.  But I still had the next larger size, Large Regular.

Well, time, etc.

A surplus store here had a whole bunch of uniform items here before they went out of business and I bought several BDU ones.  I just really like them.  I picked up a OD one for my son, as they're a nice coat, but naively didn't for myself.  The OD ones you can wear for daily wear really.

Well, here recently I found a Greek Lizard pattern one for sale and I bought it for hunting.  Which meant that I had three woodland pattern ones, one desert pattern one (a gift of an old soldier) and a Lizard pattern one.  Then I saw the current multicam pattern one for sale on Ebay, which I ordered.  Finally, I decided I needed an OD one and bought one of those off of ebay.

Some of these have the US Army tape on them.  One, the multicam one, came with paratrooper wings from the former and his name tape.  I took the name tape off and the paratrooper wings.  I'm not a paratrooper.  The OD one came with a name tape, the U.S. Army tape, and two unit patches.  I took everything off but the US Army tape.

For reasons that are silly, and I can't explain, I ended up ordering name tapes.  I can now sew those on.

Why?  I'm not sure.  I don't need name tapes on old uniform items for any rational reason.  Rather, I was required to do it back in the day, and I still feel like am now.  Indeed, it would make a lot more sense to take the US Army patch off the OD one so I can use it for its intended purpose of regular daily wear.

Odd

Well, I found a M1943 replica on sale and ordered it.  It won't have any patches.

I need to stop buying them.

As a further aside, a Carhartt coat is much warmer.  My old one is pretty much blown out now.  It was a gift from my wife and I've been resisting getting a new one, even though I need to.  Guess I'm hoping for another one as a gift so that I don't have to buy it.

Back to occupational identities for a moment.  It occured to me how, when I was young, men had much less of one. They genuinely seemed more well rounded than men do today

People always like to claim things were different, if not outright perfect, when they were young.  But it does seem to me that genuinely men were quite family oriented. That meant that their professions and occupations were focused on providing for their families, but it also meant that their professions tended not to be all that they were, including to themselves.  I can vaguely recall some men who were very career oriented being criticized for it.

Every man that I knew when I was young tended to almost be identified by a collection of interests.  Medical professionals were often hunters and fishermen.  Indeed, I don't know one who wasn't.  Some were dramatically so.  Men who had come into professions from farms and ranches tended to still be identified with their origin and retain some contacts with that life.  I knew a fireman who was a pretty good amature geologist, another who was a car restorer, and another who was the first long distance runner I ever knew.  More recently professionals, or at least lawyers, have almost become cartoons of themselves in some instances, only engaging in the law or perhaps one activity that's sort of socially approved for lawyers.

It isn't good.

Last Sunday I ran this item:

Pack Animals - the 🇩🇪 German Mountain Infantry Brigade

I knew that the Bundesheer has a mountain infantry brigade.

I've sometimes thought that if I had been born in Germany, which I'm very much glad I was not, I'd have opted for a career with this unit.  Outdoors. . . animals, etc.  By the same token, if I had been born French, there's the Chasseurs Alpins.

Hmmm. . . 

Well, I didn't opt for a career with the Wyoming Game & Fish, so I'm probably just fooling myself.

Have a nice day at work.  

Mehr Mensch sein,