- No Recommendations yet - go add some!
- Yes
- First of all I am reminded of the other day's segment about "The Memphis Three." in which a documentary film maker said something about how three innocent teens were convicted of a crime they did not commit because of the fact that a crime occurred in a very "fundamentalist" part of society (Memphis) and people there "believed in their authority figures" and just wanted to see someone get caught for the crime and they believed the weak evidence against the 3 teens.
It seems to me that this dad who is shooting the laptop (I have not seen the video) must come from such a society. Not to be negative about people with Southern accents, but it seems to be a tell-tale aspect and besides that, this dad seems to be from a background which believes in guns and authority figures. I am "pro gun" myself when it comes to self defense, but I think that this father is throwing a bigger temper tantrum than his daughter. A parent is supposed to realize that parenting will come with heartaches and headaches. Allowing your anger to get a hold of you so as to shoot some-thing can, under the right circumstances, mean that in anger, you can shoot some-one. As "Steve Hopkins" posted here, it is an act of "commiting the laptop to death" so as to hurt his daughters feelings. It is practically a threat to then turn the gun on his daughter. It is creepy. I can't help but get the feeling that this dad probably has it in him to run his household with domestic abuse.
It seems that the fact that the daughter ranted online about her parents (writings which I have not actually seen or read) indicates that it is not mere "out-of-nowhere" teenage rebellion but it might have some basis. Perhaps the daughter is so angry and dysfunctional not in spite of her parents "bringing her up the right way " but because they actually have brought her up fanatically and with too much authority. It is probably very rare that a child is spontaneously dysfunctional if his or her home life is stable and s/he has loving, knowledgable parents who communicate with their kids. Of course I can only say that this is generalization and I don't know all the facts about this "Girl ranting online/ father shooting laptop" case.
Now if the girl is actually wayward and unappreciative of her decent parents, she will have to progressively live and learn and make mistakes and find out that others have it much worse. It seems that she cannot be made to love her parents more if her dad shoots her laptop.
- This segment made it seem as all poor people are just honest folks whom are forgotten and deserve government help. Sure those are out there, but as someone who grew up poor and am still struggling and forseeably will always be, I would say that there is a certain way in which Romney's words "I'm not concerned about the very poor" makes sense. I have seen a lot of abuse of the system. A lot of poor people just want to stay dependent on welfare. It just might have less to do with the way in which some politicians such as Romney ( and I am no "endorser" of him ) has an outwardly indifferent attitude toward the poor , than it has to do with the reputation that indolent people who only want hand-outs have given to everyone else whom is economically poor.
And again, I myself am struggling very much and always have been.
- The Komen cause is one of the biggest rip-offs in history. Sure it might be well intended regarding the supposed story of Susan G Komen's sister creating a movement in memory of Komen and to "empower" women to fight breast cancer, but what has happened is that merely being born female has been made into a crisis, and a lot of women are being scared silly into thinking that they have to have mammograms or their most-likely fate is to die of breast cancer. There are women whom are needlessly intimidated by doctors into undergoing mammograms which only profit the doctors themselves and the medical establishment.
In spite of critics saying that Planned Parenthood should not be about birth control and/or abortion but about "women's health," Planned Parenthood should not be an extention of the Susan G Komen cause.
- Some women have been led to think that it is better to risk "slightly-possible illness" by medical procedures such as a mammogram rather than risk "not knowing" if cancer would happen by itself. This is what the medical establishment and certain politicians whom somehow have ties with the medical establishment have taught the public to believe, and that if a little preventative medicine is good, overdosing on it is better.
The legal requirement for parents to have their female children vaccinated is not about female empowerment, and if it is to certain people, it is a misplaced idea. The hysteria over a female's inherent succeptibility to cancer, is making for a world in which merely being female is considered to be a medical crisis and a disease.
This also may be a bit off topic, but I can't help but say that with several "Susan G Komen" and/ or "Women against cancer" events scheduled to take place in New York City for the fall season, most women should not be brainwashed by the "Pink Campeign." Sure, much of it is well meant and people have experienced their own health problems, or loss because someone they know has died of cancer as with the case of Susan G Komen, but we must not be blind to the huge profit-making, medical-establishment-benefitting, actually-mysogynic, exploitative, bandwagon that these events have become.
Many of us would do well not to buy "pink products" or wear pink , or in any other way, blindly and without strong evidence of it's worthwhileness, support the establishment that only profits as long as a cure for cancer is not found.
- The fact that Ms Bachmann is a disliked politician and disliked person should not be basis for being against what she says. I can agree that there is sometimes hysteria and fearmongering about vaccines causing autism, but the other side of the coin is that the pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines (and this at least definately goes for the makers of this so called "Gardasil") are also somehow useing fearmongering tactics to play on the public's fears of cancer so as to get people to submit immediately and unquestionably to "doctor's orders" to make certain vaccines a rite of passage.
The chances of females getting cervical cancer are practically said to be (by certain medical "experts" or "profesionals") spontaneous and eventual . There are overstatements about women's automatic succeptibility to cancers so that a lot of emotionally-vulnerable women and people in general , are made to believe that it is better to be exposed to radiation by way of mammograms because they think that it is a "prevention" when the mammogram itself often causes the affliction, and then it is a matter of self-fufilled prophecy. You might hear women speaking on those "Walk/Run/Bike (etc) For The Cure" events proclaiming how they found lumps on their bodies and were rescued by some kind of radiation treatment or other medical method. The fact is that there naturally is no statistical data kept about how any lump found on the body had never been cancerous but the medical evaluations and/or treatments that were meant to investigate and/or cure the condition were what made the benign lump cancerous.
Prostate Specific Antigen tests for men and pap smears for women both have significant if not very-high likelihood of false positive results for cancer or illness and the consequent treatment or evaluations are what result in complications.
Yet most doctors and health-care professionals emphasize yearly or other "regular" medical tests that involve invasiveness, exposure to radiation or other needless procedures either because they are motivated by making money, or because they have been brainwashed to believe that everybody should have certain tests done regardless of individual risk factors.
(ctd)
- Didn't Bill Clinton have heart problems? Didn't Ronald Regan do his presidential duties after being shot?
A woman is less capable of doing the work of the President of the United States with migraines ?
Sounds like a very familiar argument regarding women and their biology and their subsequent, supposed- inability to think without hysteria.
- The free speech issue tends to play out in a way that bites back. The privacy issue has similar elements, and even often becomes the free speech issue that bites back .
A few years ago there was the issue of "Upskirting," (men placing hidden cameras in public places so as to be able to photograph under women's skirts and publish the photos on the internet or elsewhere). Certain lawyers protected the practice saying it is a matter of free speech, and said that anyone in public cannot expect privacy. However, soon afterward a woman started a campeign in which she urged all women whom are approached in public by men making lewd comments or exposing themselves, to use their cell phones to photograph the perverts so that the photos can be put on the internet. Then there was talk about how a "Big Brother" mentality has made ordinary citizens take the law in their hands and expose people whom may be unpopular but whom have rights to privacy even on public streets and subway trains and busses and parks.
Maybe those who claim to strictly uphold free speech ought to be forced to prove it by being legally required to tell the public and the media everything that they otherwise aren't telling anyone. Maybe those religious groups shouting anti-gay words at funerals ought to be made to tell the public about their funding sources and how much money the church's pastors take for themselves and how much they give to charity.
- From what I recall of the discussion it was mentioned that certain people were tested and given placebo pills and some were told that the medication they got was more expensive while other people were told that their medication was less expensive and the people whom were told that they had the more-expensive medication reported that they felt better while those whom got the less-expensive medication reported not feeling the medication’s benefits as much.
I have participated in many psychological experiments. People are chosen according to their particular susceptibility to the power-of- suggestion . In other words people whom are not prone to being swayed to buy any product just because of positive advertizing or whom are not prone to believing what s/he is told , does not qualify to participate in the study. These studies which show so overwhelmingly how outer forces such as someone’s say-so makes a person believe that a product is better, are actually set up to have certain results. I would say that another matter is that the researchers whom design such studies often don’t seem to know that they are setting up the study so as to “discover” something that is or isn’t obvious.
(And if I did hear right) as for the mention of the female dancers whom get more tips because they were at the peak of their "fertility," was that just one study in one bar? Were all the dancers within a certain, limited, age-range? Was there a comparason group of dancers whom were not at the peak of their fertility? What about the people who tipped these dancers? What age were they? What culture? What background? Were they all male? In fact were all the dancers female?
- The other night, "Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother" was reviewed on Fresh Air. It was said that though the author abusively raises her children to make them successful not happy, the reader will agree that strict parenting is too rare and "Western ways" of not burdening kids with parent's neurotic expectations is just political-correctness.
After hearing this commentary/book-review, I found it hard to sleep.Now this same upcoming issue on The Takeaway.
In the movie "Precious" the main character (an illiterate, lower-class, teen living with an abusive, welfare-queen of a mother) is told by her mother that she will never amount to anything should have been aborted. The mother pressures her daughter to go on welfare,not peruse education. True-to-life for some people too.The literal elements of these lifestyles are different, the dynamics are essentially the same.
Why be afraid of being an ultra-stereotype and raising your kids to be the same ?
Phoebe Eng wrote "Warrior Lessons."It tells of how people of her culture live emotionally-tormented lives concentrating on small failures and in the first few pages tells about a depressed Chinese woman's death which Ms. Eng suspects was suicide because of the guilt of disappointing one's parents. Statistics show that in 2009 suicide became the second-highest cause of death of Chinese youth, reportedly due to academic stress and is common in females.
It can be asked that if parents were demanding of their kids for thousands of generations, then why are Chinese teens so suicide prone today? Is it that Chinese parents were not really as demanding of their kids in past centuries as today? Is it that there is now more technology and accompanying difficult things to learn so as to succeed and Chinese parents have gotten more intense too?
Is it that Chinese kids have always committed suicide at a high rate but only now is there such a close-study of the phenomenon? Oh don't forget, Oriental cultures tend to practice the killing of elderly, useless parents too.
Rules of Freakonomics dictate that for better or worse, regardless of method, children do not form according to their parent's desires.Extreme pressure is one of those elements on the farthest end of the Bell Curve least likely to work perfectly (high success and no emotional drain). Some parents have a self-defeating fear of disgracing cultural ways. "Iindividuality” is a bad word here.
It only makes it seem more sensible for people to have themselves neutered.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132833376/tiger-mothers-raising-children-the-chinese-way?ft=1&f=13
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1414751/
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/health/mental-health/2010/09/21/273353/Youth-suicide.htm
- More
New Movie Releases: 'Men in Black 3' and 'Moonrise Kingdom'
Is the Private Era in Space Officially Upon Us?
Why Increased Immigration is the Solution for America's Ailing Economy
