Tolja

[fpb]

This - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1215389/Abandoned-parents-betrayed-schools-young-boys-turning-criminal-gangs-protection-sense-belonging.html - is without a doubt the best and most important article printed by any British newspaper in months if not years. And Harriet Sergeant is an exceptional journalist - I have seen other items by her, and she is brave as a steel sword. But I regret to say that I foresaw every word of it before I ever started blogging, and described it in my article about the Tony Blair generation two or three years ago.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In the U.S. in the 1980s, there was a wave of stories covering the new breed of "superpredator." It was all over the news, in all the magazines, etc. The media had middle class America terrified of the army of adolescent sociopaths that was about to be unleashed upon their streets. Always, the unspoken subtext was that these "thugs" and "monsters" were mostly low income black kids, which led to lots of judgmental handwringing about "lack of parenting" and other thinly-veiled racist paranoia.

Crime rates and socioeconomic indicators over the next generation showed that these "superpredators" were mostly bogey-monsters haunting the guilty consciences of white America.

That is not to say that adolescent gangs and lack of opportunities or support for low income youth is not a problem, but I have been skeptical ever since whenever I see another round of hysteria about how society is going to hell in a handbasket because [i]all of a sudden[/i] there are all these kids with inadequate supervision and family support who are all joining gangs. I am especially skeptical when it gets blamed on a particular politician, political party, or ideology.

(Ever see [i]Gangs of New York[/i]? Obviously not exactly a historical documentary, but it's accurate enough in showing that disenfranchised minority youth turning to ultra-violent gangs is not something that has come about because of modern liberalism, or whatever your scapegoat of choice is.)

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Dang, I keep forgetting that LJ uses HTML tags, not BB code. Sorry.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Excuse me, but someone said that they did not want to be "trapped" discussing political issues on my blog.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

I never said "trapped." :P I blame only myself when I succumb to temptation.

I'm actually disposed to vociferous debate by natural inclination. So I made a choice to try to keep my LJ/authorial presence detached from that -- but sometimes the spirit is weak. ;)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And I do not usually reject an opportunity to argue. But in this case it seems to me that you have already decided that what I posted about is the result of scare stories in newspapers, rather than - as some of my older friends know - decades of experience of British society at literally every level (from the high table of Balliol College, Oxford, to months on the streets of London and three years in a housing estate in the East End), which means that not only I can attest the truth of what this unusually brave and forthright journalist describes, but that I predicted it nine years ago and described it two years ago. I do not react well when my own personal experience is denied and ascribed to bad reading.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://fpb.livejournal.com/250748.html

[baduin.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Incarceration_rate

"American prisons and jails held 2,299,116 inmates as of June 30, 2007.[12] One in every 31 American adults, or 7.3 million Americans, are in prison, on parole or probation. Approximately one in every 18 men in the United States is behind bars or being monitored. A significantly greater percentage of the American population is in some form of correctional control even though [AND ACCORDINGLY] crime rates have declined by about 25 percent from 1988-2008.[13] 70% of prisoners in the United States are non-whites[, FORMER SUPERPREDATORS].[14] In recent decades the U.S. has experienced a surge in its prison population, quadrupling since 1980, partially as a result of mandated sentences that came about during the "war on drugs." [NOT SURPRISINGLY] Violent crime and property crime have declined since the early 1990s."

My comments in CAPS.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think this misses the point. inverarity68 argues that the rise of these feral children (as we call them in the UK) does not really threaten society as such or the middle classes, and that the media are exaggerating their menace. My view is that this is strictcly irrelevant. Although it is certain that feral children and their grown-up counterparts threaten mostly abandoned and deprived neighbourhoods from which they rarely get out, it is the ruination of the children themselves that I object to. As a trainee teacher, I saw these children peeling off from the ranks of ordinary society and spinning off into the void; and that - the failure of the teaching profession - is what I objected to. That is also what Harriet Sergeant was really speaking about.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Actually, I didn't say they don't threaten society, though I do think the threat is overstated. Nor did I dismiss the threat because they largely victimize other poor people rather than the middle class.

Also, to be clear, I do not think either you or Harriet Sergeant are racists. But I do think the way in which these stores are framed is often used as cover for explicitly racist assumptions.

I agree with you that the abandonment of the children themselves is the greatest tragedy.

(I also agree with much of what you said in the other article you linked to, including that computers in classrooms are largely a waste of money.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think they are much worse than a waste of money. I think they are positively counter-educational. I have sat in on a few lessons where twenty-eight children sat in front of twenty-eight screens. The teacher could not follow almost any of them. It wasn't a lesson, it was a free period with free internet access on the side.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, there are some interesting data. In Italy, in spite of our chronic organized crime and social disorder problems, and of unmanageable levels of crime among the immigrant population, the jails hold some forty thousand people; and that already seemed too much to the Italian public, which welcomed a mass amnesty a few years ago. Italy has sixty or so million inhabitants. The kingdom of England (that is, England and Wales) have ten million less; but they have at least 78,000 inmates at present. What is more interesting is that since 1995 the prison population has been growing uncontrollably, and that the country has had to build one new prison a year. Check the figures here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_population_of_England_and_Wales . And bear in mind that they are probably an underestimate, since the British government tend to lie.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Interesting and revealing that you equate "non-white" with "FORMER SUPERPREDATOR." Thank you for making my point.

Aside from that, you'd save yourself some embarrassment by educating yourself about the difference between correlation and causation. There are some pretty obvious holes in the logic of your ALL CAPS conclusions, if you do even a small amount of research on what other factors affect both crime rates and incarceration rates.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Why not save baduin the trouble and do it yourself? If you know these "other factors that affect both crime rates and incarceration rates", do share them with us. To just assume that your opponent's data or reasoning are flawed, without supplying any of your own, is a fourth-rate arguing tactic.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

And to make statements based on disproven assumptions and then demand other people do the work of Googling for you is a disingenuous tactic.

If baduin wants me to do research for him, he can get in touch with me and I'll provide him with my hourly rate. But this one's a freebie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but that is not the way it works. If you want to assert your views, you have to assert them. Otherwise it is open to anyone to answer that, whether or not correlation is not causation, correlation in this case (whatever the case may be) certainly is.

It's also rather rude.

[baduin.livejournal.com]

If we are speaking about science, I would like to ask a scientific question. Are you actually a human, or is it some kind of Turing test?

In the second case, you failed. I would like to inform the programmers that they still have a lot of work. It is an ingenious approach, I must say - a search for key terms, and finding the relevant platitudes in a database, but it is rather easy to distinguish this from the true intelligence. Namely, this system can never reply to arguments, only - obviously - quote platitudes.

On the other hand, it would work well on TV. I suggest adding rendering and voice recognition subsystems. Or perhaps it has been done already?

Hope and Change!
baduin.livejournal.com

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh for the love of Heaven. I am just done rebuking inverarity68 for rudeness to you, and you have to go and write this. I am trying to have a discussion here - NOT a sequel of mutual insults. For your information, inverarity68 is human enough to be one of the two or three finest fanfic writers I have ever read. If his/her responses strike you as cliched and unresponsive, say so. Argue. Don't insult. The issue we are discussing is, in my view, so important that this kind of behaviour in its discussion is positively impertinent.

[baduin.livejournal.com]

Impossible. I do not believe you.

There is no man alive who could claim, seriously, that putting criminals in jail does not lessen the number of crimes.

It must be a badly done AI.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Mister, you are drinking in the last chance saloon. One more response like this and you'll be forced to answer anonymously. I don't have to coddle your superiority complex and I won't. If you had said to inverarity68: "Do you realize that you have said that jailing people does not reduce crime? How can you justify that statement? Where is the evidence?" - nobody could have had any complaint. But to argue that someone is not human because s/he said something you find silly is despicable. As for inverarity68's fics, here is a link - http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/inverarity/ - and I suggest you read them. You might learn something.

End of the story

[fpb.livejournal.com]

baduin answered with a sarcastic apology that made matters worse. He is now banned from commenting in this LJ.