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Thinking the unthinkable

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Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#61

Post by pjscott »

slyn wrote: post #56
pjscott wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we actually have statistics showing America to be worse about this than other places? It sounds like the kind of thing that people just assume after hearing about a sensational, attention-grabbing tragedy. Remember when there were huge epidemics of suicide and Satanic ritual abuse in the 80s? Or rather, people said there were. In reality, suicide rates remained mostly flat, even declining slightly overall, and the…

>15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. In second place is Finland, with two entries. That's a bit of a disparity. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...

The United States also has more than 50 times the population of Finland. Normalize!

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#62

Post by zekenie »

joonix wrote: post #12
forrestthewoods wrote: post #7

Post like this terrify me. What if there isn't anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break. Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It…

This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next. We'll soon enough try gun control. That won't stop mass killings. Then we'll try increased mental healthcare access. That won't do much because we'll struggle with the Constitutionality o…

Talk this over with a molecular biologist. Its never gonna happen. Some pathologies are (or have components that are) hereditary. Of those things, a handful are specific gene mutations or groups of mutations. These mental illnesses are so poorly understood... None (to my knowledge) have been shown to be genetic. And its not just that we haven't found the underlying genetic reason. There probably isn't an underlying genetic cause! These systems are so complex, and DNA is only one piece of the puzzle. Epigenetics is a field that isn't getting enough public attention. Its probably responsible for much of the more nuanced hereditary pathologies and patterns that people observe.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#63

Post by Daniel_Newby »

mpweiher wrote: post #17
antidoh wrote: post #11

Outlaw guns, knives and rocks, and wink them out of existence, and these people are still there. Treat them, and some of them will come back. Outlawing guns doesn't solve this problem. But outlawing guns is the kind of "solution" we like, because a) there's a clear, specific action to argue over, and b) we can focus on it long enough to get the law through and then fool ourselves into thinking we've done something.

Regulating guns ("outlawing" is a straw man) ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. A knife in the same situation is much less dangerous, as evidenced by the incident in China at the same time where people were hurt, but none so far killed. Degrees matter.

> Regulating guns ... ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do.

No, it makes it much worse. We want the violent lunatics to have guns, because guns are not particularly fast or efficient at killing people. A lone gunman can kill at most a few hundred people before he is stopped.

You know those nightclub fires that kill hundreds of people in ten minutes? We want our nutjobs to have guns so they will not be forced to recreate a nightclub fire on a stadium scale, followed by decades of copycats.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#64

Post by mpweiher »

smsm42 wrote: post #53
mpweiher wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulating guns ("outlawing" is a straw man) ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. A knife in the same situation is much less dangerous, as evidenced by the incident in China at the same time where people were hurt, but none so far killed. Degrees matter.

Outlawing - at least if you are not police officer or soldier - is not a straw man at all. Only recently we got a SCOTUS decision that proclaimed US citizens have right to own guns, and that was a close one too. Before that, many places existed where private ownership of guns was essentially banned, and many still exist now, even though with the new decision they will be eventually phased out. However, people that in…

Outlawing is a straw man in that it is not the only option for regulation that would help. These things are not booleans!

Countries with much tighter gun regulations than the US don't outlaw guns. They also don't prevent 100% gun violence. They just have less of it. A LOT less.

So "Regulation of guns would absolutely help nothing" is just plain false. It would help some, as the numbers clearly state. It would not prevent everything, but that's not the same as it would "help nothing".

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#65

Post by elchief »

david927 wrote: post #59
elchief wrote: post #57

Thinking the unthinkable: boys of single mothers have bad outcomes.

And they also become President of the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Bubba too. Unfortunately, the plural of anecdote is not data. Statistically, children of single moms fare poorly. I am curious as to the degree that it is different beween single fathers and single moms.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#66

Post by antman »

GuiA wrote: post #16
forrestthewoods wrote: post #7

Post like this terrify me. What if there isn't anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break. Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It…

Story time! My brother (3 years younger) suffers from pretty much the same global disorder as described in the blog; the main difference is that we're in France (well, my family still is; I moved a few years ago). Throughout childhood, he presented a mix of pretty much every single psychological disorder possible- bipolar, paranoia, kleptomania, depression, etc. He was extremely manipulative, and knew how to be perfe…

He is in the mountains chopping wood with his girlfrend?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Humans vs Dolphins “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

― Douglas Adams

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#67

Post by omGac0W »

joonix wrote: post #12
forrestthewoods wrote: post #7

Post like this terrify me. What if there isn't anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break. Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It…

This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next. We'll soon enough try gun control. That won't stop mass killings. Then we'll try increased mental healthcare access. That won't do much because we'll struggle with the Constitutionality o…

Is "wanting to kill people" really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, "Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings"? Because in my mind, the line between being "sane" and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine.

One's logic could go like this, "Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I'm not happy no ones gets to be happy. Lock and load assholes." Suddenly you've got another tragedy. I would imagine people that are suicidal sometimes feel like this. Maybe it depends on how introverted or extroverted they are. The introverts disappear quietly in the dead of night, and the extroverts start mowing down pedestrians in the town square and then blow their brains out standing on the Mayor's statue.

If a gene could be isolated for "suicidal tendencies" and also for intro/extro we might be able to reduce future events like this. But just because someone is a suicidal extrovert that hates everyone it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start killing people. Maybe the ones that don't are just pussies and the gene for "guts" or "courage" would also have to be isolated?

I don't know I'm just rambling. I ask myself why I don't kill my neighbors. Is it because I'm "sane"? Well I guess so, if "liking others" and not wanting them to be sad is a characteristic of sane people. But I firmly believe that there's a tiny slice of murderer in all sane people, and I like to think of people like Adam Lanza as having just a bigger slice, because putting them in a different category of "mentally ill" sort of feels like I'm denying a part of my own nature.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#68

Post by jpeg_hero »

It's interesting to consider that if the mother, by keeping the troubled child "Michael" in the middle class artificially, she is some how enabling a possible shooter (but still unlikely).

If the child was shunned now, sure, he'd end up homeless in LA, but he would be so busy struggling with his daily existence that he wouldn't have the resources or time to go on a mass rampage.

The father seems to understand this.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#69

Post by justindocanto »

javajosh wrote: post #25
jaggederest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, since his outbursts are so episodic, My suspicion is that they very specifically aren't episodic - lots of kids with this style of behavior problem are excellent manipulators. You can't discount the possibility that he's behaving well and poorly in order to extract what he wants out of other people.

That doesn't sound consistent with the article at all. I mean, the kid seems to have uncontrolled outbursts which don't sound manipulative to me. I mean, he didn't want to go to the mental hospital but he repeated the behavior he knew would get him there. Perhaps it was a gamble to see if his mom would keep her word, but the way the article is written, it doesn't sound like that.

Outbursts can, from what i've seen, be a final attempt to manipulate somebody. If every time you bring up death/suicide, and you get what you want, well then... why wouldn't that child try that technique again.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#70

Post by justindocanto »

richcollins wrote: post #52
msutherl wrote: post #3

This is incredibly important. Every time I talk to people from outside of the country about the US, the first thing that comes up is the difficulty of obtaining proper healthcare.

Is there any evidence that healthcare would help with this situation?

As somebody who has dealt with the mental health care system without and with mental health care... absolutely yes.
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