Waste of skin female states her cousin had no choice but to burglarize to get money for school, clothes, etc. Blames homeowner who shot & killed him during confrontation when burglarizing.
Relatives of a 17-year-old are angry the teenager was shot and killed by a homeowner who police say was protecting her property.
The sister of the teen who died identified him as Trevon Johnson. She said he was a student at D. A. Dorsey Technical College.
“I don’t care if she have her gun license or any of that. That is way beyond the law… way beyond,” said Johnson’s cousin Nautika Harris. “He was not supposed to die like this. He had a future ahead of him. Trevon had goals… he was a funny guy, very big on education, loved learning.” […]
“You have to look at it from every child’s point of view that was raised in the hood,” said Harris. “You have to understand… how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school? You have to look at it from his point-of-view.”
If you raise a kid to be a thug, he may meet a thug’s end.
It’s the principles, stupid.
When I was a young child, we were being raised (five of us) by a single mother, and we never had any spending money. So we got creative. We made (by hand) pincushions based on the nearest holiday and sold them at school and church, had newspaper routes, offered to clean the windows or sweep the floors of some neighborhood businesses, passed out advertising flyers for others, mowed lawns, babysat kids, and I tutored my fellow students. NOT ONCE did it ever occur to us to rob anyone’s house.
Scratch a future thug. This woman just saved the State the cost of his future incarceration(s).
“You have to look at it from every child’s point of view that was raised in the hood”
No I don’t. Sorry.
We have to remember that our property is theirs for the taking. It’s a simple concept.
“You have to understand… how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school? You have to look at it from his point-of-view.”
The frightening thing is that such a world-view is learned; it does not rise spontaneously. There’s no doubt in my mind that the decedent heard this sort of justification from every adult in his life from the time he was a little kid.
#BlackThugLivesMatter!
Is it just me, or does naming your son Trevon or Trayvon or some other variant doom him to death?
“What did you name him?”
“Treyvon.”
“So, he’s gonna get shot then.”
1Jesus said to his disciples, “Stumbling blocks are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! 2It would be better for him to have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. (Luke 17:1-2)
Every tick you pluck from your skin thinks it has a right to your blood.
We have to remember that our property is theirs for the taking. It’s a simple concept.
Hey, a whole political party is built around this concept! :-P
Greetings:
Me, I’m going with “It takes a pillage to raze a child.”
Wait, this kid was in college? Yeah, I couldn’t afford that.
Ok, truth is I didn’t want to afford that. Instead I got a, dare I say it, JOB.
Speaking of which, my dad’s parents died when he was in 8th grade, he had to quit school and…get a JOB. When he was 35, with five kids, he went back to school while at the same time…working at a JOB. He’s retired school principle now.
My wife (my third one by the way ‘cuz I’m evil like Donald) went to college at thirty and got a master’s degree while raising a son and…keeping a full time JOB.
I guess if you come from the hood a JOB is immoral or something…
Just another, rather imaginative take on “dindu nuffin”.
I wonder if the two years my family lived in the projects in Sacramento would absolve me of guilt if I started stealing stuff from hard-working people?
And this thing of using the word “hood” to mean “neighborhood?” Real parents should slap that habit right out of their kids’ mouths.
“But peeps know what I mean by it!”
“Yes. They do. And that’s why you need to stop saying it. A ‘hood’ is a certain kind of neighborhood, and when people who aren’t from one hear you say that’s where you’re from, they hear you saying you’re not worth as much of a person as they are. That makes you an accessory before the fact in how they treat you. Say ‘neighborhood’ instead, and they will hear you saying you are every bit as much of a person as they are. They’ll respect you.”
“Am I less of a person for coming from the hood?”
“No. Only for calling it one.”
Raskolnikov could not have justified a crime better.
If a White man had said this , he would be called a racist and hounded from his job.
Homeowner ought to sue the thug’s estate for any property damage that occurred.
…and require the state to pay the award?
Good Lord. Do porch monkeys have any self respect? Any at all?
Oh dear.
“The frightening thing is that such a world-view is learned; it does not rise spontaneously. There’s no doubt in my mind that the decedent heard this sort of justification from every adult in his life from the time he was a little kid.” –
This is exactly right-and is exactly why I fear that our Republic is doomed.
Since Ace of Cunts kicked me out, because, at the end at least, I claimed Ace capitulated to PC when Jeff told him (and Jeff told others) over and over and over, you give them a hint of decency assumed and they kill you.
My last quote, at Ace tonight, was somethin19550g along the (true) troll lines of “Ace only refused to see Goldstein’s truth because Ace hate Jews” or something trolly like that.
But the fact is language controls thought.
As I have been saying for a while now, Buckley* is the answer.
Consider what Buckley fought against from Yale in the 50’s, to the extent he publish God and Man at Yale around the age of 24. This isn’t any “get out of jail free” card of course, but to the extent the fight is like the journey Garth Brooks poeticized about, “the chase” he called it, isn’t it really a great time to be alive?
^Win Reagan-style 49 states
Mark Steyn, Ann Althouse, and Jeff Goldstein are heros, and they most likely don’t think of themselves as such (often).
Chesterton and C.S. Lewis knew persons of this ilk.
Ace is a great writer, but a childless atheist can only do so much, am I right?
I am childless and don’t live according to any religion’s precepts of a Christian value set; I do hate myself at times for it and that does limit me.
Aren’t I right to disclude myself compared to men raising families when probity is considered without ego?
Uh oh; It ain’t St. Patrick’s Day no more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RST9mrC5sbc
Among others, Ann Althouse?
we need more better social policies
Ann Althouse?!?
The only explanation for including that dingbat on the list is ’cause you have the hots for her.
But the fact is language controls thought.
That’s a strange definition of fact, if it were one. But there are probably plenty of neurophysiologists who would dispute on the question what “controls” thought or thinking, along with all the myriad other brain functions they would list alongside thinking as of a piece with it. Dollars to doughnuts though, they’ll be taking about matter in motion or similar such businesses.
Interesting concept. Maybe better stated as “thought is limited by/to language”?
George Orwell believed language controlled thought.
On a gross [tacit] reading of nature (in a kind of plainness or simplicity, which is to say not necessarily adequate but a place to start), one may as well say that thought is limited by the foodstuff available to sustain the organ making thinking, i.e. the brain.
For instance, Bashar Assad puts rebels into his prisons and there starves them to death (apart from the physical tortures, the cigarette burnings, iron-rod beatings, broken bones, etc). The question then arises, what controls the thought they cease to have as they fade from consciousness, just prior to their deaths? The gross or simple reading of the physical situation would say, lack of food.
Of course, that simple reading does not descend to the cellular level, molecular level, or electromagnetic level of accounts the neurophysiologists might make. It doesn’t fill out the question “How does that work?” Rather, it’s the sort of beginning that eventually spurred the quest for such neurophysiological accounts. “What’s going on here [mechanically speaking]?”, is the raw kind of question. That leads to other sorts of how questions, “what’s the physical architecture like,” what’s the structure, what’s the form, what’s the input, what’s the output, what are the parts, how do these and these parts relate to one another (or not) and so on.
Eventually some questions go to what is consciousness itself? What is this thing we refer to (experience, even) without knowing what it is?
So in another sense, these latter questions were already raised in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo dealing with Socrates’ “second sailing”, asking about causes. As well as intentions. Agency comes up. There’s a lot we don’t know — both about how it works but also as we see, why it works — and thinking, with language plays a role in telling us this: that we don’t know.
I’m starting to get why Lee wants to play roman legionary to your Archimedes. . .
he teased.
Language circumscribes thought.
Better?
I think the biological process is different than what we’re talking about though, by which I’m thinking of the higher level of thinking. Animals have no language (beyond, say, growling to convey warning), but do they think? I know they can learn, but not perhaps above whatever rudimentary communication they are capable of. Does a one year old child think, even before grasping there is such a thing as verbal communication? Again, I would say yes, but only to the extent they comprehend the communication they do grasp. Or, before learning language, is a child just an unthinking being only capable of reaction to pleasure or pain?
Is it better? I don’t have an answer really, though that has to be taken in the context of the wider questions I think are raised. For instance, if we think that a child without language (because too young yet) doesn’t think, then maybe speaking of thinking solely in terms of language makes sense. If, on the other hand, we think that a child without language (because too young yet) does think without language, then it’s another thing again. But that’s just me.
Or, the thought process is circumscribed by the language in which it is carried out.
Does that bring you down from your Olympian abstractions?
You little Athenian, you.
Perhaps it’s enough to speak of communicated thought, hence language bearing thought. But then that’s sort of like the principle of heat, phlogiston, going wherever heat is present. Or that Moliere doctor character talking about — what was it? — the principle of sleep (dormative virtue). A kind of question begging, right?
I don’t know about you, but I know my kids could understand Enlish before they could speak it. So it’s my opinion that language and thought develop concurrently.
But too, there are other questions here I’ve been ignoring. Like our notion “fact”. Only recently (a few months back) did I run into Harvey Mansfield’s account that holds Machiavelli responsible for originating that [fruitful] idea. Along with that idea I’ve been stuck for years on, the other idea we call by the name “reality” — another deeply embedded concept which generally goes without much examination. The word “reality” which we take so much for granted seems to have entered our parent languages from the world of property (land) holdings and titles to such, around the same time as Machiavelli was writing. So, there’s that too.
You’re familiar with Frederick II’s (Holy Roman Emperor 1220-1250) experiment to discover man’s original language by having an infant reared in complete silence aren’t you?
Nah, probably not save by some mention I’d heard. Don’t know about it beyond a mention.
I did have a semi-fascination with Herzog’s movie The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser [or Every Man for Himself and God Against All] way back when, though have forgotten most of that.
I’ve never heard of it, what did he learn?
He didn’t learn anything. The baby died. Which may be because it was the 13th century, or it may be because there is no question to beg. Language and thought go together like particles and waves.
I remember there was a Jodie Foster movie about a child that grew up in the wild isolated from other people and had no language when she was discovered. At least no recognizable language. I didn’t watch it, but it makes me wonder, such a circumstance would not prevent one from thinking, but would necessitate the person to attach some sort of signifier, verbal or not, to things and events. For example, even though she knows no word for the moon, she would still attach some name to it and so then be able to think on her observations of it so as to be able to anticipate its behavior. So.maybe it’s a kinda chicken /egg thing, what comes first, the thought or the signifier?
Go together isn’t in dispute though, is it? That is we don’t say that there is no association of language and thinking (at all). What’s in question is whether thinking is occurring in the absence of human speech. Which seems a plausible predication (or state of affairs with mental activity) anyhow.
On the other hand, O Sparty, what the fuck?
I would guess there is a minimal amount of mental activity going on that corresponds to what we call “instinct,” and that’s that.
But this has been an excursion down a rabbit hole of abstraction, because the interesting thing for me is the practical action, which is where Orwell located it: language circumscribes thought.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
I do a poor job articulating the center of the abstraction, it’s true. However, it is not a worthless or easily dismissed matter, for this reason I believe: the question goes to the heart of the source of agency in the thinking beings, questions of free will and determinacy, beyond mere language as such (that’s why touching on the meaning of consciousness earlier). We’ve been circling around the margins of what I think the scholars have termed compatibilism and determinism (terms in opposition, at least as I dimly understand them). But for more on that it is probably best to go to the sources.
To differentiate between instinctual thought and abstract thought, I would just say you can’t have the latter without a set of terms, a language, to give thinking form. As to whether language controls thinking, I would say it’s possible to control thinking if you are able to control the language, PC of course immediately leaps to mind, but to make the blanket statement that language controlls thinking is probably more a generality (or a theoretical?) than a fact.
We’d have to carefully tease out what we mean by terms like instinctual and the others we use about thought and thinking.
Like lots of people today are watching the newly hatched eagle at the National Arboretum. Little critter instinctively raises its bobble-head and opens its beak to get fed. Or, prior to that, instinctively pips its way out of the egg-shell in which it was contained. There’s a bird brain in there directing that behavior.
So with a man throwing a rock at a prey target (or a basketball at a hoop). There’s a human brain in there calculatively determining all that’s about to happen when the arm winds up and lets go the stone at the right moment, position and angle — this stuff has been modeled by the thrower’s brain prior to the throwing, huge amounts of processing involved. This too, the neurologists say, is thinking going on. Is language necessary for that? No, it doesn’t seem so. Offloading thoughts about it to others however, communicating, that’s where the language we speak of comes in.
Another fer instance: Crow eats.
Thinking? Or not thinking? Looks like pretty complex thinking to me.
Really? Try thinking in colors or tastes or sounds (thinking not describing in terms of color, taste or sound).
Sdferr’s comments though, raise some interesting points, so I’ll agree that we need to distinguish between different kinds of problem solving and higher order reasoning. We think in language, but we can also do (throw rocks, lick termites off a stick) acts of problem solving. Symbolic action comes into play somewhere though. Offloading thoughts is as good a way to put it as any I guess.
The neurologists will probably tell us it’s all a neuro-chemically induced illusion. . . .
>The neurologists will probably tell us it’s all a neuro-chemically induced illusion. . <
no start blaming peeps for their dysfunction:
Pelosi calls on Ryan to delay Easter recess
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/273567-pelosi-calls-on-ryan-to-delay-holiday-recess
dem council rep gov : their effin' prob not mine.
. For example, even though she knows no word for the moon, she would still attach some name to it and so then be able to think on her observations of it so as to be able to anticipate its behavior. So.maybe it’s a kinda chicken /egg thing, what comes first, the thought or the signifier? –
For the congenitally deaf, there is no heard/spoken language so their language is entirely symbolic
also, see the story of Helen Keller … blind & deaf who had simple gestures as symbolic of things and fully grasped language when she was able to grasp a series of symbolic gestures as “water” and that those symbols could be used again and again in different combinations to stand in for different things and concepts.
The neurologists will probably tell us it’s all a neuro-chemically induced illusion.
Yet these same ‘experts’ are unable to figure out what consciousness is.
The brain is the hardware — it passes thoughts, stores memories, etc; but the conscious person who learns, plans, decides – just uses the hardware. And language is soft interface the *I* uses to interface with the outside world. IMHO language can definitely shape the *I* because it can normalize the particular behavior and reinforce it.
Work in an office where people are pissed and are vocal about it — it “infects” others. On the other hand, a pleasant office where people are happy and treat each other civilly help induce feelings of satisfaction and happiness in others.
We can even affect our own emotion well being by acting the way we wish and finding ourselves actually being that way.
Ralph Fiennes couldn’t wait for the end of the filming of Schindler’s List because he discovered the days of acting as the sadistically cruel & evil Nazi was affecting him and how he expressed himself and treated others in real life.
“In real life” invites us to revisit our friendly concept “fact”, along with its partner in the division of the world as posed by the modern political scientists, “value”.
So for instance, we glance again at the cause why Socrates was in prison awaiting his execution. For the Athenians it was because Socrates denied the existence — the reality, we would say on their behalf, as opposed to the fiction — of Zeus. He had broken the Athenians’ law which demanded belief in the gods of the city without exception. Socrates says no, Zeus does not exist, he is a fiction. (In our terms, Zeus is a product of a brain or of many brains sharing a product, made [or pretended to be] substantial — so substantial, in effect, as to be the cause of or at the root of the possibility of all human society in the Greeks’ terms.) Zeus seems to be in terms of the moderns’ fact-value distinction an Athenian value, while taken by the Greeks who prosecute and condemn Socrates to be a fact.
[Of course this account is itself highly abstracted from the myriad of events and circumstances applying to the lives of the Athenians at the time, such as the Athenians having been at war with the Lakedaimonians; such as the Athenians’ disastrous Sicilian campaign; the overthrow of their democracy and institution of the oligarchy of the 400; the overthrow of the 400 and reinstitution of democracy; eventual Athenian defeat by the Lakedaimonians; the subsequent tyranny of the thirty; Socrates’ earlier association with Alcibiades and then some members of the 30 tyrants together with resentment of these associations, etc: Athenian fortunes were in the shitter, and someone could be blamed whether responsible or not. Socrates’ accusers were hardly going to blame themselves. Socrates, on the other hand, had nothing to do with all of that.]
Still, this abstracted reduction was the essence of charges and conviction, that is, what was formally at issue and upon which actions — execution and suffering execution — were undertaken. Speech.
Orwell depicted “language controls thought” as the view of IngSoc, not an objective fact. His argument was that IngSoc sought to deprive people of the tools to think freely, by restricting the language into logical loops that could never approach ideas that IngSoc disapproved.
If language actually controlled thought, there could be no Thoughtcrime, and no need for Room 101.
I need someone to tell me where *I* exist, *I* being the self-aware meta-cognitive being who operates they biological machine it corresponds to.
For simplicity, and lack of a better term, let’s call *I* my soul. What is this soul? Where does it reside? How was it created? Why was it created? If it evolved..why? Could it evolve again? What happens when this biological machine I control breaks down?
Religion provides answers to these questions if you have faith…but what are science’s answers?
Is my soul merely electrical impulses stored in my neurons?
Religion may instead skip the troubling questions part, and in that sense, skip answers to the questions as well. Those kinds of answers, after all (as we learn in Job, I think) seem to be the provenance of the deity alone; answers to which we humans have no direct access outside claims that the deity provides them to us (through a glass, darkly, and therefore so to speak, incompletely — we just don’t possess as the deity does the unified whole which stitches together all our partial human truths).
For another (possibly more confusing) attempt at the illumination of those questions I’d recommend the Introduction to Seth Benardete’s book “Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic”, just for one concentrated source. He begins with the flustering (labyrinthine) arguments concerning the unity and separation of soul and body in the Phaedo.
“I need someone to tell me where *I* exist,”
Sure! You exist within your body.
Before you had a body and after your body dies no one knows, can’t help you there.
Sure! You exist within your body.
Where? Can I somehow be removed? Moved to a different meat machine? Does my identity change if I leave my body? Am I nothing more than an energy field? The collective conscious of individual cells?
What makes me me? What makes me wonder about such questions?
Theoretically, one’s memories can be stored. One’s beliefs, priorities, devotions — supposedly — all stem from one’s experiences.
But without an OS to animate the memories and reliably recompile them into the resulting personality every time it boots up, it’s just an archive without a soul except by peruser’s interpretation — assuming said peruser has a soul of its own. Even then it’s just an impossibly detailed autobiography.
An overabundance of free time. ;-)
Sorry, you are stuck in your own body until your body dies. Can’t be moved til then at least.
Those other questions? Some think the answers can by found by gazing intently at your own navel, I’ll warn you though, it’s been tried by many people for many millennium, with no satisfaction.