Vizinni was far less obnoxiously full of himself.
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Nice read, and she (Penny) does seem to know her way around a well-turned phrase. I particularly liked:
But I think the real takeaway for me was that I might want to go back and read the original Peter Pan book.
That, and the fact that I always think of this before I think of Peter Pan when I hear the phrase “Lost Boys”:
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The director, Lee Unkridge, is a big fan of monkeys in general, and sneaks toy monkeys into Pixar movies as an in-joke.
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I recall him claiming that being banned from Twitter was all part of the plan “this was always going to happen” (if a little ahead of schedule) (Laurie Penny again)
I wonder if this was ‘always going to happen’ too?’ 
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@nimelennar; that’s gauche enough for sure, but it’s still not nearly as creepy looking as the version that so many of us know and hate…
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There’s something I really like about that guy.
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Unfortunately we know that people who are abused are substantially more likely to become abusers than the general population. But fundamentally most of the people in the world who do the worst things are doing so as a way of dealing with their own struggle. That doesn’t negate what they do, though. We can have sympathy, but sympathy doesn’t mean agreeing with, condoning the actions of or supporting the person.
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Very true; well stated.
On the other hand, I tend to give even less of a pass to someone who has been victimized who then becomes even worse than the monsters who abused them.
It’s possible to be survivors without becoming complete assholes due to our trauma.
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And that is super important. Like I said, the group of people who have been abused becomes abusers at a higher rate than the general population. Being abused does not condemn a person to becoming an abuser.
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Agreed; at some point, there is a conscious choice being made.
Someone like Milo is long past that point, and he chose poorly.
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And it certainly doesn’t excuse them if they do.
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I think this is a huge disconnect between the Republican and Democrat bases. Anyone who pays attention to reality is going to be able to tell you that the roots of criminal activity are complicated, and that individuals find themselves becoming criminals for a wide variety of reasons highly correlated with various socio-economic factors. “Tough on Crime” politicians paint that observation as excusing individual criminal acts and say that policies that will actually reduce crime are “soft of crime.” They think that understanding that a violent criminal may have painful experiences in their past that led them to their current position is a “hug-a-thug” mentality.
So then when that same group vehemently denounces racists, the “tough on crime” crowd see what looks to them like hypocrisy. They think - you were so forgiving of those criminals, but you are so tough on me! They don’t get it. Understanding that there are reasons why people commit crimes isn’t the same thing as condoning theft or violence. And similarly, understand that there are reasons why some backgrounds are closely associated with racism doesn’t mean excusing racism.
It feels like you shouldn’t get out of grade 8 without understanding this distinction.
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Is there a research basis for this? It is often stated as a fact by defence lawyers as a mitigating circumstance for their clients, but this is not dispositive.
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Why so srs?
Shut. Him. Down.
Period.
P.S. Paedophilia needs no voice, anywhere. grrrrr
P.P.S. Children have no voice, inherently, so don’t pretend that sex with children is anything other than violence against humanity.
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I found a couple of studies that concluded that abusive people are more often victims of abuse themselves. But reading them does point to a problem with the way I stated it above. I think that if you want to properly state the link, you’d say that people who have abused children are more likely to have been abused. That’s different than saying that people who have been abused are more likely to abuse (which implies causation we can’t prove).
I also found a more recent study where that link wasn’t found using a more information sources to try to determine whether a person had been abused. It’s possible, after all, that a person who is abusive is more likely to have recollections of being abused or there is more likely to be evidence of them being abused without it actually being the case they are more likely to have been abused. That one was fairly recent and the people who did the study said it needed a lot of further research.
I think the reason why this became “common knowledge” was that the information came out from academics who actually studied it. Sociological/Psychological studies from decades ago have are sometimes disproven as people find better methodologies and maybe keeping an open mind about the causal element is a good idea, but for now I think the link is still a reasonable thing to assert.
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What makes you think we want him back?
OK, I’ll be reasonable. Maybe now is the time to start work on creating that far-right colony on Rockall.
They can get to be patriotic and defend the distant borders of Britain.
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I don’t agree with this at all.
Children absolutely have a voice. They can voice their views, their consent, their approval, or their ideas.
You are free to ignore them, but you can’t say that children are ciphers with no voice.
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