May I introduce young Zach Gottlieb, a senior in a Los Angeles high school.
My revelation came in the spring, after a typical day in 11th-grade AP English. The topic was gender and how the experiences of the authors we were studying related to our world today. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear anything I hadn’t heard many times before.
Class discussions tend to go like that. We’ve been inculcated with approved positions on issues such as gender identity, patriarchy, cultural appropriation and microaggressions. Any perceived misstep can ruin a reputation in a flash.
and,
Almost a century ago, the psychologist Jean Piaget defined the stages of cognitive development. Up until about age 2, children learn about cause and effect through their actions. For the next five years, they learn through pretend play but struggle with logic. By middle school, they’re in the “concrete operational stage.” Their thinking is more logical but still rigid. Then around age 12, children enter the “formal operational stage,” becoming capable of theoretical and abstract reasoning. This progression isn’t just about acquiring knowledge; it’s about a change in the very nature of how we think.
Madeline Levine, a psychologist and expert in child development, says today’s adolescents aren’t making it all the way: “We’re turning out kids who don’t think in complex ways.”
“Some of what I see,” she adds, “is even pre-operational thinking. It’s I can only see it from my point of view. This egocentrism starts to go away in concrete operational thinking.”
maybe it used to,
During lunch at school recently, someone brought up transgender females getting banned from British rowing. Letting trans women compete on a women’s rowing team, one kid said, would be like allowing a trans LeBron James to compete in the WNBA. A girl we were sitting with immediately called him transphobic and patriarchal. She didn’t just disagree with him. She demanded that he retract what he said.
“Just because you’re offended,” he replied, a little frustrated, “doesn’t mean it’s offensive.”
What happened next was predictable. The girl shunned him, told her friends he was a jerk, and later, when another student complained to me about what he’d said, I avoided the topic entirely because I knew the drill: If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong. If you offend me, you’re canceled.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”
This boy, Zach, is only 17 or 18 years old. Let us all pray he is among the many and not the few of his generation.
Good afternoon. I guess everybody is busy with Christmas stuff.
I will be busy myself for the next couple of days.
Merry Christmas to all in case I don’t drop in before hand.
Just so you know.
If it were acceptable for me to take a second wife, I would marry Patty Loveless.
Via Shannon…
Country Music Hall of Fame Patty Loveless 2023
My son-in-law is so overwhelmed with work right now that my daughter had to go into her local liquor store to buy 7 bottles of wine as gifts for his clients. She is 8-1/2 months + pregnant and big as a house. As she went up to the counter another woman was there kinda giving her the look with the… Read more »
15 Squawk I’ve been following the Fed’s double-talk and it has been really disturbing. Between Yellen and Powell, it is a freak show. Britt Gillette’s info on the Japanese banks was news to me and alarming. I’m not surprised about helping out major banks in the West because we have asked them for assistance and cooperation over the years, but… Read more »
Texpat @ 8:13 I’m hanging at the Flea Bag Hilton tonight, I’m not really too old to make the run straight through but it’s not much fun and with Dawg I figured we’d be better off spending the night. FWIW; I came real close to driving straight through. Oh and when you’re going down the interstate at 75 and the… Read more »
I’m curious about the route Super Dave is taking from southeastern Alabama to Midland. Is he going up to Montgomery and taking Hwy 80 west to catch I-20 at Cuba, Alabama at the Mississippi line to take that interstate all the way to Midland ? Close, I went up to Troy and ran the pig-trails, Highland Home, Letohatchee, Hayneville to… Read more »
17 Super Dave
Buy more coffee, Dave. It’s a long, lonely drive out I-20 from Weatherford to Midland. You don’t want to fall asleep. Be careful.
Well I made it to Weatherford and I’m about Tarred. I left about 4:30 AM and didn’t get here until 6:30 PM but fooling with dawg and about 45 minutes of delay with construction near Shreveport and again between Marshall and Longview burned some time. Oh and don’t get me started on the low pass through Dallas Fort Worth.
Fēlīcam Nātīvitātem (Christī) tibi ōptō! (Fay-le-kahm Nah-tee-vii-tah-tem (Krees-tee) teebee ahp-to!) (Don’t forget to roll the “r” a little.)
I wish you a Merry Christmas!
Bonum annum novum tibi! (Bah-num ahn-um nah-voom teebee)
I wish you a happy New Year!
This is part of tonight’s class. I think I got all the stresses correct.
Texpat
There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a
gunBANK over thereA-telling me I got to beware
You ALL need to watch this video. There is something really bad coming.
I put a set of winter tires on an older vehicle here. When we broke down the rims, it was amazing how beat up they were. One had dent in it that has now shown itself to be slowly leaking. They say people in New Jersey now spend $1,000 a year more than the average American driver because the roads… Read more »
Dennis Prager and Eva Vlaardingerbroek discuss the Dutch farmers in the fight of their life against a tyrannical government enthralled by eco-fanatical lunatics. Eva has been on Tucker Carlson a number of times and she is a brilliant, articulate conservative. It’s a 15 minute audio. Sorry, no video, but… She is also. And this one. Proving once again all the… Read more »
Bought two new tires and went by a very busy HEB to grab some tamales. Surprised to find my brand of tamales on sale BOGO free (Tamales Aguilar).
Parking lot was full. Checker told me the employees are parking off site and they are shuttle-bussing them in.
I don’t agree with David Frum about much, but he tweeted this on October 11th and it’s worth quoting. You don’t find a lot of murderous antisemites in senior business jobs. You don’t find many in the military or national security agencies. Maybe somebody in academia should ponder why their one sector of public life is so very susceptible to… Read more »
There is an old tradition in this small neighborhood started by an attorney and his wife years ago when their children were little. Those kids are out of college now. They took the time to make real old fashioned luminaries with paper sacks, sand and little candles. For years the parents and kids would come around with a big wagon… Read more »
When the Clinton administration rolled over and let China sign 25-year contracts in 1997 to operate the three key ports of the Panama Canal, smart people were rightly alarmed, but it didn’t matter. Last year in 2022 the Biden administration apparently put up little or no fight in the renewal of those contracts for another 25 years. If Iran continues… Read more »
More C&C: Brownstone’s Jeffrey Tucker penned a short but thought-provoking counter-revolutionary piece yesterday titled, “This Silence Is Not Golden.” Mr. Tucker marveled at how the Establishment seems to be sweeping the pandemic’s totalitarian excesses — and all the resulting casualties — right down the memory hole: [insert text excerpt] Mr. Tucker was frustrated by the bizarre media silence, but I… Read more »
From the Suddenly & Unexpectedly Department, this time with irony: Jean-Philippe Collet, age 59, left this mortal coil after establishing himself as a renowned cardiologist, heading the cardiology department at a large and prestigious European hospital. He died at home, S&U, on December 15th. [I feel for his family, entering the holiday season with such sorrow.] There were many superlatives… Read more »
Facing a loss of support in Silicon Valley, the censorship industry has come up with a new blueprint to influence future elections: work with friendly jurisdictions, including the European Union and Democrat-run states, and use their power to force tech giants to reinstate 2020 levels of censorship. In a report published in September titled Seismic Shifts: How Economic, Technological, and… Read more »
More from the “science”: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a vaccine. The UK Daily Mail ran a curtly-headlined story yesterday which seemed to acknowledge how ridiculous this is getting: “Now scientists develop a vaccine to lower CHOLESTEROL.” Yes, it’s another DNA type vaccine. Run, run for the hills! This “vaccine” gets your immune system to… Read more »
Morning, gang. I never saw Billy Cat yesterday, so decided at midnight last night that something must have happened to him. However, he was in the gazebo in my back yard when I got up an hour ago, so I think I need to be less pessimistic from now on.
C&C today: CLUSTERED ☙ Thursday, December 21, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday — only four days left till Christmas! The good news is I’m back at Childers HQ in Gainesville. The bad news is due to a travel hiccup we got in late and today’s post is a little on the shorter side, but don’t worry,… Read more »
Iran has hung to death 33 women in 2022 and 2023. America is horrified at the thought of capital punishment for a woman while Islam slaughters the mothers of children.
Read This Story.
This one has more clarified details.
Found a clip that excerpts the longer Fr. Ripperger interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4Zm5i_bhM8
I’m listening to my Return to Tradition podcast, and there are priests already being faced with the baker’s dilemma: sanction my sin or else. The holder of the office of pope is evil. He is winnowing the willing from the faithful. Count me as one of the remnant, if it comes to that. My eternity is more important than religious… Read more »
The punishment for prosecutors with holding exculpatory evidence should be the maximum penalty for which they were trying the defendant. Anything less than that is an insult to justice.
It pays to know your customers. Posted this morning by Stephen Green at Instapundit: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN (ON GAS): Nearly half of Buick dealers accept GM’s buyout offer.“General Motors Co.’s Buick brand said that nearly half of its U.S. dealers have opted to take a buyout instead of moving forward with its electric-vehicle future.” Plus: “Buick is the… Read more »
The next time you want to trash defense attorneys remember Glynn Simmons and 48 years. I know, I do it too. However, the prosecutors in the original trial withheld exculpatory evidence. Remember that also. A 71-year-old Oklahoma man who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he did not commit was exonerated by a judge on Wednesday. Former… Read more »
We had our dad’s service yesterday morning and once again, Magnolia Funeral Home did a fantastic job. Cannot recommend them enough, very fair and just so easy to deal with. Brother in law cooked up some brisket and pork butt and we all spent the afternoon at their house. When you’re 89, many of your friends and family are not… Read more »
I’m curious about the route Super Dave is taking from southeastern Alabama to Midland. Is he going up to Montgomery and taking Hwy 80 west to catch I-20 at Cuba, Alabama at the Mississippi line to take that interstate all the way to Midland ? If I were in a hurry that is the way I would go, but interstates… Read more »
The only good thing about cancer as opposed to a gunshot or fatal car wreck is that you get some time to get your affairs in order and make your peace with ELOHIM. May Texpat’s son-in-law find that peace before he goes. May Texpat’s daughter quickly and fully recover from her grief.
Texpat
So very sorry to hear about your son in law, how heartbreaking. Prayers for him and your daughter.
I hope Zach doesn’t succumb.
Every time I believe we have reached Peak Stupidity, some sector of our society says, “Hold my beer.” Honestly, this kind of news makes me want to scream and wring people’s necks. There are boards of trustees overseeing every one of these funds and no one is screaming to the media about this. Obviously, all these hundreds of people think… Read more »
On the road again,…well we’re off.
Mornin’ Gang