Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
"Being a civilian in Chicago is more dangerous than being a civilian in Ukraine". Does that phrasing sound acceptable?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
Murder rate versus dead civilian rate.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
This past July, Chicago had ~45 murders against a population of 2.72 million. Ukraine had 286 civilians killed, against a population that seems a bit up in the air, but 35 million looks like a decent estimate, somewhat rounded down.
So in that month, Chicago had 16.67 murders per million people, and Ukraine had 8.17 civilians killed per million people.
Sure this is a bit cherry picked - though I chose July simply because that was the first search result with a tangible number of deaths for Ukraine. That article notes that the 286 dead civilians was "the highest since May 2022", and July is also usually a bumper month for urban crime. I don't think the comparison is completely off base, or unfair. If we restricted it to just active war zones or active gang wars, do the ratios really change that much?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
I think the point was more "If you hire someone to keep a building from catching on fire, but part of their incentive package is a reliable promise that if a fire happens then they will be the first to get rescued and also they win the lottery, then overall you haven't given them a strong incentive to be invested in a lack of building fires."
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
Well, why are they deployed?
Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.
Why is there a ton of tension and pressure around their deployment the a crazy ideologue can hook into?
Because Democrats are ideologically wedded to the idea that crime isn't real and that policing causes crime and the worst thing that could happen is for an increase in military-style crime deterrence to actually deter crime. Doubly so if that results in a win for Cheeto Hitler.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
What would such a program look like in your mind?
One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.
It took me about $50 to build an ax-throwing range in the back yard. The local gun range charges $10 a head for an hour of archery, and would absolutely give discounts for a Scouts or Hard Scouts type regular event, and would almost certainly involve a subject-matter expert helping out. Bullets are expensive, but I'm sure something could be arranged, and the rentable 50 cal sniper rifle they offer would be a hell of an incentive to reward 12 year olds.
Beyond that, hard hiking and roughing it. Physically intensive activities, especially involving mud and filth. Mud Runs would be a good fit and fuck it, I'm signing up for the Philly one tonight. Manhunt in the woods at night. Paintball. Airsoft. Reach out to local law enforcement, military, and academic institutions for specific trainings. See where you can overlap with ROTC, (there's a term for junior police academy, but I've had a bunch of wine at dinner and can't think of it). Reach out to local universities and zoos for help with teaching about local wilderness hazards and wildlife.
Seriously physical conditioning. What are the optimal amounts for pre-teens? My son talks like he's terrified of "Coach Tyler sprints" at football... but he also complains when they get skipped. What does an optimal 2-3 times per month workout for young boys look like?
And let's go even more intensive. Movie nights with films like Tremors 1-2 and Red Dawn. Monthly book clubs featuring Gary Paulsen and Jack London and Rudyard Kipling.
The hard part would be maintaining standards, but I think with 15-20 hours per month between meetings and training and assigned readings, you could get some impressive results out of a program like that.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
I think of my childhood as a triptych. In school, I was a nerd and then I came home and reread Redwall books on loop. Then, after a few hours of reading, I went to sports practice for my jock third, where I did football, hockey, basketball, baseball, crew, and year round swim teams. And then, on the weekends, I went to the farm a few towns over where my best friend lived to spend 48 hours as a feral redneck, loose on quads in a few hundred acres of woods with BB guns and slingshots and M80s until we stumbled back at dusk, exhausted and filthy.
That best friend tolerated Scouts for a grand total of 36 hours before he was sick of it, and demanded his parents pick him up from the summer camp. And while that might sound weaksauce, he also bagged his first buck a month after he turned 10, alone with a shotgun in a tree stand on his family property.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
It's not just "not paid", it costs money to register as a volunteer every year.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.
I think this expectations mismatch might be the heart of the problem. I wanted something more rigorous and active and, well, manly. Even as a child I wanted grueling endurance challenges, not a gentle stroll that meets a PBS Kids definition of "being active". My favorite memories are things like winning a fire-building contest, teeth chattering in the wet snow, at the Klondike Derby. Or later on, after some Troop drama left me siding with a small break-away faction we did a "summer camp" that in retrospect was not actually an authorized Scouting event beyond the fact that the dad who took us was our new Scoutmaster. He just had a friend who owned a large expanse of wild property, and we spent two weeks loose and barely supervised on an Appalachian mountainside.
The things I remember fondly and want to recreate for my own kids are the things that were hard. If we're setting the standard to "easily accomplished by basically any family that cares to show up"... what is even the point? Is that sort of lowering of standards actually expanding numbers? Or is that why they're still dropping?
As a note, I don't have any problem with opening the program to girls. My own daughter did it for a while. In any county, there's going to be at least a troop's worthy of hardy, outdoorsy girls, and they deserve something more intensive than selling cookies.
This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.
I can find older lists of Boy Scout requirements, but not anything for Cubs. I have to wonder though - is this actually an increase in standards and manliness? That goes against the grain of the BSA changes. Or is this something that was being made a requirement because it used to be an assumed default baseline that didn't even need to be mentioned? If the revamp happened in 2015, that's just a few years after Obama ended the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.
I would like the story, if you don't mind, even if it needs to wait until after the holiday. You seem to have been more involved in this stuff than I was, and I'd appreciate reading your take.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
FWIW, the only people in my time in scouting who gave me "pedo-ick" were a married couple who were volunteering on behalf of their nephew, and who claimed to want to stay involved even after he left the program. It wasn't anything in particular, just physiognomy/vibe plus the oddity of being so into volunteering while having such a personal remove. I was very glad when they did not follow through and I never saw them again.
Because some of the things they'd be taking way are very low cost, and probably even a net boon. Like letting Scouts meet on bases, or take tours. It functionally costs nothing, and it's tacitly encouraging Scouts in a direction you want to see them move.
Or cutting support to the Jamboree. It's probably justifiable just as a training exercise and a chance to show off. Citing the exemption that you can pull out for national security reasons because you're stretched too thin to handle the Boy Scouts just sounds weak.
The removal of rank/pay benefits, OTOH, are plausibly reasonable and appropriate.
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