This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Mineral Bluff is a small, isolated, unincorporated community in Georgia (US, not the other one) of around two hundred souls, six miles away from the big city of Blue Ridge--a proper city of over one thousand people (yes, more than ten hundred), the seat of the Fannin County (population just a tad over 25K). Demographics-wise, Mineral Bluff follows similar trend and makeup of its larger neighbor and its county, with almost a 100% non-Hispanic White back in 2000 Census, with that percentage dropping to around 90% by 2020 as more identifying as multiracial.
Mineral Bluff is in the news because a local 11-year-old boy walked about a mile to its center, by himself which precipitated a chain of decisions and actions that led to the arrest of the child's mother:
While the boy was walking along the road (speed limit 25/35 miles), a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK. He said yes. She called the sheriff's office anyway.
A female sheriff from Blue Ridge picked up the boy and called the mother. The mother told the sheriff that she didn't know that her boy went off to the town, and was upset he didn't tell her, but was not worried since the boy knows the area and there are plenty of family living within walking distance. The sheriff dropped the boy off at home (a house on 16 acres of land) and left him in the care of his grandfather, who lives with his daughter and her four children (while the husband works out-of-state).
Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother--in front of her four children (of which the 11-year-old boy is the youngest)--who after booking was soon released on $500 bail.
The next day, a case manager from Children Services came to investigate. That investigation resulted in requiring the mother to sign a Safety Plan that requires her to install an app on her son's phone that would track his location, and to designate a Safety Person who will oversee the the children whenever she's not home. Again, the youngest is 11.
The assistant district attorney says that he'll dismiss the charges if she signs.
But no, that's not why the case is in the news. The case is in the news because the the woman got smart, lawyered up, and told the Assistant DA and the Children Services to take a hike. She got the lawyer who heads ParentsUSA and she ain't gonna sign nothing.
Five years ago, Utah passed a law that parents cannot be investigated for child neglect based solely on the fact that they let their kids walk alone, play by themselves, or wait in the car by themselves. Several states followed suit. I hope that more do so, and that publicity of this case in particular--and cases like it--precipitate adoption of similar legislation.
Because what this case so aptly illustrates is that, under current laws, it takes one stranger with safetyist mindset to see the child unaccompanied and make the call. In this particular case, the call went to the sheriff's office, landing on a sheriff who agreed with the exaggerated sense of danger for the kid (I checked the FBI stats for the county, it's not a dangerous place), which led to the dramatic arrest of the mother.
But the more typical case bypasses the law enforcement and goes to the child protection agency, which is stuffed with social workers that, charitably, over-train on the worst of parenting, and who like all bureaucrats feel the urge to To Something. That potential harassment means that even parents who themselves do not have a safetyist mindset must rationally conclude that the probability that there is one such person in the area where their child would walk or play is so high that they better not allow it. Which leads to fewer kids walking by themselves; which leads to every kid that does walk by itself being a glaring exception, which leads to higher probability that a well-meaning adult with a deranged sense of danger will call the authorities...
I don't have a Culture War angle to this. I mean, I have heard of cases like this happening in urban areas (coded Blue), but this case happened in a rural place (coded Red). When all it takes is one deranged stranger (to report, not to kidnap!), coordination becomes near-impossible. Thus the need for explicit laws like Utah's: This Is Fine And Thou Shall Not Investigate.
I would have thought the culture war aspect would have been obvious.
My life, over the years, has taken weird turns, and put me in contact with people are are decidedly outside the norm.
Nothing best exemplifies this by my most recent job, which has put me in close contact with law enforcement around the country, Sheriffs Office's most heavily.
What I've learned is that Sheriffs actually have a very broad range in how they can enforce the law. Complaints from constituents can result in everything from just a general wellness checkup to brushing the matter off('I know the guy, he's fine, and I know the person complaining, she does this all the time') to putting out a warrant for someone's arrest.
So when I see something like this;
That makes me raise more than a few eyebrows.
To put it bluntly, what the hell happened here to cause this reaction? Was the person filing the complaint a political bigwig who could have stirred up a massive fuss and the Sheriff wanted it taken care of properly to quiet a reaction? I've seen this happen before, so it wouldn't surprise. Or, more unfavorably, did the female Sheriff get a particular bee in her bonnet that made her bring the hammer down? I have no idea. An uncharitable part of me wants to lean in this general direction, because this entire thing is odd, no question, but who knows?
And on top of all that, this entire commotion was brought about by an 11-year old boy walking a mile in an area where a mile really isn't that big of a deal. Hell, I walked more than a mile away from my home when I was a kid, and I certainly don't live anywhere near the Blue Ridge mountains!
What an absolute mess and embarrassment for the Sheriff's Office.
Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this, but it's also the case that sheriffs know who the troublemakers are, and use stuff like this to go after them.
It's unfortunate, but there's going to a lot of free range kid incidents that do involve genuinely negligent parents or feral kids, and from our perspective 30,000ft above the media firestorm we'll never see it.
Where I live there's a group of tweens+teens who roam around breaking into empty summer houses. The sheriff can't really even arrest them, and even if he did the leftist prosecutor wouldn't do anything about it. So naturally his only leverage over the parents is going after them with CPS. So far this seems to be working, with little pushback because the local head of the ACLU isn't inclined to start a fuss due to her summer house being broken into.
But if it did blow up, I can already write the reason dot com article about "rural kids reported to child services just for riding their bikes to town!", and the resulting shitstorm would distract from any real conversation about how law enforcement got like this in the first place.
See this locally famous case for another example. Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane hijacking would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him. Many such cases, and a lot of them end in deadly carjacking rather than just hilarious levels of property damage.
So for the "free range kids" movement to win, it's going to need to help solve the youth crime problem that incentivizes helicopter-parenting mandates. And since a lot of the big media figures are left-libertarians like Radley Balko who also went all-in on BLM, the odds of them owning up to this are low.
The law is far too soft around young children who commit serious crimes. Deadly carjacking by under-age girls? Death penalty!
Not:
If swift use of the death penalty returns, people will be amazed at how quickly the random stabbings of 3-year-old children ends, how these violent carjackings and armed burglaries get squelched. These 'mentally deranged' people rarely try stabbing attacks or pushing-onto-the-tracks against 190 cm bodybuilders or big, tough construction workers. They go for women and children or they bring weapons. They know what would happen, even within their esoteric, legally fortuitous 'unable to understand the consequences' mental state. They do understand consequences, we just don't inflict the necessary punishment.
If all else fails, the death penalty will cull the problem people out of the population.
Technically speaking, 2A + property rights is the death penalty. It's distributed (and you'll get prosecuted if the perp fails the paper bag test and you live in a jurisdiction that conducts them), but it's still there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
<BLAM!>
You're just-worlding this nonsense hard. You've got no evidence, aside from blind trust in authority, that this 10-year-old kid was up to anything troublesome.
That's the thing: you're right in general, and I don't have any evidence about specific cases other than the ones in my local community. But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids" that normies find a lot easier to stomach than caning the little shits, so unless you can deal with the underlying problem your CPS-reform movement is going to be resisted by people who are sick and tired of having all their shit stolen by 17yr 364day & 23hr old minors who get away scot free.
And it was used to exactly that end in this case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think @SteveKirk was claiming, nor even implying, that the specific kid from OP’s story was up to no good. I think the actual point he made is that it would be very dangerous to dismantle law enforcement’s ability to deal effectively with actual cases of child abuse, just because sometimes those powers will be overfitted to apply to benign cases. It’s no different from the general discussion about tradeoffs regarding how much power to give law enforcement and how much risk of overapplication of that power you’re willing to stomach.
Not so much "dangerous" because a) the benefits of cps-elimination for good kids might outweigh the harm done by yobbos anyway, and b) taking away that specific tool would encourage people to support real solutions to youth crime.
It's mostly that a lot of people are going to see cps-elimination as taking away the one thing they see actually being used against ferals in their community. And people are so sick to death of unpunished crime right now that you don't want to become an acceptable target for their anger. (It's a lot safer to attack white libertarian free-range kid activists than it is to give a physical description of the Youth who stole your bike.)
It's "you can't take my broken stapler; what else will I use to pound nails?" You need to at least hand the guy a rock if you want him to give up his stapler without a fight.
More options
Context Copy link
Iterate that sort of advice for several generations and you end up right where we are now. You can't improve things by being afraid to dismantle harmful institutions.
In any case, he's not talking about these laws being used to deal with child abuse; he's talking about using these laws to punish parents for crimes of their children which somehow the cops can't do anything about otherwise.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link