I’ve mentioned a few times in the past that I spent a couple school years working in my hometown’s public school district. I spent the bulk of that time as a paraprofessional in a program for students with severe emotional disturbance. The program was housed in a regular K-5 public school but separate from the regular classrooms, though a handful of the higher-functioning students were partially mainstreamed. I quit at the end of the school year. I had grad school to go to, but even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have kept going. The job was just too emotionally punishing. A lot of these kids were, at 8 or 9 or 10 years old, damaged in profound and debilitating ways. They self-harmed; they attempted to harm their peers; they would on rare occasions become so agitated and destructive that they had to be sent off in an ambulance. No one ever got specific about the source of any given kid’s problems, but the general problems were pretty obvious - physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect. I felt guilty about my inability to cope with the constant emotional stakes of the job, especially considering that the permanent staff there were people who were totally dedicated to helping the hardest-to-help kids.
I think this is the logical end point of "problematizing" and "deconstructing" everything. See that obviously necessary mechanism for maintaining safety (in the first example) or obviously necessary mechanism for people who are excited to care for orphaned children? Turns out it's oppression, and you should feel bad about everything you thought you should feel ok about.
When a person decides to believe something, then ties their ego, self-esteem, and social status to it, and also receives financial reward for it - good luck undoing that.
There is a force that would get these people to change their mind. And that's skin in the game. If someone is high on idealism, there's nothing to sober them up like a little shot of experiencing the practical issue in their real, physical reality.
As long as your experience of a problem is mere paraexperience, it's easy to agree with your tribe. For pundits and politicians, it's even in their financial/political interests to simply follow the party line. You see a lot more nuance when you talk to folks who are living with a problem.
While this is prominent on the left now, I wouldn’t say it’s exclusive. The tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good is also what has pushed the GOP into nominating ever more ideologically pure candidates, or doing things like playing Russian roulette with the debt ceiling.
It’s a fundamental problem -- maybe caused by decades of Boomer material plenty-- that we no longer think of choices in terms of trade offs -- accept *this* negative thing (taxes, white people adopting brown babies) -- and get *this* good thing (schools, babies with parents).
It’s the illusion of nonscarcity, of every choice being a moral one instead of a pragmatic one.
I really liked this piece. Bit of a tangent, but I read Little Fires Everywhere recently and I was stunned by how juvenile a perspective on adoption it had.
When it comes to students with serious behavior problems, I think people need to realize that the number one priority for a school is student safety, and that the vast majority of the time that there are any concerns for a student’s safety during the school day, they will come from other students. That story you shared about the denialism about the need to restrain students is maddening, I hope that kind of denialism isn’t very common.
This is a sheltered and infantile world view. It's the philosophy of a child that has never been forced to grow up. Compounding the problem is the weird American fetishishization of youth, the strange idea that kids are somehow wise in a manner that adults have lost.
This was published recently on Bari Weiss' Substack. I think it's highly relevant. Somehow a subset of the country has come to believe that suffering is unnatural and must be dispensed with.
It's interesting that as a leftist-socialist you feel like you have to emphasize the fact that you support all of the issues regarding criminal justice system reform before pointing out that sometimes it's necessary to call a cop to solve a problem.
I find that as a libertarian kinda conservative, I have to do it in reverse order - I have to emphasize the fact that not all cops are bad, that we need the police, that we need the rule of law, etc., before I can point out the the criminal justice system in this country is broken and needs to be fixed.
My experience is that if I can have a rational conversation with anyone on this topic (left, right, or in between), we tend to agree on both points. But, just like your experience at the seminar, too many times this conversation isn't rational and people end up talking past each other (or more likely shouting past each other) because no one wants to freakin' listen anymore.
This piece of Freddie's, like a number of his other writings, made me profoundly sad. Not because he's wrong--on the contrary!--but because he reminds me of what I miss so much, which is intelligent, mature, informed discussion of complex topics. I listen to the general discourse in our society and I hear cacophony, repetitive screaming, folks with fingers in their ears chanting la-la-la. To suddenly encounter a grown-up sane voice saying comprehensible things is both a pleasure and a grief-inducing thing. What happened to everyone else? Where did *they* go? Anyway, nevertheless, thank you, Freddie.
One of the greatest myths of our time is that everyone is "fixable" or "reformable". Unfortunately, that is not the case, and the denial of this fact leads to tremendous suffering.
I would also not be surprised if many of the people advocating never restraining a child are themselves childless.
I had the same experience a few years ago, living above a man who was a violent abuser. You'd hear him shouting horrible stuff at his wife constantly - more than once she ran out of the flat in the middle of the night and there was stuff smashing etc.
Another time a traffic warden was ticketing his car and he opened the window and unleashed a volley of racist and sexually violent abuse that was p much the worst stuff I've ever heard anyone say to a person. He was a person of colour, but I guess that happens. Similarly, I came back from Christmas holiday at some point and he was gone, and there were a lot of relatives in the house with the wife etc and people coming and going.
I assume he did something further and was sent to jail. Every single person that lived there was better off. Even a traffic warden doing her job who was crying because this dude shouted sexual obscenities about her father, who had recently died. I reported that incident to the police but not sure they did anything about it.
People's conception of these issues are so often theoretical. I live a majorly privileged existence so I'm sure I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, and even then it wasn't directly affecting me, but the reality of what people will do is cruel and nasty and poisonous sometimes - that's just life.
If I spoke to this person about anything he would have just called me a homophobic slur or whatever - there's no negotiation happening.
My cousin's daughter was adopted at the age of 5? maybe 6. My cousin was and might still be a heroine addict, idk. My aunt had custody of her, my aunt is a severe alcoholic and walked out of her job when she crashed a forklift, presumably she left because she was drunk. She was taken out of the 1 bedroom apartment she shared with her grandmother and put into foster care. She had her own bedroom in a house with a yard, they bough her her first ever bike, quickly they adopted her as soon as the state made it possible. Now is it better that she was taken away from her family of origin? If her mother was healthy it would be a tragedy but its undeniable that she now has a better life than she would've had she stayed where she was. She is probably about 13 now, I hope she is doing good.
It isn't just that certain strains of political thought make the perfect the enemy of the good, it's that certain strains of political thought put disproportionate amounts of care into identifying the harm caused by casual and innocuous social interactions while (seemingly willfully) marginalizing the harm done by actual crimes.
The last part on calling the cops reminds me of the "why would you need to call the cops on property crimes, it's just property" discourse, because there was something darkly comical (albeit depressing) about people who could see the obvious aspects of feeling unsafe in manspreading on the subway or catcalling on the street but not the fact that being mugged, burglarized, or held up in a store is extremely fucking terrifying and traumatizing even if the perp ends up never touching a hair on their head, and being mugged on the street or coming home to find your windows smashed would definitely rate at least an 8/10 on the "I feel unsafe to a degree where this could interfere with my daily life and give me anxiety and depression" scale.
If there are any defenders out there who argue that catcalling and "Washington Redskins" makes people unsafe but punishing property crime is just unjust, punching down, and a capitalist conspiracy that puts property above human beings' mental health, please share how you developed this philosophy that property crime doesn't hurt people because I would love to hear it.
I think this is the logical end point of "problematizing" and "deconstructing" everything. See that obviously necessary mechanism for maintaining safety (in the first example) or obviously necessary mechanism for people who are excited to care for orphaned children? Turns out it's oppression, and you should feel bad about everything you thought you should feel ok about.
When a person decides to believe something, then ties their ego, self-esteem, and social status to it, and also receives financial reward for it - good luck undoing that.
There is a force that would get these people to change their mind. And that's skin in the game. If someone is high on idealism, there's nothing to sober them up like a little shot of experiencing the practical issue in their real, physical reality.
As long as your experience of a problem is mere paraexperience, it's easy to agree with your tribe. For pundits and politicians, it's even in their financial/political interests to simply follow the party line. You see a lot more nuance when you talk to folks who are living with a problem.
While this is prominent on the left now, I wouldn’t say it’s exclusive. The tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good is also what has pushed the GOP into nominating ever more ideologically pure candidates, or doing things like playing Russian roulette with the debt ceiling.
It’s a fundamental problem -- maybe caused by decades of Boomer material plenty-- that we no longer think of choices in terms of trade offs -- accept *this* negative thing (taxes, white people adopting brown babies) -- and get *this* good thing (schools, babies with parents).
It’s the illusion of nonscarcity, of every choice being a moral one instead of a pragmatic one.
I really liked this piece. Bit of a tangent, but I read Little Fires Everywhere recently and I was stunned by how juvenile a perspective on adoption it had.
When it comes to students with serious behavior problems, I think people need to realize that the number one priority for a school is student safety, and that the vast majority of the time that there are any concerns for a student’s safety during the school day, they will come from other students. That story you shared about the denialism about the need to restrain students is maddening, I hope that kind of denialism isn’t very common.
This is a sheltered and infantile world view. It's the philosophy of a child that has never been forced to grow up. Compounding the problem is the weird American fetishishization of youth, the strange idea that kids are somehow wise in a manner that adults have lost.
This was published recently on Bari Weiss' Substack. I think it's highly relevant. Somehow a subset of the country has come to believe that suffering is unnatural and must be dispensed with.
https://www.thefp.com/p/get-serious-about-suffering
Great article.
It's interesting that as a leftist-socialist you feel like you have to emphasize the fact that you support all of the issues regarding criminal justice system reform before pointing out that sometimes it's necessary to call a cop to solve a problem.
I find that as a libertarian kinda conservative, I have to do it in reverse order - I have to emphasize the fact that not all cops are bad, that we need the police, that we need the rule of law, etc., before I can point out the the criminal justice system in this country is broken and needs to be fixed.
My experience is that if I can have a rational conversation with anyone on this topic (left, right, or in between), we tend to agree on both points. But, just like your experience at the seminar, too many times this conversation isn't rational and people end up talking past each other (or more likely shouting past each other) because no one wants to freakin' listen anymore.
This piece of Freddie's, like a number of his other writings, made me profoundly sad. Not because he's wrong--on the contrary!--but because he reminds me of what I miss so much, which is intelligent, mature, informed discussion of complex topics. I listen to the general discourse in our society and I hear cacophony, repetitive screaming, folks with fingers in their ears chanting la-la-la. To suddenly encounter a grown-up sane voice saying comprehensible things is both a pleasure and a grief-inducing thing. What happened to everyone else? Where did *they* go? Anyway, nevertheless, thank you, Freddie.
One of the greatest myths of our time is that everyone is "fixable" or "reformable". Unfortunately, that is not the case, and the denial of this fact leads to tremendous suffering.
I would also not be surprised if many of the people advocating never restraining a child are themselves childless.
Thanks again for your excellent insights. I honestly feel like a lot of people are just taking ‘stupid lesson’ to set up a narrative of victimhood.
Somewhat disappointed to learn that I am not the only one rocking a big, fake gold G-Unit medallion.
I had the same experience a few years ago, living above a man who was a violent abuser. You'd hear him shouting horrible stuff at his wife constantly - more than once she ran out of the flat in the middle of the night and there was stuff smashing etc.
Another time a traffic warden was ticketing his car and he opened the window and unleashed a volley of racist and sexually violent abuse that was p much the worst stuff I've ever heard anyone say to a person. He was a person of colour, but I guess that happens. Similarly, I came back from Christmas holiday at some point and he was gone, and there were a lot of relatives in the house with the wife etc and people coming and going.
I assume he did something further and was sent to jail. Every single person that lived there was better off. Even a traffic warden doing her job who was crying because this dude shouted sexual obscenities about her father, who had recently died. I reported that incident to the police but not sure they did anything about it.
People's conception of these issues are so often theoretical. I live a majorly privileged existence so I'm sure I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, and even then it wasn't directly affecting me, but the reality of what people will do is cruel and nasty and poisonous sometimes - that's just life.
If I spoke to this person about anything he would have just called me a homophobic slur or whatever - there's no negotiation happening.
Every word.
My cousin's daughter was adopted at the age of 5? maybe 6. My cousin was and might still be a heroine addict, idk. My aunt had custody of her, my aunt is a severe alcoholic and walked out of her job when she crashed a forklift, presumably she left because she was drunk. She was taken out of the 1 bedroom apartment she shared with her grandmother and put into foster care. She had her own bedroom in a house with a yard, they bough her her first ever bike, quickly they adopted her as soon as the state made it possible. Now is it better that she was taken away from her family of origin? If her mother was healthy it would be a tragedy but its undeniable that she now has a better life than she would've had she stayed where she was. She is probably about 13 now, I hope she is doing good.
It isn't just that certain strains of political thought make the perfect the enemy of the good, it's that certain strains of political thought put disproportionate amounts of care into identifying the harm caused by casual and innocuous social interactions while (seemingly willfully) marginalizing the harm done by actual crimes.
The last part on calling the cops reminds me of the "why would you need to call the cops on property crimes, it's just property" discourse, because there was something darkly comical (albeit depressing) about people who could see the obvious aspects of feeling unsafe in manspreading on the subway or catcalling on the street but not the fact that being mugged, burglarized, or held up in a store is extremely fucking terrifying and traumatizing even if the perp ends up never touching a hair on their head, and being mugged on the street or coming home to find your windows smashed would definitely rate at least an 8/10 on the "I feel unsafe to a degree where this could interfere with my daily life and give me anxiety and depression" scale.
If there are any defenders out there who argue that catcalling and "Washington Redskins" makes people unsafe but punishing property crime is just unjust, punching down, and a capitalist conspiracy that puts property above human beings' mental health, please share how you developed this philosophy that property crime doesn't hurt people because I would love to hear it.