Give a child approval, and he will learn to like himself

I happened past a small sign placed in the front of an architectural firm downtown, and it had a number of little statements along these lines like: give a child criticism, and he will be a cynic.  They were both positive and negative and then I came to the one which is the title of this post.

The reason I highlight this one is because I think it’s likely often true.  And it hit upon a topic which has been recently on my mind again about bullying and suicide.  A child needs encouragement and approval.  I worry about gay teens which get little or no approval.  Perhaps I am pointing my finger in the wrong direction, but parents could be lukewarm in their support about their child being gay.  If they are badly informed about innateness of homosexuality, they may secretly hope that bullying the kid receives in school would change their child.  They may provide conditional love.  We’ll only love you if you change to be ‘normal’.

Sometimes when parents point fingers elsewhere, I wonder about whether the parents did all they could.  Obviously if they had unlimited resources, they could move to another place where being a gay teen is better accepted.  But obviously this kind of remedy is only available to the most committed and wealthy of parents.  Still, being supportive parents should be able to do a lot to help shield a child from bullying and suicide.

The right’s sudden love of austerity and balanced budgets

Do conservative people own a lot of bonds or debt issues?  I guess it would make sense that they are too conservative to own equities, so maybe it’s the case.  Are they Chinese?  What’s behind the idea that we should prevent any inflation?  By the way, inflation is a great way to get rid of debts, and the US owes a ton of money.  It doesn’t quite make sense.  I guess there is some sort of right-wing Christian hard currency thing which is so random and not sensible.

What triggered this was I was reading Krugman again, and in the end he argues (as always) for the side of expanding government spending.

I also think that all of this convenient that for a Democratic President the Republicans are very intent to tanking the economy.

Bullying of gay teens

One of the conundrums of gay teen suicide is the dynamic of how bullying leads to suicide.  A recent NYTimes op-ed doesn’t seem to enlighten us too much on the issue.

I call it a conundrum because on the face of it, it seems the ultimate case of doing what your opponent wants.  If a bully calls you a f*g and says you should die, why would you help him?

I think it might be that, surprise — a little like in domestic violence cases — the victim actually likes the bully.  Crazy, right?  From what we hear in the news, this isn’t made terribly evident.  Take a related case, though not the same in base criminality: the killing of Lawrence King by a classmate.  In this case, King probably liked his classmate killer, and maybe at least in the beginning hoped his killer was gay, too.  And when it was clear the killer classmate was straight, perhaps King switched to dressing like a girl.

But okay back to suicide.  I think committing suicide due to bullying means that actually you care a lot about the bully’s opinion.  If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t give suicide a second thought.  In the vast majority of cases, the bully perpetrator and victim are male.  And in almost all cases the victim is gay and the bully is straight, so what comes to mind, is that probably the victim somehow liked the bully and wished the bully would return the affection.  When the bully inevitably rejects the victim with anti-gay slurs of course, this hurts a lot.  Why doesn’t the victim, leave off after this?  Reminder, we’re talking about teenage crushes here, and so it might be some sort of lingering and immature obsession by the victim with the bully.  And when the bully increases the intensity of his rejection and his bullying, the victim perhaps remains in an emotionally aroused psychological state (no, not the other kind of aroused state).  Once in this state, it is possible to do crazy things, and there you have it.

Perhaps it is here that the bully sees his power and uses it to wicked ends.  The bully sees that the victim likes him and wants to make him happy and is willing to do anything.  His orders are for the victim to make himself scarce, so scarce that the bully never has to see him again.

Summary: There is of course the obvious ego destructive feelings of people saying you are worthless, etc, etc.  But this would only have an effect if you believed them, and you would more likely believe them if you really liked them or admire them.

Diagnosis made, but how to prevent it?  Reject the bully in your life!

## Some are saying that bullying rarely causes suicide.

What the average American says to themselves? “I’m so rich, I’m just like those billionaires who don’t pay no federal income taxes”

I’ve always wondered about the Republican argument that people don’t want taxes raised on the rich.  They say that this is because they (Americans?) are aspirational and always thinking about when they might be that rich.  Let me try to follow that reasoning…

$40,000/yr might sound to some like a lot of money.  When the President Obama says he won’t raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 , I gotta think that people in the $40,000 range must say to themselves, in a thought of pure ego preservation: “Hey, I’m not far away from that tax hike.  I mean I’m not good at math, but with a few raises I’ll reach that income level and then, I’d be really upset about all those taxes I would be paying.”

Nevermind that $250,000 is one massive 525% raise away affecting these folks.  If they were to get a consistent 5% raise every year, they’d be 38 years away from hitting that tax hike (with inflation adjustments, probably even longer, at 2% inflation, it’s something like 62 years), and these people would probably be 10-20 years past their retirement age by then.

But let’s set the record straight to the rationalizers: if you aren’t paying federal income taxes, you are some of this country’s working middle class, just slightly above the poor.  You aren’t rich.  Depending on where you live, you might be barely getting by.

Is this another case of psychology where people don’t want to foreclose future options if they can avoid it?  In this case, the future option is to be making a ton of money without paying taxes on it.  There must be a way to combat this nonsense. Maybe we should generate some pride and attention around this idea:  If you make $250,000 a year, you are helping make it so that people making $40,000 can continue to pay no federal income taxes, and make it so that the paltry $40,000 sum is actually a living wage!  Be proud of paying your taxes, and helping out the old $40,000/yr you.

Gunman, no such thing as gunwoman

In a way it’s not a surprise that the word ‘gunwoman’ doesn’t exist. But still, I guess it’s incredibly rare for a woman to fire a gun.

Why are unelectables running?

It’s not that there seems little to lose from running, there must be a lot to be gained from running, even if you do lose.  Perhaps now candidates can funnel campaign money into anything they like, but especially paying huge salaries to friends and spending extravagantly on themselves even while their campaigns flounder (Gingrich spends $40k on 3 days of private jet travel).

From the Caucus blog at NYT in a discussion of the Gingrich staff quiting en masse: “as the National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes, staffers don’t usually just get up and quit unless they have somewhere else to go, since even hopeless campaigns still pay the bills.”

Afghanistan and bin Laden

This seems to clarify things very significantly.  It’s interesting that I think it would be very politically palatable to withdraw from Afghanistan now.  If only Bush was able to get bin Laden in 2001 or 2002, a lot of US treasure might have been saved.

Jared Loughner’s Todo list (sarcastic)

[It's a strange thing but virtually all searches coming to this post are asking if Loughner was gay.  My personal opinion is this is extremely unlikely.  No gay guy would make himself bald when he could obviously easily have a full head of hair.  Similarly, the (hideous) teenage long curly locks is a style only a straight guy would wear.  Besides something like Loughner being gay would have gotten reported on immediately, just like they reported it in the cases of PFC Bradley Manning (alleged Wikileak source) and Steven Slater (the [ex-]Jet Blue flight attendant).  The recent finding by police of Loughner’s pictures of himself in a red g-string aren’t gay because it’s the straight guys who love women’s panties.]

Todo

• Prove the army wrong: that I’d actually be very good at shooting people (done)
  

• Finish Sarah Palin’s request (she’s so hot, by the way) to eliminate the 20 democrats who voted for damn gov’t takeover of health care so that Tea Party candidates will take their places (partial, harder than I thought)

• Show Pima college that I’m not crazy (not yet done [don't know how to start])

Wives don’t wonder whether their husbands are gay over the holidays

A quick check of the visitor stats on my 4 year old blog post on the topic which still gets visits fairly regularly sees big lulls over Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Maybe it’ll come back after New Years…

Height and gayness

If studies of male homosexuality are to be believed, you are more likely to be gay if you have more older brothers.  This implies that if you are gay your birth order number is likely to be greater than the normal population.  Birth order has been found to relate slightly to height to the tune of up to 1-2 cm less for later offspring.

Another piece of data which I gleaned from Simon LeVay’s recent book: Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why was that in one study gay males tended to have smaller limb versus trunk ratios.  The reason for this could perhaps be earlier puberty.  Limbs tended to grow more before puberty and trunk grows more after puberty.  (The later the onset of puberty, the more chance you had to grow.)  Or it could be less sex hormones (testosterone).

A separate Canadian study found that gay males tended to shorter and lighter than straight males.

Robert Putnam @Stanford: American Grace

[Author's note: americangrace.org/press.html has labeled my blog as reactionary.  I had to look it up, but reactionary means conservative.  Sorry folks, this is a radically liberal blog.]

I found Putnam’s book ‘Bowling Alone’ fascinating, so I was fairly enthusiastic to hear Putnam talk at Stanford about his new book ‘American Grace’ even though it has to do with religion, and I’m an atheist.  He seemed to talk liberally about the contents of most of his book in his roughly 90 minute talk which was interspersed at times with anecdotes and self-deprecating humor.

Putnam shows a graph which shows that Americans are quite religious, far more than any other developed country and slightly more religious even than Iranians!  He then described how the sexual revolution earthquake of the early 60′s resulted in a reaction by some (older) Americans into a stronger embrace of more extreme (evangelical) Christianity.  He says this stampede to ‘family values’ actually caused another aftershock of younger folks into being non-believers in reaction to what they saw was promotion of extreme conservative beliefs and invasion of the political sphere by the ‘religious right’.   Both of these effects have conspired to empty much of the mainline Protestant churches.  The resulting polarization might predict religious war.  However, as I had heard him state earlier in an interview (I think it was on PBS Newshour) and again in today’s talk, surprisingly Americans are tolerant of other religions and non-believers/atheists.  As evidence of this more than 50% of very religious people believe that persons from another religion or even non-believers could go to Heaven (despite this being quite contrary to almost every strict religious teaching)!  He says this is probably precisely because of the religious diversity in the US.  Americans are highly likely to have a friend or even to have married someone from another religion (or non- religion).  Once again demonstrating the principle that it’s difficult to demonize people you know.

One very surprising finding is that in America the group people view most positively out of all religions or non-believers is Jews.  Jews have something like a >80% approval rating, just besting Catholics.  (I think we should not let it be said that Jews are an oppressed minority, at least in America.)  Non-believers are at slightly above 50% approval, actually above Mormons which are below 50%.  Buddhists and Muslims are also in the 40′s below Mormons.  (I think opinions on Hindus were not requested.)  He was not terribly troubled about what appeared to be anti-Muslim sentiment because the Buddhists and Mormons had been lumped in roughly together with them.  He said it was essentially fear of the unknown.  People did not have a Buddhist, Muslim or Mormon friend.

Virtually as a side comment, Putnam mentions that people become more religious as they get married and have children (carrying on a religious/cultural tradition?) and puzzlingly around the age of 60 they also are increasingly religious.  I immediately thought of Heaven as a reason at the same time Putnam then mentions he hypothesized that people might be attempting to: ‘cover the bases’.

Linking back to Bowling Alone, Putnam then states that actually the number of friends you have from church predicts the amount of volunteerism, donations of money and time, and community involvement regardless of the type of religion it is.  This is in a way a measurement of the public good of religion (which I guess is not the source of all evil after all).  He then posed the question: what’s special about the ‘church’ friends that makes this happen, saying that he didn’t know the answer.  In the Q&A, no one really addressed it, but I think the obvious answer (which he probably would have thought of, too) would be that if you go to church and you believe you want to get into Heaven, you are supposed to be doing good deeds.  I.e. good people do good deeds, and besides you want to get the word out that in your religion, people are actually trying to get to Heaven and doing good things, it’s like peer pressure, advertising and competition all wrapped together.  Anyway, that was my guess.  Will there ever be a secular organization to do good like churches?  I believe there could be as soon as they stop being distracted by the assault by the religious on the separation of church and state (a principle which I think is all important to atheists).  Atheists, secular humanists motivation in such a group may be to prove that people can be moral (have compassion, show kindness, etc) despite not believing in religion.

The Stanford Daily coverage.

You’re disgusting! No, you are!

If you’re a polite person, you don’t go around saying other people are disgusting and not to their face.  You think you’re being honest and saying something ‘obvious’ that everyone else must feel.  But no, this is not polite, and you’re not being a nice person by being ‘honest’.

This is not something I have been stunned by many times, but I can say that whenever it happens I am struck wanting to say something untrue in return.  Like: ‘Nooo, you straights are the disgusting ones!’

What’s interesting is that it is actually untrue.  You would think that as a gay male, to me it would be gross to see heterosexual sex (or as close as Hollywood gets to a simulation of it) on screen.  But it’s actually okay.  I mean, Hollywood sex generally targets the woman, and I’m not attracted at all, but I find nothing objectionable about it.  Mind you, it’s not something I go out of my way to see, I mean, the steamy Hollywood sex scenes focusing on the woman generally in the missionary position.  But I specifically must say, I do not feel disgusted.

So now you straights for the coaching you need:  The correct response when seeing a gay kiss or gay sex scene is to applaud, but failing that to simply be quiet and appreciate a different human condition.  Later, whenever you speak of the scene you saw, you will say exactly what I said: “I wouldn’t go out of my way to see that, but it was okay.”  If you are feeling brave, maybe you could say it was “interesting”.  If you are my friend, I will never hear you say it was otherwise.