Most elementary schools curricula teach kindergarteners about body parts these days, but not necessarily about boys and girls. Except maybe sometimes to suggest that girls are better than boys.
Have we gotten toxic masculinity all wrong?
From Rob Henderson, the Luxury Beliefs guy who grew up in foster care:
People are slowly realizing they held the wrong mental model of young men. The wrong mental model says that young men are natural risk-seekers and will naturally want to approach (and possibly harass) women. Now people are learning that most young men's default factory setting is apathy and not giving a f--k. Most guys won't willingly take risks or approach women unless they are encouraged and incentivized in some way.
The false mental model says young men are naturally predatory and must be disciplined into compliance. The real story is young men are naturally lazy and need a reason to do anything.
Other cultures (and ours up until 10 minutes ago) understood that mature masculinity is largely artificially induced through culture. Mature men do not naturally emerge like butterflies from their boyish cocoons. Rather, they must be carefully encouraged, nurtured, counseled, and prodded into taking the actions necessary to achieve mature manhood.
I think that this is part of the picture we are seeing now in our culture. More at the link.
Below, some other factors to consider.
Maybe you can get 'em outdoors, doing some masculine type things:
Education is in trouble at all levels
Related bill, affecting transgender bathrooms in schools
Discussion in the responses.
The E. Jean Carroll case
VDH has written a comprehensive tweet on the current status of the case, too long to post here. It disturbs him. An excerpt:
It was never clear what were the preliminaries that supposedly (Trump denies meeting her) led both, allegedly, willingly to retreat together to a department store dressing room, where during normal business hours the alleged violence took place.
Moreover, the sexual assault complaint came forward decades post facto--and only after Trump was running for and then president.
Carroll eventually sued him for battery, but well after the statute of limitations had expired and thus the case seemed defunct.
Her claims of defamation injuries arise from being fired from her advice column job at ELLE magazine.
She claimed that Trump's sharp denials and ad hominem retorts led to her career ruin. But the loss for anyone of a column at 76 does not seem such a rare occurrence, and the absence of a salaried job in one's late seventies for four years does not seem to equate to a $83 million hit.
And note the allegation that her dispute with Trump led to her firing was strongly denied by the very magazine that cut her loose.
But then another strange thing happened. In 2022, a new law ("The Adult Survivors Act") was passed in the New York legislature. It also post facto established a twelve-month window (beginning six months from the signing of bill) that permitted survivors of long ago alleged sexual assaults suddenly to sue the accused long-ago perpetrator--regardless of the previous statute of limitations.
That unexpected opening suddenly gave Carroll's prior unsuccessful efforts a rebirth. And she quickly refiled with the help of arch-Trump hating billionaire Hoffman.
Yet the bill may have been introduced with Trump particularly in mind--given the legislator who introduced it, Brad Hoylman-Siga, was known as another Trump antagonist.
More interestingly, he had earlier introduced and had passed another Trump-targeted bill. That "TRUST" act had empowered particular federal Congressional committees to have access to the New York State once sealed tax returns of high-ranking government officials--such as Trump.
That bill's generally agreed subtext was a green light for anti-Trump members of Congress to obtain legal access to Donald J. Trump's tax returns.
So there is an eerie feeling that the New York legislature may have abruptly passed legislation that was aimed at the past conduct of Donald Trump but only after he entered the political arena.
While these are not quite bills of attainder, there is something unsettling if they are post facto laws aimed at targeting the most famous and controversial man in America and the leading candidate for the presidency.
In essence they were targeted statutes designed to make Trump's prior legally unactionable behavior suddenly quite legally actionable.
Trump will be subject to such special treatment all summer and fall.
Texas
There's too much going on to summarize here on the weekend but:
Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals again
Pay attention to efforts at moral framing:
Saul is all wet:
There is no "biblically" mandated immigration policy for the USA.
The same crowd telling us that America can't be a Christian nation now tells us that we have a Christian duty to open our border.
Please stop trying to 'Bible' liberalism down our throats.
Your church can 'welcome the stranger' until you're on a first name basis with every son of Adam's race. You can even set up a six-decker bunk bed in your house and let the tired, poor, huddled masses sleep cheek to jowl in your children's bedrooms. That's completely up to you.
But you can't use John 3:16 like a pair of holy wire cutters to rip open the fence at Eagle Pass, TX.
Music
He was - -
an athlete featured in Sports Illustrated;
a golden gloves boxer;
a Rhodes Scholar earning a Masters in English lit from Oxford where Tolkien served as chair;
an Army helicopter pilot;
an Army Ranger instructor --
And he gave all of that up to be a janitor . . .
He is perhaps the most interesting man in the world, and he traded everything to push a broom at Columbia Records hoping someone would take a looks at some songs he had written. Eventually they did. That's how Kris Kristofferson wrote his way into American history forever.
As anybody who moves to Nashville for a career in the music business knows, it's not as easy as just showing up and becoming a superstar - even for somebody as talented as Kris Kristofferson.
Burdened with debt from paying for his young son's medical bills, Kristofferson took a job working as a janitor at Columbia Records. And it was this job that eventually gave him the opportunity to get the attention of one of the biggest names in country music, Johnny Cash.
Kristofferson would meet June Carter and ask her to give his demos to Johnny Cash, but they often ended up in a pile with all of the other demos he was being pitched.
Eventually though, the janitor managed to set himself apart as a songwriter and finally got the Man in Black's attention. In fact, Cash was such a fan that Kristofferson recalls one time that Cash refused to go into a recording session unless Kristofferson was in the room.
It all started with Kristofferson being banned from Johnny's recording sessions:
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Last week's thread, January 20, The World Economic Forum is Over
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.