I kinda-sorta can wrap my head around it, courtesy of being familiar with the hornet’s nest that my brain was devolving into when I was a fundamentalist Christian. Even thirty years on, I can still remember the entitlement, the magical thinking, the resistance to objective reality. So when some rando does a murder-suicide on his pregnant wife, or his wife and living children, even though I personally never came close to that, I can understand at least intellectually that it’s in the service of avoiding anything that violates his envisioned perfect life – a submissive wife who always worships the ground he walks on, obedient and happy children with no strange problems or struggles, and so forth – and if you’ve been taught that’s the only life there is or should be, then you can get twisted around to the point that if you can’t have it, they can’t either, that somehow God will make it right on the other side of the grave, because He said He would (or that you can spare them the pain you’re experiencing). It’s incredibly disordered thinking, of course, and incredibly immature and selfish, but it’s what’s celebrated in the fundamentalist world and probably elsewhere (incels, etc). Susceptible people can go all the way down that particular rabbit hole.
Like @CyberLN pointed out, allocation of money to schools, and the will to allocate those money, correlates strongly with quality. But the money have to be used wisely. If you just squander it on buying bibles and giving bible studies classes, you obtain nothing. With no standards, the schools/school districts/states in the lower tiers would not have incentives to improve. Hence why a federal minimum standard would make sense to help raise the quality of the schools as a whole.
But it is all complicated, and will take time. Especially considering that I think you will also have to reform the curriculum in the schools to also include more awareness of the world outside the US. As the last election and the current shitshow clearly demonstrates, there is a severe lack of understanding among the population (and the current top politicians) on how global economies work, that they’re interconnected with the economies of each country (the US not being an exceptional exception, despite what many people seem to think). Also, some basic knowledge about world history (world > USA) is very important knowledge.
Don’t bet on it, the public school system in the UK have been churning out the children of wealthy successful people, and the aristocracy for centuries. Both Boris Johnson and David Cameron went to Eton, that’s not a coincidence. The uptake from Eton (as one example) to Oxford and Cambridge is exponentially higher than the average. One could argue they are buying their children a chance at an elite university, but I think that is only partially true.
It’s not a coincidence that many elite Public schools in the UK, are boarding schools, that remove children from parental influence, at a young age, it’s by design.
I may not like it, or agree with it, but their success rate is irrefutable. Though of course, one could argue, and with good reason, that the more resources schools have, the higher their success rate, but this would be an oversimplification here.
Many parents devote enormous money, and effort to grooming their children for success. Not all of them are excessively wealthy. The children may not know it, but their parents knowledge has shaped their lives. Sadly these are, and of course must be, a minority, as elite education cannot by definition be available to all. Take from that what you will.
I am autistic, FYI, and I have been called out on my job for treating LGBTQ people by the same standards that I treat everyone else (I was a paramedic and am currently a registered nurse).
Here in the U.S., there are preachers (and other religious leaders) who are hate mongers who call for violence against LGBTQ people.
As an example, a famous religious leader named Pat Robertson–who had tens of millions of followers of his television show The 700 Club–told his audience that they should never shake hands with a gay man because most gay men wear rings with sharp edges that have been deliberately contaminated with HIV-infected blood so that they can intentionally spread AIDS (see below):
Also, these religious leaders have deliberately fostered and spread the idea that “all gay people are pedophiles,” which is a very common and widespread belief here in the United States.
This assumption has even interfered with my work and my social life . . . because when I became a nurse, people automatically assume that I’m gay (I’m not, BTW), so I must also be a potential child molestor and shouldn’t be trusted around children.
See below:
Also, see below:
Religious organizations in this country have even used their money to buy political influence in other countries to create laws requiring consequences like the death penalty for homosexuality. Please see below:
I hope that this clarifies things.
P.S. Please note that I am not asking for sympathy. I have worked in healthcare for over 30 years, and I was aware of these social beliefs before I became a nurse, so I walked into my new career with my eyes open.
P.P.S. If people want to judge me for doing this vital and important job . . . then they can go fuck themselves.
There’s a difference between knowledge (the possession of info) and wisdom (the ability to use it effectively) and character (the ability to apply knowledge with compassion and empathy, and to delay gratification in the service of higher goals, especially involving others). This involves personal discipline, which parents or educators can support and encourage but not substitute for. The problem IMO is the lack of discipline or prioritizing the development of discipline, which ultimately can only be done (or not) by the individual.
I’m in no way saying that society can’t prioritize encouraging and supporting the development of character, virtue, discipline and good judgment (or the destruction of same). Or that we shouldn’t try. But as a youngster, just head knowledge of what’s important didn’t have that much “reality” to me. It was an abstraction, and at a Certain Age your elders seem like moralizing simpletons and you tend to discount what they have to say. You have to find out for yourself, ultimately, that yes, what they say is important IS, in fact, important. And then apply yourself to it with a right good will.
No one can do that for you.
You can have good mentors, but you still have to do the work.
That is the point I am trying to make here.
My mother emasculated me as a child growing up. I found it very hard to not get bullied. I wish … I wish … I wish I had, like two thousand dollars. That’s it. Just give me two thousand dollars and I’ll be on my way. The “American Dream” they call it. Pssshhhh. Yeah right. Where’s my turkey dinner? Where’s my call to arms? Probably never find out. Just have to accept the things I can’t change and pray to Gor for the wisdom to change the things I can. Right?
Agreed, but then that is what those schools do, they take children at an early age, and they instil in them self belief, a work ethic, and unwavering belief that they are meant to lead.
FWIW, I am not saying this is a good thing necessarily. They gave us Boris Johnson after all.
I was very much the same, I imagine many people are, unless they have those choices taken away, and are packed off to an elite boarding school, that single-mindedly drills the ideas I mentioned above, into their sponge like minds.
I guess what I am saying is that while knowledge is more about objective facts, wisdom is a little more subjective, about how best to apply what we know, and best for some is to make sure their children are not just successful, but that they are the most successful.
I don’t disagree, but this is not left to chance by some.
On this we agree, but my point was that elite public schools in the UK, do not entertain any such failure, the work ethic is part of the education. In the secondary modern I attended, if you thrived with such an attitude, you were a very rare exception.
I seriously doubt that all the people that claim to be atheists are really atheists. Just because somebody has the atheist tag, that doesn’t mean they are here for good intentions. It would be for them to invade here and to spread their ideas under the atheist tag.
The solution: ban anybody that spreads hate against LGBTQ people. That ends the problem.
I do believe we’ve had one or two members that joined under the Atheist tag only to preach and debate about their god. Some choose Agnostic and then do the same thing.
We already do that here. But that certainly does not stop the problems @skylersh was describing in the OP.
As a whole within our communities the first step is thinking grand scale what can be a system of rehabilitation for people with hateful views. Just baning a person from this one platform out of many doesn’t teach that person compassion and forgiveness. That person must be faced with their insecurities and bias so they can understand LGBTQ+ as a fellow community and not something that is separate from them. There is no us and them there is only human beings.
I don’t think you can directly “fix” anyone’s thinking, that is just trying to control something that isn’t yours to control.
But what you can do, I think, is leverage the fact that we’re herd animals. We had, in the US, for a time come to a place where it wasn’t “cool” in larger swaths of public life in many areas to be bigoted. This at least drove the haters underground and forced them to play nice in the sandbox. I think many of them accepted it as the status quo, however reluctantly. Then over a generation or two the latent bigotry tends to be bred out and you have children and grandchildren growing up in a truly civil society. They know dear old Dad is a bigot, but they go to college and meet all these supposedly awful people who are in fact just … people, and they move away from that mindset rather than toward it.
Unfortunately, that is all being actively dismantled now, as quickly as humanly possible, and actively attacked in the more liberal regions of the country and in more liberal institutions such as academia, in an attempt to erode pockets of resistance.
My own take on it is that the Deep South / Bible Belt never stopped being a place where you could nurse deeply held resentments / suspicions and bide your time, plus, it tends to be poorer and less educated. And this was our undoing, because the GOP absorbed those resentments when its power based became centered in that region; it also absorbed the fundamentalist religious zeitgeist, and was then able to subvert the “body politic”. And here we are. There were other factors, mainly IMO the fact that the evangelicals / fundies decided to do a 180-degree turn on their former aversion to seeking political power, starting in the late 1970s and really gaining steam in the ensuing balance of the 20th century.
So unfortunately I think the only way to “rehab” society is to do the hard work of arguing our case, re-establishing beacheads from which we can re-assert empathy and compassion in all its forms, until it again becomes a majority view – but this time don’t kid ourselves that we can rest on our laurels, that settled law like Roe v. Wade could never be undone, that no one would ever fall for cartoonish / clownish fascistic characters again, that the lessons of history cannot be forgotten.
Well that was a flex of intelligence and I tip my hat. I agree to a point but current criminal rehabilitation is something I think that should be considered as a possible format for these people because unfortunately most bigotry lies with those sorts of communities. But the therapy provided unfortunately is only now being taken seriously.
Do you by the phrasing “criminal rehabilitation” mean U.S. style incarceration or Nordic style criminal rehabilitation philosophy, or something else?
Yes so what I am referring to is criminal justice reform treatment specifically offence specific treatment or in other words sex offender treatment. I believe that taking that therapy and using as a template for a bigoted person would teach them true empathy and compassion on a level that would shift their way of thinking. The evidence is clear that this sort of treatment is more than successful and can be applied in all sorts of settings.
This will only work if they commit a crime, surely better to address bigotry and prejudice before this.
Is it, in which country is this?
“In the U.S., sexual recidivism rates vary depending on the length of the follow-up period. Studies have shown that after 5 years, around 14% of sex offenders are re-arrested or convicted for a new sexual crime. This rate can increase to 20-24% after 10-15 years. Some studies even show rates of 34% or higher over a 25-year period.”
In the US, mass incarceration, the highest per capita on the planet, has become a massive income stream, and a business model based on maintaining and or increasing that rate of incarceration is well underway.
In a way Trump’s rhetoric about illegal immigrants and crime, and his attempts to deport them, is undermining that, but I’d guess those business models will “find a way” to incarcerate more and more ordinary US citizens, to make it pay. How many times have heard the phrase “Lock em up, and throw away the key”, this is no accident surely.
Rehabilitation seems fairly low on the agenda of the US criminal justice system.
I would like to know where that is sourced from that seems important to address. What I’m suggesting is we treat bigotry of all kinds as a crime. That sounds extreme but is necessary for this to work. This would mean however oh and yes this is in the united states, that we reform the first amendment. I’m all about having a safe place to state your opinion as long as that opinion doesnt infringe on the happiness of others. If it does we need to address the thinking errors and distortions. I’m confident in saying that all people with this issue have a direct issue with power and contol. We have to root out that specifically.
This statement infringes on my happiness. You should be imprisoned for it.
Where what is sourced form, to whom are you addressing that question?
Hate speech is a crime in many countries, but we have to be very careful that taking away aspects of free speech, doesn’t march us into totalitarian police states.
Then you need to consider how that amendment protects your right to say such things, and the possible consequences of taking that right away.
So you don’t think I should be allowed, in a free society, to say anything that makes the Ku Klux Klan unhappy?
Beat me to it. 