Peterkin

The first SF movie I ever saw was War of the Worlds, in Technicolor, in a the old Victory theater that had a large screen. It scared the bejeebers out of me. Came back the next weekend for It Came from Outer Space (ditto). For $0.35, you got a B&W movie, a cartoon, a bunch of ads for candy you couldn't afford and big, flashy feature. Where else would we spend Saturday afternoon? It didn't have to be SF, but it very often was in the 50's, and it didn't have to be realistic to become a lifetime habit. I'm not sure that can happen for young people now: they're so inundated with electronic images and sensory input, I don't know whether any one thing can claim their attention, let alone leave an impression.

That was my second choice, after DS9. Lots of parallels between the two, but B5 was the more complex and layered. Still, I much prefer the non-war episodes of B5 and the Klingon-free episodes of DS9. Buzz Lightyear gets to go to infinity and beyond? Cool.

There are manufactured product for the purpose, suggestions for DIY, as well as instructions on line. https://hellosewing.com/flexible-nose-piece-materials/ I have used the nose-piece from a surgical mask, as well as a whole paper mask as liner for a fabric one. In one mask, I used the flexible metal tie from a bag of imported pasta, That's actually the best fit, as it's a little wider and holds its shape better than the bridge in a disposable mask.

I don't need alternative theories. I prefer to fantasize the oldest and most nearly universal version of Paradise: serenity, interspecies amity and perpetual good weather. I don't have to believe it to imagine it, any more than I have to believe to in a God to summon his wrath upon a hammer that landed on my toe while possessed by a demon in which I also don't believe. The multi-compartmental human mind has always done that.

Much as the primitive peoples did their own situation? PS - You can have the dog-training blue ribbon, if you like; I'm content with my imperfect Alphadom.

Screen door. From house to porch. She inside house. Me on porch. Bear advancing. If she was being aggressive, it was for what she considered a good reason. We all act, when we feel we must, on limited information, because the alternative may be the death of a loved one. No problem; I'm used to that. I wish I could. Won't be long now. That's the one thing I miss about religion, and the one thing most people are unwilling to give up, however implausible, absurd and wrong it may seem: an afterlife. One writer I appreciated likened heaven to a vast library, where you would meet and talk with the creators of all the books you admired. Another notions was that you get to play different roles in heaven that you might have wished, but never got a chance to play in life. The most consistent recurring theme is that you're reunited with all the people you've loved and lost. My favourite fantasy is that when you die, you walk into a meadow where all your past friends of other species come to greet you and frolic about as you cross the bridge to where the human ones are. My personal theory of why religion was invented: people missed their parents. Being an atheist deprives me of "the sure and certain hope of the resurrection" - and there is nothing I can do about that.

There was nothing wrong with my control. This little Sheltie cross saw a hulking great creature advancing on me in our own porch and thought I was in imminent danger. There was no time to woof or warn, just to get between me and the threat. If it had been a real bear, she'd have been killed. You don't be casting aspersions on my Daisy! She was one very good dog. I haven't wanted another since.

I'm not saying any fear is invalid. No, I'm saying that you cannot explain away a real danger, because it is real. And you cannot explain away an imaginary danger, because it's inexplicable. I'm saying fear doesn't come from ignorance and knowledge doesn't cure it. You can tell your kid the umpty-seventh time that there can't be a monsters in his closet, because monsters don't exist and the Pixar movie is just drawings; you can even show him how animated motion pictures are made - none of that will do a scrap of good. You have to get the flashlight, open the closet door and say very loudly: "Any monsters hiding in there better get lost right now, or else!" Then let the kid keep the flashlight; "Those monsters bother you again, use this on them". That's how superstition works. That's why people who know all about lightning and volcanoes still go to church.

That's not the kind of thing the supernatural can help you with. Wolves don't need explaining: if you live in the wild, wolves are something you understand, a danger you can avoid, outsmart or fight. Of course, you're afraid: therefore you make weapons, light fires, shelter in caves and set a watch. No need to make up gods about it a practical problem. The wolf in my 4-year-old mind was a superstitious fear, not a real one - in the bathroom on the fourth floor of a city apartment - exactly because they were not of my world; they were the stuff of fairy tales. It didn't need explaining; it needed exorcising. They're afraid of what their environment and culture presents to them as things to fear. Different things. Not the unexplained but the known. Explaining the reason why a serial killer might have escaped from prison and be desperate to hide wont make him any less threatening to the householder who thinks he might be hiding downstairs. The normal, practical fear of familiar dangers does not engender superstition. It's dangers of the imagination that engender superstition. Explanation won't make those fears go away; you need magic. No, because they know those familiar sounds are not threats to their safety. They're not alerted by sounds that are unexplained; they're alerted by sounds that might warn them of dangers they do know about. They do understand about a serial killer, and that's what makes the concept frightening. Cavemen understood about cougars, and that's what made cougars frightening. Fear is normal and sensible. It does not automatically reach for superstition. You don't see a lot of bright jackets in the Andes. My dog dove through a screen door one time, attacking a neighbour she had never seen in a parka. She understood human; she understood 'our house'; she understood 'protect our house from suspicious stranger coming in the the porch uninvited'; the only part she didn't understand was 'friend in disguise'.

A number of reasons related to their way of life. Simply put: they were not sheltered from the harsh realities. And they were literally not sheltered from storms. Why worry about the reasons for things that are just the way they are? There are always such "certain people", but in this age of explanation, speculation, theorizing, discussion, disputation refutation and even more explanation about everything all the time, the unexplained sticks out a lot more than it did before all those mountains of explanation were written. I'd blame the inventor of papyrus, but electronic media have far more to answer for. I know, that's flippant. What I'm really talking about is different mind-sets, different habits of thought, concerns, priorities, world-views, perspectives. Are they? I mean, what makes you think it's the dark they're afraid of, not what might be lurking in the dark? And what that lurking danger might be is a product, not of the child's own imagination, but his culture. When I was four years old, I was afraid to go to the bathroom at night, in case there was a wolf waiting behind the toilet. My nightmares often featured witches on broomsticks, flying in through windows. I'd never seen either, except as depicted in storybooks. My son, in turn, was afraid to go down to the cellar in case of vampires and evil clowns. He didn't like swimming in the lake, either - guess why! No, they're not. They're afraid that sound is a home invader or escaped convict looking for somewhere to hide. But they're not afraid of distant sirens and airplanes. Just as our distant ancestors were not unworried by the owl's hoot or bat-wings flapping, but sat up and reached for their spears at the stirring of a low branch or high weeds - even if it wasn't a stalking cougar - this time. We're afraid of what we've learned, though experience or from other people, poses a danger to us. That hardly fits into the natural phenomena category. Both ancient and modern man have to settle for invented stories on that subject. Unexplained, yes. Unfamiliar, no - in fact, a lot less. The more we are alienated from nature the more we - some of us, anyway - see things in it that require explanation. I have no reason to suppose early people had that same attitude. Other apes don't show any signs of worrying about natural things. Ancient peoples were more imaginative, as well as more inquisitive than their ape relatives. So they studied the properties of materials, used vegetation, made tools, exploited the environment in clever ways. They also told stories about all manner of things, natural and supernatural, practical and fanciful, instructive and amusing. Just like we do.

And has anyone here attempted to do that? You like science, and that's wonderful for both you and science. It does not, however, address the OP question.

You should care how a dog was turned into a killer. Else you will turn more dogs into killers. But there is nothing to be gained by torturing it - unless you're an evil bastard yourself who takes pleasure in that sort of thing. The victim isn't compensated by the suffering of the attacker - but might feel safer if the attacker were no longer in the world.

Your sympathy will be as useful to the victim as the perpetrator's suffering You are agreeing with yourself, not with me.

You've changed animal to criminal. I was talking about depravity in animals. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3874604/ What kind? On what level and scale? What duration? I don't presume to say about anyone, whether they are sane, disturbed, profoundly troubled or so emotionally scarred that they cannot be reached. Jail is. Euthanasia isn't. An animal that cannot control its aggression must be contained - which would be hurtful and humiliating to the animal, probably exacerbating his condition, and serve no other purpose than keeping the rest of us safe - or rendered harmless. (Maybe a time will come, in the not-too-distant future when more tools are available. The drug-induced coma that helped Jordan Peterson kick his drug habit seems to have promise for other applications, but we're not there yet.) Euthanasia - without, pain and ritual, without the parading him in public and forcing him to witness the means of his imminent death (which is what the death penalty does) is the only relief and release we can afford to give a person, or animal, that we dare not let loose. Nothing i want accomplished, no. It doesn't change undesirable behaviour or render the offender more benign or compensate anyone for a loss. It does achieve something I don't want: causing the offender discomfort, possibly mental anguish, possibly grievous bodily harm; whatever he suffers is protracted, maybe decades; his family has long-term distress and shame in their community; it raises the risk of destructive behaviour inside the prison, perhaps leading to injury or death of guards and other inmates, or escape and heightened danger to society, and costing the taxpayer a fortune - just to satisfy some people whose anger cannot appeased any other way. Name two other species that ever act this way. Make up your mind about animals! Are they all bad, some bad, only bad when they're like humans, or what?

I would assume any animal that behaves in a depraved manner is suffering either from rabies or extreme emotional stress. IOW, mentally ill. If the illness is incurable, the animal may have to be put down. Punishing that animal seems to me pointless, since the only function of punishment in animal training is correction - even then its efficacy is questionable, as positive reinforcement has proven a far more reliable method. The distinction between mental illness and just an aberrant psychological state is certainly no more clear-cut, no more readily discernible than the diagnosis of mental illness. The point is moot in the case of a condition, whether pathological or depraved, that is impervious to correction or cure. In those cases, the dangerous individual must be contained, sedated or euthanized. If he's incorrigible, nothing is accomplished by punishing him.

I'm sure you had a reason.

It's possible to arrive at different conclusions from similar data, because of one's perspective. As several examples presented in this thread show, some people are deeply impressed by one or two outlying cases, which are also the ones most likely to be sensationalized by the press. I excluded the wife-killer, as I do parricides and personal vendettas, from any consideration of effective prisoner rehabilitation, because such intimate violence is not in the same class of criminal behaviour with armored car robbery or housebreaking. The motivation for property crime, even if aggravated by violence, is different in kind from the motivation for domestic, religious or racial violence. The second category may or may not be accessible to amelioration attempts, while the first kind very often is. Of course, the sensational crazed killer, though he attracts a great deal of attention and reaction, accounts for a very small percentage of prosecutions. In fact, you can infer and inverse ratio of incidence to news column inches: a common occurrence is not news. Also, one's own experience influences one's interpretation of facts. If you consort with career criminals - whether at the level of pickpockets and fences, or in the orbit of $multibillion Ponzi schemers, you get a different perspective on lawbreaking than from the other side - if you've been involved in the solving of crimes. Or, one might just have a dull axe.

The first two links were to 8 different articles by 6 psychologists in learned publications. If one were suspicious of the motivation of all psychologists who study prisoner rehabilitation methodology and practice, all of them could be dismissed on those grounds. The third, however, cites an exhaustive 9-year study of recidivism then follows it up with studies on reducing recidivism, also under the DOJ auspices and a state government commission and the Rand Corporation The last one is from NCBI. Not quite up to the standard of hearsay, but fairly respectable organizations, all the same.

That's got to be good enough for anybody. Next time you challenge me to produce a scrap of evidence, I won't link scholarly publications; I'll just report on comments from people I've met. Should be scrappy enough.

You followed up all those links and determined that every scholar, legal council, law-enforcement agency, advocacy and support group and addiction research institution that compiled all those data is biased and unreliable. In that case, you're right. There is not a scrap of evidence for anything. Because when one of the rich and influential finally get arrested after many decades of criminal activity on a huge scale, it's such a rare, special event that it fills up the news cycle. When a hundred petty thieves from the wrong side of town are rounded up routinely, it's not worth mentioning. But there is a connection between the two levels of crime. Of course, I have no evidence for that, either. He wasn't, BTW. He was suggesting that if we alleviate some of the conditions that drive people to law-breaking, there would be less law-breaking. That would also apply at the rich/important/influential level, only eliminating the crime-generation there requires a different approach: regulation, oversight and enforcement. In fact, let's try reversing the strategies for a while: better services for the poor; more policing of the rich, and see what effect that has on criminality.

According to whom? Who or what is stopping them? Nobody can: they own the media. Some are. Some are angry old change-makers. Some don't care one way or the other. Some used to care, but don't anymore. Old people are not all the same. Which young person would say that? It isn't, and there isn't any. Does this group look young? Most people's never count at all.

It makes one faction of them angry: the ones who are still fighting for their lost privilege, and they're not done fighting. It wouldn't be a significant distinction - it wouldn't even matter what old people think - except that the anti-PC faction is less willing to withdraw from the fray. As time passes and the old PC leaders hand over the reins to their younger lieutenants, the intransigent faction doesn't. Battles progress from arguing in civil court over offensive language on stage, to social media hounding of people who disagree, threats of violence, overt violence, and the tactics are not the same on both sides. Biden, Trump and Sanders are the same age, but not of the same generational mind-set, and the armies they recruited don't fight by the same rules. Maybe none of that has any part in shaping cancel culture, or whatever this fashion is. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't just break down along a generational divide, and isn't due to people merely resenting change. It's deeper, more complicated and more dangerous than polls show.

Doesn't sound PC to me! As for the statistical difference between old people and young on their attitude to inclusive/civil public discourse, it's not quite as simple as that looks. What it really means is that people who are old now were young and middle-aged when they advocated for or pushed back against the modification of language to reflect a wider acceptance of differences - and that generation is still divided along the same line - while people who are young adults now have grown up with the changed norm and take it for granted. They don't make offensive ethnic jokes or call damaged war veterans 'cripple', simply because in their formative years, that was no longer an approved attitude. But some of the reactionary old have still not gotten over losing.

That would be nice.

That one: among others. as child-friendly celebrations of Jesus the redeemer. The first to encourage obedient behaviour and the spirit of giving; the second, initiated to subsume pagan fertility festivals into the Christian cult of sacrifice, but little children aren't supposed to know that about rabbits. More euphemism, same purpose.