Incapacity

But with a child so young, traditional principles like punishment, accountability and rehabilitation "don't really apply," [University of Richmond law professor Julie Ellen] McConnell said. "As a 6-year-old, he just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to even understand how to form the intent to commit a crime like this."
A 6-year-old shooter raises difficult questions for the criminal justice system

Okay, I'll bite. Why not?

I used to work with children for a living (if you could call it that, given the salary) and one of the things that I came away with from the job is that adults tend to underestimate children's abilities to understand the world around them, especially power relationships. Take the unnamed child who shot an severely injured his teacher last week in Virginia. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that the student could have intended to injure the teacher over some action or another that he didn't like, and understood that guns are capable of injuring people. Children, after all, hit, kick and bite one another with dreary regularity, and it's common to not only impose a mild discipline, like a "time out" on a child when they do so, but to tell them that if they do so again in the future, another discipline would be forthcoming. If children are so intellectually incapable that they can't understand that their behavior draws disapproval, why does that behavior make any sense?

What many children seem to lack, in my understanding, is the idea that their current emotional state is not a blanket justification for anything they might do that stems from it. Granted, I've met more than a few adults who seem to have trouble with that reasoning, but still, it strikes me as being part of what sometimes strikes people as a lack of empathy in children. Sure, children will commonly say it's bad when other children hit them, but that's because children tend to never see being hit as a rational response to their own behavior. But "they started it" is less a childhood dodge of culpability than their standard way of looking at the world; children can having difficulty with the idea that their wants and desires aren't imperatives that the rest of the world needs to immediately indulge.

But more to the point, I don't know that I find casting children as mentally impaired when compared to adults a necessary step in deciding that sending them to juvenile detention is inappropriate. In Virginia, the minimum age for detention is 11. Whatever the reason for making that choice, it wasn't, and couldn't have been, based on some fact of biology that kicks in at a child's 11th birthday. It was a choice that was made because it seemed reasonable to the people who were making it. And that's all that's really needed in situations like this. It strikes me as unreasonable to lock small children up for long stretches of time, even for serious misbehavior. And part of of this is because, yes, children's outlooks on the world are different from adults; and their general inability to understand long-term consequences makes it somewhat pointless. But here in the United States, a large part of the legal system is about finding someone to punish, so that people understand that the world is "fair." Which is why the child's parents may now be under investigation for failure to keep the child from taking the gun. Perhaps if there wasn't such a need for an eye for an eye, there wouldn't be a need to equate childhood with brain damage.

What You See

Okay, so here is what I want to know... What rock has this guy been living under for the past few decades? The military has, for as long as I've been aware of it, had a large number of non-White people in it. It's been, for the most part, one of the best ways for non-White people to get ahead in life. I had plans to join the military after I graduated college - but kidney stones rendered me unfit for service, and that was the end of that.

And there have always been a decent number of women in the military. Mainly because modern militaries have a number of functions other than simply fighting. While private military contracting companies are a thing, it's not as if the various branches of the United States' Armed Forces have contracted out everything outside of being on the front lines.

But more to the point, there's nothing "woke" (regardless of how badly on bastardizes the definition) about the military being a place of opportunity everyone who enlists, including people who are something other than White men. Why shouldn't the military draw from all of the various demographic groups that make up the United States as a whole?

It's interesting that the profile picture for "end wokeness" says: "I support the former things." Maybe they're hankering for the days in which minorities were given the dirty and dangerous jobs that White soldiers didn't want to do. Or when servicemen regarded women in uniform as "comfort women," there to cater to their sexual desires. There's a reason why that garbage came to an end: the nation started realizing that mistreating those who volunteered to serve was a bad idea.
 

Holiday Cheer

I was at the grocery store today, and, at the end of one of the aisles, there is a little place where holiday candy tends to be stocked. Now that Christmas is over, it's full of Valentines Day candies, including Reece's Peanut Butter Hearts. They're basically the same thing as regular Reece's Peanut Butter Cups, but they're somewhat larger, and the ratio of peanut butter to chocolate seems to be higher, so they taste different.

Anyway, they're currently going to $1.25 each, or 4 for $5. A little ways from this, near where the seasonal non-food items are normally stocked, are the leftover Christmas candies, including the Reece's Peanut Butter Trees. Those are now on deep discount, and are being sold for 39¢ each. The Peanut Butter Trees are pretty much the same thing as the Peanut Butter Hearts; only the shape is different. If one is a Reece's Peanut Butter fan, now is a good time to stock up. (They freeze really well.) Personally, I'm past the days when I could stock up on them, as, now that I'm an old man, peanuts are bad for my skin.

But it's interesting to see what the holiday theming does to the price of two items that are, for all intents and purposes, the same. Both are highly processed (and sweetened) peanut butter in a low-grade chocolate shell; they're the same weight and the same calorie count. Yet the vaguely-evergreen shaped ones are now one-third the price of the heart-shaped ones, simply because Christmas was a little more than a week and a half ago and Valentine's day is somewhat more than a month away. After which point, the cycle will repeat, as Reece's Peanut Butter Eggs replace the Hearts on stores shelves.

Of course, this is a common phenomenon. There's all sorts of random Christmas-themed bric-a-brac on store shelves right now that's past it prime sales time. But most of that strikes me as much more strongly themed that the Reece's Trees. Given the number of evergreen trees in this part of the country, one could likely get away with selling them year-round without most people batting an eyelash.

But to the bargain bin they have been moved, and it is from there that they will dwindle away to nothing so that the Valentine hearts may have pride of place for a while.

The Easy Route

I found an article on Psyche.co today: "How to be a happy nihilist." In it, Wendy Syfret offers advice on how to embrace optimistic, or "sunny" nihilism. Which is all fine and good as far as it goes. But it strikes me that there is a simpler way.

Simply drop the idea that life must somehow be "meaningful" for it to be happy.

I don't remember when I first encountered the idea of the meaning of life outside of the clichéd image of someone climbing a mountain to find some wise guru at the top to whom they can put the question of life's meaning. I think that I may have been out of college by that point. I managed to live to adulthood without realizing that philosophy was even a thing, let alone that you could take classes in it.

And I wasn't miserable or unhappy throughout that time. At least, not for want of meaning. Life had its ups and downs, and I rode the roller coaster just like everyone else, but the idea that happiness in life was contingent on finding some poorly-described meaning in it had never occurred to me. And I suspect that there are plenty of people the world over who manage perfectly happy lives without any broader sense of meaning for no other reason than no-one has told them that it's not possible.

Today, when I talk philosophy with people (like this wonderfully thoughtful ex-philosopher now police officer I met a few weeks ago) and they tell me that I can't be happy without understanding the meaning of my life, I simply ask them: "Why?" With the exception of a few people who decree that meaning is an indispensable part of happiness, such that anyone who has not found meaning is simply deluding themselves as to being happy, it's rare to receive an answer to that.

And so I remind them that just like any other article of faith, not all people are going to hold it. (Although when discussions do start to legitimately turn on articles of faith, that's usually my cue to be elsewhere. Faith admits no need for evidence, and so people can explain themselves to one another, but debate is usually pointless.)

In the end, though, I enjoy reading article on people's understandings of meaning, precisely because it is otherwise such a nebulous and undefined term. And I am happy for people who have found a meaning of life. But for myself, learning to do without it was worthwhile.

Practiced

Nobody in Particular is not, strictly speaking, a photography blog. I do post a fair number of pictures, but this isn't conceived as a place to show off my photographic talents. Mainly because I don't have much skill with the medium, or my equipment.

Perhaps it's time that I changed that.

I had meant to take up portrait photography in 2020, but I hadn't really done anything to make progress on that goal prior to "the pandemic" (as if it were the only one to have ever happened) and between the emergency orders and people's general unwillingness to be in the same space as another human being for most of the year, I never managed to get anything off the ground.

I'm still very self-conscious about asking people if I can take their picture, so I don't know if I'll get anywhere with portrait photography this year, but even failing that, I do want to simply become a better photographer. And if I take more pictures, I'll consider giving over more posts to them. Let's see if it works out.