crazy4lsu

Nah he'd be great.

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Also Rage Against the Machine, which is kind of hilarious.

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Only if you never read their lyrics or listened to any of their interviews.

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A question I have , was autism being diagnosed prior to the development of Tylenol?

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This is a complicated question, as if we had the same standards of for diagnosing the disorder as we do now, we could make a ‘like for like’ comparison.

I remember reading Bartleby, the Scrivener by Melville a long time ago and thinking he had likely had autism, just from the way he was written.

But otherwise, yes, the conditions included in the autism spectrum have existed for a lot longer than the widespread availability of Tylenol.

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1) caused by environmental stimuli that is altering genetics - which if it’s this is a national security issue

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If this is the case, then I know for a fact that no administration would do anything meaningful, especially if that exogenous substance was related to some industrial byproduct.

It's also the fact that we have a larger population, understand genetics at a level that we couldn't in earlier generations, and can categorize different patterns of illness. I'm also skeptical that you know anyone with gender dysphoria, as it is still a relatively rare diagnosis.

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In modern society, we’ve largely dismantled the structures that once helped people orient their lives: family expectations (marriage and kids are increasingly not seen as central life goals and careers force us to continuously sever family relationships), community traditions, even widely accepted narratives about what counts as a good life.

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Yes, there has been a fracturing that has been occurring, but I don't really understand where it is coming from or how to stop it. In some sense, we will eventually create something new, but I don't think we can underrate the degree to which technological change has made it extremely difficult to have a stable ground. The term in sociology I think is 'culture lag' where there are aspects of culture which cannot adapt to new technological norms. If we take that to be true, we also could be on the precipice of some large changes due to AI which might finish this fracturing.

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This is where I think Aristotelian notions of virtue, especially as retrieved by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, could be helpful. MacIntyre argues that we’ve inherited fragments of moral language without the coherent traditions that once gave them meaning. As a result, people end up oscillating between relativism and ungrounded dogmatism, never really knowing how to direct their energies toward a common good. For someone young, talented, and restless, that vacuum can be devastating and I can imagine they feel listless.

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Your the second person who has brought up MacIntyre in as many weeks. I need to read him. That sounds like a really astute observation on his part.

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Reintroducing a sense of purpose doesn’t mean imposing rigid conformity, but it does mean recovering the idea that human life has ends proper to it: flourishing, excellence in practices, contribution to the community; that can order ambition and give structure to energy. Without that, alienation becomes inevitable, and destructive outlets more tempting.

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I mean, I can imagine reintroducing this to young men in small groups, but society wide it would take some effort. I feel like a major undercurrent in this current nihilistic vein is that climate change is inevitable and thus the young feel 'future-less.'

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In other words, I think you’re right that alienation is at the heart of our present crisis, but alienation itself is downstream of this deeper dislocation from purpose. And unless we can give young people something truly worth living (and even suffering) for, the “new American tragedy” you describe will only continue to play out.

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It's hard to give something to people that you feel you might have only recently found yourself. It feels much more rare to see young men who have a clear sense of purpose from their teenage years. Lots of millennials and elder Gen Z might have only found that purpose relatively recently.

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People have been very complementary in this thread so I figured I'd do the same specifically towards crazy4lsu. I think we'd end up having very different metaphysical groundings to our value systems and where they emerge and what we ought to do with them in the public sphere (I have issues with the Rawls/pragmatic school of thought you embraced earlier in this thread) but I don't think anyone can deny you are incredibly well versed on a variety of scientific, philosophical, and historical topics and your contributions to this board is a very welcome break from the tedium of what most of the internet offers.

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Lol, let's not be hasty. I have spent a good part of the last four years being an obnoxious troll and only posting like I once did when I had time and energy. But having a daughter in the past year as well as seeing Kirk's death reminded me that there is still plenty of room for dialogue, if only to give my children a world where dialogue can still be meaningful.

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It's tough because a lot of that describes me. I was a socially stunted smart kid

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Honestly, it describes so many kids I knew growing up and even in college. Just incredibly talented people who needed some type of structure. Hell, I needed structure for a long time.

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Nihilism, much like communism, is a social contagion that only leads to destruction.

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I mean, from the large view, Fight Club captured the essence for that era and it might also capture it now. Young men are still young men and in many ways they are the drivers of civilization. A lot rests on whether they feel as though they can improve their own life. Are we going to be vigilant enough to know where that tipping point is though? That worries me a lot.

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4.0 gpa and over 30 on his ACT. Which over the years I’ve learned means nothing when it comes to the real world. Some of the smartest people I know can’t function in the real world.

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The crisis for lots of modern societies is what to do with young men who feel alienated from the world around them. I forget who said it, but the transition from childhood to adulthood can feel like a 'death.' There were some traditional societies that had 'coming-of-age' ceremonies and the US still has lots of avenues for young people, especially through the military, that could theoretically function as 'coming-of-age' but it really isn't a new problem.

To give a basis of comparison, the 'fin de siecle' period in Europe (which started in France but now generally describes the pre-WWI mood) had men believing the world was crumbling around them, that the end result of the rapid industrialization was both decadence and decay, and had them seeking out alternative ideologies for what they argued was a failed world. The forbearers of fascism fomented in this era, but the reaction to ever increasing industrialization also resulted in the desire to start over again, which would be exemplified by the modernists, who after the 1st WW wanted to recreate the world from the ashes of the old.

I think the contradiction between the internal pessimism of the individual and the decadence of the era was summed up nicely by Octave Mirbeaau's book The Torture Garden, where he said:

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“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

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While I think this is a nice description of that era, and I encourage everyone to read about that era for themselves (especially The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read), I think we might be at a similar crossroads now. Arguably, alienation from one's surroundings was also a massive theme of Jihadist literature of the past 20 years or so, which I think adds to my suggestion that alienation is an underrated them psychological explanation for a peculiar crisis of modernity. When young people who are particularly energetic have no avenue for their energy, or feel all the new frontiers may be closed to them, I think it can create a desire to search for structure.

I feel like one of the most common themes of American life is to see a talented person who has excelled in school but never finds their footing in adulthood. Either they lose themselves to drugs or some other vice. I knew several people like this growing up, incredibly talented, bright people who set out to make some sort of difference in the world, but could never figure out how. While searching for meaning, they got sidetracked on something else and then lost that brightness that drove their talent. In such a situation, I can easily imagine wanting to lash out at any figure from whom they can gain definition. I don't know what this guy's relationship was with Kirk, but if he was so moved to define some aspect of his relationship with the world as diametrically opposed to what Kirk may or may not have stood for, that might serve as psychological motivation.

Or he could just be a crazy person. But hearing about parts of his upbringing bring to mind many friends I once knew and now I don't who were incredibly talented people who could never find their own way. That situation might as well be the new American tragedy if it is indeed as common in other people's lives as it is/was in mine.

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I've already provided examples of "fundamental rights" that some people believe we have and others don't

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Individual examples are less meaningful to me than systemic examples, which is what I’ve constantly referred to.

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I'll throw health care in the mix as well. Do people have a fundament right to your labor as a provider? A lot of folks believe they do.

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But has that made it into some documentation somewhere?

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If you can't get to "we don't all agree on what our fundamental rights are" from that I can't help you further.

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Well, it doesn’t seem like you are arguing that we don’t have a broad consensus on what human rights are, but rather, you are arguing that human rights can be further developed. They can be, but since the original formulation, what specific rights have been added? The rights themselves are so broad that people can read specific things into them. The original notion of human rights , from how they were originally conceived, have been remarkably consistent. There is no limitation to an individual reading a ‘new’ right into the framework of an older one, but it is still based on the consensus of the older framework.

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Stating the truth is "retreating"?

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It is what you believe to be true, but again, it isn’t supported by the evidence on hand, as in what people have actually written and supported and took time to put into their newly constructed constitutions. Yet time and again, they put the same rights and references to rights over and over, and without any specific reference, I’m supposed to believe there is any evidence that ‘not everyone agrees on what human rights are.’ Again, by virtue of what several people felt was important enough to put to paper, broadly, we can say that we do have an agreement on human rights and those rights derive from the Enlightenment.

Look, I suspect you aren’t operating in good-faith all that much, but you desperately need to read a book or something. And then learn how to argue and support a point with actual evidence, as simply repeating a statement and assuming it is true isn’t a standard for discussing a point.

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Everyone doesn't agree with that at all.

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They broadly do. I think you guys are not understanding how popular the Enlightenment conception of human rights actually is.

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And throughout history even fewer have agreed with it.

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Again, Post-Enlightenment, it is the standard by which we define the rights of man.