The Monsters Among Us

I came across this news story the other day, and I am absolutely disgusted to share a species with these people. This is a truly heinous crime, and one which merits the death penalty, for without remorse, there can be no rehabilitation. Without rehabilitation, we are left with retribution, and the death they will receive at the hands of the state will be far cleaner and more merciful than the one they so richly deserve.

These people are nothing short of evil, and while we must be cautious not to assign that label to those undeserving of it, to those who demonstrate, through their own actions, their own lack of moral sense and value, no mercy should be given. Evil, when we can perceive it clearly, is not something which should be tolerated under any circumstances.

Does that include the 12 year old and the 16 year old? Also; you're making a colossal leap from 'copper says they show no remorse' to 'they feel no remorse'. The aim of locking someone up isn't (shouldn't be) retribution - but to protect the public from them, if they're truly so unshakably evil and unreformable as you claim, based on the scanty evidence and hearsay that you have.

"Look, Znert; the local moon is up."
"True. Look at all those impact craters."
"Nothing but. Plenty of strikes down here, too; remember that flattened forest Recon went nuts about? Turned out it was a comet, not a nuke?"
"Oh, yeah. Speaking of which, how are we going to destroy those cities without nukes?"
"Dunno."

That's not uncreative; that's too stupid to have developed starships in the first place.

It's ages since i last saw some episodes but i remember from Star Treck (TNG onwards) biology mainly that it did stick to ID with a consistence remarkable for Star Treck. So they might be a case for being wrong, but at least being consistent in that area.

I agree that the crime was heinous.

I'm surprised, though, that the AP is allowed to print the picture of the 12 year old.

The 12 year old might have a case, depending on how obedient he is. The 15 year old, however, is old enough to know better. Teenage rebellion is a side-effect of young people realising they can, in fact, start making their own decisions. Our culture unfairly and cruelly coddles them, offsetting their independence and stifling their growth by making them all but the property of their parents.

Children are not stupid. A child is roughly as intelligent as an adult - in some ways more, because it's proven children learn faster and think more flexibly than adults. What children are is inexperienced, yet they are rarely treated the same way inexperienced adults are. Except in situations where dehumanisation is the goal, adults are never told to do something "because I said so". It is never assumed that an adult must answer immediately to another person, but this assumption is made of children every day.

Now, let me temper this by stating that I'm an opponent of the death penalty, which is nothing but a retributive punishment, but I believe for the most part that children, and especially teenagers, shouldn't be treated any differently than adults, even when they make mistakes. If an adult honestly "didn't know any better" than to kill someone, imprisonment might take place in an asylum rather than a prison, but the punishment is not commuted because of it.

Except that children are much, much more accepting and trusting than adults. Even adults listen to authority figures way too much, but children do so almost exclusively. They're almost absurdly trusting.

How much of that is indoctrination, though? How much of it is learned behavior that is subsequently unlearned?

I'm not a child psychologist. I don't know how much more credulous children are than adults and how it wears off as a function of age.

A quick google search found this set of guidelines from the Advertising Standards Agency which stresses that commercials aimed at children must take into account their heightened credulity and sets the limit for that at age 16.

If you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes a lot of sense for children to be open and trusting; it helps them learn quickly and ably the things they need to learn to survive.

Now think of your own experiences as a child; how often were you quickly sucked in by something that, even in immediate retrospect was implausible?

That's a matter of experience. It's seen even in adults; if you know nothing about physics, you're likely to take what a physicist says as true (in that subject), no matter what it is.

Children lack the experience to know that sometimes people lie, especially as all their education and entertainment tells them how wrong, bad and harmful it is to lie. When all your experience tells you lying is bad and wrong, and nothing in your experience has told you that bad and wrong things happen anyway, you're naturally going to expect people not to lie. This is especially compounded by parents that say "because I said so" or "it just is"; children are not often encouraged towards self-discovery and instead to take the word of their parents and other adults as truth.

Personally, I cannot think of a single circumstance in my childhood in which I believed the unbelievable. Learning there was no such thing as Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and other childhood myths was not a major enough event to have made any impact on me; I was either very young, or never really believed them in the first place. As far back as I can recall, I knew myth had a power of collective imagination; sort of a sense that just because our parents give us gifts labelled as from Santa does not, in fact, make the idea - if not the body - of Santa Claus unreal. But I should not be taken as a typical example; I come from a family of geniuses, and I (and my brother) share in that gift, which was coupled by parents more than willing to say "I don't know; go look it up", an atypical parental answer to childhood questions.

I fell for "Did you know that 'gullible' isn't in the dictionary?" when I was 8. In my defense, I didn't know what 'gullible' meant.

On the subject of gullibility; have you ever taken a look at the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division page?

Take a critical read through the page. Yes, there is a trick to it (hence why I mention it in relation to gullibility); but it's not so obvious a trick as a direct lie.

Now, simply from the content of that page, and if I hadn't mentioned that there was a trick, how many of you would be in favour of a direct ban on Dihydrogen Monoxide? How many of your colleagues? How many rational adults?

I know damn well what "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is; so does virtually every person I spend time with - though, as mentioned earlier, genius, so I tend to self-select away from idiots.

Most anyone with a basic high school education, and many with a middle school education, will realise what Dihydrogen Monoxide is. Men in Black was very much right about something: a person is smart. People are dumb. When you present information in a sensational and alarmist manner, people act like the stupid herd beasts we are, starting a stampede. Get a person alone and ask them about Dihydrogen Monoxide and you'll get very different results.

And of course people with scientific training would immediately see that the chemical formula for "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is never listed, throwing the whole subject under immediate scrutiny. Of course, that's because its chemical formula is widely recognised, and would ruin the whole joke of the site.

I disagree. I didn't look at the website, but I only worked our DiHydrogen Monoxide because I was informed it was some trick up front, and I'm sure a lot of people with a university education (probably not chemistry graduates) would also not cotton on. It's easy enough to scan that as 'long name for a chemical' and move on.

Based around my memories of being a kid, I wasn't as trusting as you seem to be saying, and was quite prepared to believe people were lying; but I also definitely did more idiotic things. Getting into silly little flights in the playground was just the way things were - but I haven't been in a fight for years. I used to cry a lot more and shout at people a lot more - because I was a lot mroe emotionally mature.

Nobody's claiming children should be let off the hook if they commit a crime, just that sentencing should be more lenient and they shouldn't be shoved in the general prison population* - that's the way to ruin someone's life based on some stupid, childhood decision.

*or killed.