Criminal behavior (and school misbehavior) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Since 1960 the number of boys raised without fathers has grown along with welfare state policies that make fathers less relevant. The debaters ignore this and promote drug legalization and government interventions they assume will fix toxic American family cu…
Criminal behavior (and school misbehavior) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Since 1960 the number of boys raised without fathers has grown along with welfare state policies that make fathers less relevant. The debaters ignore this and promote drug legalization and government interventions they assume will fix toxic American family culture that inculcates many boys. "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple describes English city life (pathological violence, drug use, fatherless boys, unemployment) among lower classes identical to ghetto culture in US cities. Yet these cultural patterns go unnoticed by political and media elites promoting government solutions with little empirical evidence of success. Government can't create healthy families, but unintended consequences of feel-good policies certainly incentivized family dysfunction.
💯. We are a society untethered… not beholden to family, religious institutions, or community. In times past, these institutions created guardrails of shared values, and people were shamed or shunned by their immediate families or the greater community if they did not follow the rules, written and unwritten. Our current culture celebrates every extreme expression of untethered individualism, and the collective has suffered. In addition, we have devalued the role of young males, who are no longer needed to provide, and who cannot provide even if they wanted to. It has become prohibitively expensive to start a family or buy a home, so these aspirational hopes have also gone by the wayside for the many. The only way back to some sort of sanity is the promotion of policies that build families. Right now there are none.
Criminal behavior (and school misbehavior) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Since 1960 the number of boys raised without fathers has grown along with welfare state policies that make fathers less relevant. The debaters ignore this and promote drug legalization and government interventions they assume will fix toxic American family culture that inculcates many boys. "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple describes English city life (pathological violence, drug use, fatherless boys, unemployment) among lower classes identical to ghetto culture in US cities. Yet these cultural patterns go unnoticed by political and media elites promoting government solutions with little empirical evidence of success. Government can't create healthy families, but unintended consequences of feel-good policies certainly incentivized family dysfunction.
💯. We are a society untethered… not beholden to family, religious institutions, or community. In times past, these institutions created guardrails of shared values, and people were shamed or shunned by their immediate families or the greater community if they did not follow the rules, written and unwritten. Our current culture celebrates every extreme expression of untethered individualism, and the collective has suffered. In addition, we have devalued the role of young males, who are no longer needed to provide, and who cannot provide even if they wanted to. It has become prohibitively expensive to start a family or buy a home, so these aspirational hopes have also gone by the wayside for the many. The only way back to some sort of sanity is the promotion of policies that build families. Right now there are none.