Ain't But One Thing Can Be Done

[Gary Sisco]

with guys like this, I'm afraid.

We shoot rabid dogs because they are a threat to human life and community.

I have always been opposed to capital punishment but some people are simply beyond the pale, altogether, and become as much a threat as any mad dog.

There isn't any rehabilitating guys this far removed from simple humanity.

Boy beaten to death while mom serves in Iraq
Woman's boyfriend charged with murder after 4-year-old found dead in bed

Updated: 4:44 p.m. ET May 26, 2007
CALUMET CITY, Ill. - A man beat his girlfriend’s 4-year-old son to death after she left the boy in his care while she was deployed to Iraq, police said.

A judge denied bond on Saturday for Donell Parker, 23, who is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Cameron Smith. Parker was charged Friday, a day after the boy was found dead in his bed in a suburb south of Chicago.

Judge Frank Castiglione said at Saturday’s bail hearing that Parker showed a “wanton disrespect for human life.” Prosecutors told the court the boy suffered multiple rib fractures, damaged internal organs and swelling around his brain.

[GoodSpeak]

If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could beat a child to death.

My God.

[Gary Sisco]

That's what I mean about it being not human. These kinds of guys have something the matter with them that just isn't fixable.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

That's what I mean about it being not human. These kinds of guys have something the matter with them that just isn't fixable.

I agree.

You know, I seriously do not know how we manufacture people like this but there seems to be no shortage.

[Gary Sisco]

I think they have some kind of real genetic flaw. Something really missing that's beyond psychology or upbringing, environment, or any of that.

When I worked in a homeless shelter for ten years, there was a sharkish element in that population that was truly sociopathic. They literally had no feeling of remorse or for the consequences for other people of their actions (though they were often the ones who would most indignantly yap about rules and fairness and so forth *in their own cases*). Talking like guys who'd steal an old man's only pair of socks in winter and simply have no remorse about it, none. They'd often rob old guys of their social security money as soon as they left the bank. One of those guys ended up getting married (another commonality was the use of women as economic salvation) and murdering his wife in a Burlington hotel. He carried her body out to the car -- right through the hotel, amazingly -- it was at night, but still, there were employees there, obviously -- and then drove around with the body in the backseat. He even stopped to pick up his mail at the post office. Later he just dumped the body a few feet off the road in some trees. Made almost no effort to bury or even cover it. Nevertheless, typically, he's made a series of attempts to appeal his conviction based on this or that comma or semicolon in the law. All denied, thank goodness.

There were sharks like that who swam through the counterculture, also. Still is.

One time when I got locked up after a civil disobedience campaign, they put me in a cell with another guy. He asked me what I was in for. I told him for political stuff. "Great," he said, as if yet another burden had been placed on his poor life. So I asked him what he was in for. He said, "They say I raped this woman." The "they say" part is also typical. Nothing like sharing a cell with someone you loathe who loathes you just as much.

[Dr Dave]

Here you go, Gary--a bit of light reading:

Inside The Mind Of A Sociopath.

[GoodSpeak]

Nice post, Gary.


Interestingly enough, I volunteer at a local food bank and sadly, I have seen that sharkish element there, too. It is amazing to me how folks like that, in their lowest point in life, still attempt to take advantage of people. I have seen people drive up in brand new Accura or tricked-out vehicle with an excellent paint job, stereo system and the rest and get in line with everybody else. One time I watched the same two people [from that Accura] in expensive running suits go through the line multiple times. Each time with the appropriate paperwork and each time they would wait until we were swamped. Maybe they were delivering, I don't know, but it sure struck me as rather odd.

We had one woman who was 350 pounds if she was an ounce create a huge scene by screaming at a volunteer and demanding her "fair share" saying we swindled her out of a toy for her daughter and food for her family. It was fairly obvious to me at least, she was only there to get a free hand-out and work the system for as much as she could get.

In some cases, though, you can tell that whatever drugs they were on had burned out their minds and some simply didn't remember going through the line.

But you're right, Gary. I honestly think there is something terribly gone wrong in folks like that which simply isn't fixable.

[John L]

Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not even uncommon.

When my son was in the hospital in Philadelphia back in the 80s, I saw beaten young kids coming into intensive care almost every day. I don't know how the doctors can stomach it. It just makes you wonder what kind of a planet this is.

[Chazro]

I'm curious though, the thread starts with a comparison with a rabid dog and how they're put down. I've always felt a 'Liberal'-type vibe here at the corner which is fine...whatever floats your boat. I come from the other side of the tracks though, where some people might try to sympathize and get that 'poor' lost soul some help, not me!! Putting one behind his ear would be as merciful as I could get. Seriously, this fuckwad kills a child, how would YOU deal with him?

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

Here you go, Gary--a bit of light reading:

Inside The Mind Of A Sociopath.

It's interesting, Dr Dave, that many of the characteristics described in that item are those exhibited by people who are born with fetal alcohol syndrome. The inabilty to feel empathy, or to understand why their behaviour is considered antithical to generally accepted social mores.
It might be described as a social brain short-circuit.
Scary stuff.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Chazro

I'm curious though, the thread starts with a comparison with a rabid dog and how they're put down. I've always felt a 'Liberal'-type vibe here at the corner which is fine...whatever floats your boat. I come from the other side of the tracks though, where some people might try to sympathize and get that 'poor' lost soul some help, not me!! Putting one behind his ear would be as merciful as I could get. Seriously, this fuckwad kills a child, how would YOU deal with him?

Child abuse is not a Liberal issue, Chaz.


It's a human issue of tragic frequency.

[Hudson Boy]

Most child abuse crimes are committed by women, but the popular image is that men are the main perpetrators.

[Gary Sisco]

Chazro, I don't know who you are addressing with your question. I think I made myself fairly clear about it. I'm not a liberal. I'm not a conservative, either, in the way that word is wrongly used today.

Guys like this, who no one can convince me are fixable, have used up their options -- and mine -- as far as I'm concerned. Nor can I think of any reasons why people should be forced to pay for his ass for decades with their confiscated wages. If I were king, from this earthly life he'd soon depart.

Dave -- Believe me that after ten years of too much intimacy with the sociopathic mind (not counting the sharks that swim in the counterculture and always have), there's nothing I'd like to read less. They're really permanently damaged goods, who lack most of what I'd consider necessary to make one human beyond the strictly species relation.

Pat -- I don't even care, frankly, why they are the way they are. To me, there is too much, many times, in such explanations that bleeds over into a kind of justification that removes their responsibility for their own actions.

(They do, too, by the way, on the flip side. You've never heard anyone sanctimonious until you've heard a sociopath go off about how he's been unfairly dealt with because the rules say xyz and he only got xy plus 1/2 z. Like the guy who murdered his wife I mentioned above. He's forever convinced that he's been wrongly imprisoned, *not* because he murdered his wife and casually drove around with her body in the back seat for several hours, including a stop to get his mail at the P.O. Rather, he's wrongly imprisoned because the judge, or the prosecutor, or whoever the fuck, was "supposed to" do this or that for him before sentence and didn't.

[walto]

Originally Posted by hudson boy

Most child abuse crimes are committed by women...

Do you have a source for that?

[Gary Sisco]

Well, that's an absurdity. With you, there, Walto. And what difference would it make in any case?

[Gary Sisco]

The explanation-of-causes-as-rationale thing really began to drive me insane when I was doing shelter work and had to deal with more social workers than I'd ever cared to. So and so was in Vietnam. Yeah, well, so were several million others, not to mention a whole shitload of Vietnamese. So and so was abused as a kid. Yeah, well, again. So was I, by today's standards. So and so was raised by an alcoholic. Yeah, yeah.

When I'd respond that my old man didn't hesitate to whack the shit out of you when he thought you needed it, that just about everyone in the neighborhood was an alkie by today's standards -- and vets, too -- that I was a high-school dropout, too, and so on and so forth, I'd just get what I began calling many years ago, "the fish-eye stare." None of that changes anything about the way *I* choose to behave in the world. Everything has a reason. Not everything has a justification.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Pat -- I don't even care, frankly, why they are the way they are. To me, there is too much, many times, in such explanations that bleeds over into a kind of justification that removes their responsibility for their own actions.

I agree that why some people have no humanitarian or social compass is neither here nor there, if they commit crimes such as the one you described.
But, I do think it interesting that children who are born of alcoholic parents and are victims of fetal alcohol syndrome are more numerous than some realize.
That is not to say that I excuse them from responsibility for the horrendous acts they commit. But, in some cases there is a cause of the seeming lack of a conscience and it is irreversable. These people are not saveable, or re-trainable.
So, the question remains, what is to be done, if a criminal truly has no conscience and causes the death of another human being??
Would having no conscience be a viable defence??
Somehow that, at least for me, flies in the face of reason.

[Hudson Boy]

Originally Posted by Hudson Boy

Most child abuse crimes are committed by women, but the popular image is that men are the main perpetrators.

Originally Posted by walto

Do you have a source for that?

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Administration for Children and Families

The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) defines a perpetrator as a person who is considered responsible for the maltreatment of a child. Thus, this chapter provides data about only those perpetrators of child abuse victims and does not include data about alleged perpetrators.
Given the definition of child abuse and neglect, which largely pertains to caregivers, most perpetrators of child maltreatment are parents. Other caregivers, including relatives, foster parents and residential facility staff also are included. During Federal fiscal year (FFY) 2005:


Nearly 80 percent (79.4%) of perpetrators were parents of the victim; More than one-half (61.0%) of perpetrators neglected children; and Approximately 58 percent (57.8%) of perpetrators were women and 42.2 percent were men.http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm05/chapterfive.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Women Kill

Coramae Richey Mann, State University of New York Press (February 1996)

In their treatise on family violence issues, Thibalt and Rosier (1992) cite figures from a 1986 national study by the American Human Association which show that 60.7 percent of the caretakers reported for child maltreatment were females and that females accounted for 56.8 percent of major physical child abuse, and 57.3 percent of child fatalities. These percentages reflect an impressive increase since 1978 when an American Humane Society report on 100,000 cases of child abuse found that only 45 percent of the abusers were women (Mann, 1984a: 24).
http://books.google.com/books?id=mJmxfwy5l1AC&dq=Percentages+of+child+abuse+men+women&pg=PA6&ots=XvB86rh0S0&sig=Qc9bDHvppGK4nRSSM90qB1S6K6c&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fsourceid%3Dnavclient%26ie%3DUTF-8%26rls%3DTSHA,TSHA:2005-18,TSHA:en%26q%3DPercentages%2Bof%2Bchild%2Babuse%2Bmen%2Bwomen&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=2#PPP1,M1

[Dr Dave]

Interesting stat. Actually not all that surprising; I wonder how many abused kids live in single-parent families, where that single parent is mom. I don't know, but I'll bet it's a lot.

[Gary Sisco]

The answer to that question, Pat, from my perspective, is that one can only deal with people based on their behavior itself. In the case of this child-beating, or of the murderer I've mentioned, there is no motive or extenuating circumstance I can imagine that would make a single difference to me. Period. I don't know how else one would make a judgment, actually, unless it is based on the behavior itself. Nor would I want to imagine a system that worked any other way.

(Incidentally, this was the original demand of the original psych-patient movement, to be judged and treated like any other citizen based on one's actual behavior. I find nothing to disagree with in that position.)

I've known some pretty hefty drinkers who stopped drinking during their pregnancies. That, too, is a choice. But if a kid is damaged by it, he or she is still to be judged on his or her own behavior, in my book, not the mother's. We can judge the mother based on her own behavior, sure, but it doesn't get the kid off for its own.

[Gary Sisco]

Stats aside, what difference does it make, male or female?

In any case, women are overwhelmingly more likely to be the ones with kids, anyway.

[Gary Sisco]

One factor rarely even meaningfully discussed in my experience, is that the present generation is the first one where concepts like "nuclear family" are taken literally. What I mean is that it is the first to raise children almost literally alone.

Former generations had grandparents and so forth to help out, and who also had lived experience *in* childraising to fall back on. Some still do today, obviously, but today it is much more likely that generations do not live in that kind of proximity. Grandparents can much more easily be in different states or on separate sides of the continent. My parents would not have been able to raise four kids literally on their own, the way they had to, both of them, work in those days to do it. Both worked swing shifts, which meant different and unpredictable schedules from one week to the next, and both often had more than one job. My grandmother raised me, essentially, until school aged, when *she* went back to work. We also lived in an actual neighborhood where adults did in fact think that it was very much "their own business" keeping track of neighborhood kids, not just their safety but their behavior as well, whether their kids or someone else's.

It was far from utopia, don't get me wrong. But my folks were not literally on their own with the whole of the upbringing of four kids. We lived within what would more accurately be called a clan than an "extended family," and within a neighborhood, also, that was more than a zip code.

[patricia]

First of all, Gary, I totally agree that the sins of the mother [or the father] should have no bearing in how society treats crimes committed by their kids later on in life. The purpose of our justice system is to protect the rights and the safety of society in general. So, acts of violence are acts of violence, no less serious because the doer may have had bad, or no socialization. In the cases of those who truly have no conscience, society's greater good still needs to be the first consideration. We can feel pity, or revulsion for those who don't seem to know, or care about other people. But, that should not cloud our judgement on who is permitted to roam freely, doing whatever comes into their warped imaginations.
Children are our most defenceless citizens and it is our job, as adults, to protect them from harm.
Like you, I too grew up in a fairly static neighbourhood and all the adults were expected by each other to watch out for the kids and even discipline them if the need arose. There were no incidents of anyone overstepping the boundaries between a smack on the butt of an errant kid and actual harm being done. They all felt responsible for the welfare of the neighbourhood and of the greater community.
I suppose that the biggest difference today is that neighbourhoods change constantly and people in them don't feel the same connection to them as they did when I was growing up. I still keep in loose touch with kids with whom I grew up. That connection doesn't seem to be as common now, probably due to the transient nature of our society.
Sad, even tragic, I think.

[Hudson Boy]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

with guys like this, I'm afraid.

We shoot rabid dogs because they are a threat to human life and community.

I have always been opposed to capital punishment but some people are simply beyond the pale, altogether, and become as much a threat as any mad dog.

There isn't any rehabilitating guys this far removed from simple humanity.

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Stats aside, what difference does it make, male or female?

In any case, women are overwhelmingly more likely to be the ones with kids, anyway.

We are much more likely to hear about men that are child-murderers.

My main point is that if there is a death penalty for child-murder, it shouldn't just be for "guys", and women who do such things are no more likely to be rehabilitated than males.

But there are double standards and it's always examples of child-murder by males that get people outraged enough to call for capital punishment. I never hear anybody talk about putting women to death for these crimes - there's always some exuses made for their behavior.

The 60's and 70's are over. It's a whole new ball game. The Marxist-type plan to destroy this society by starting with the family is continuing to have it's effects felt.

[GoodSpeak]

Marxism....you blame this all on Marxism?

[OMG]

You need to get out more, Hudson Bouy.






Whoa.

[Hudson Boy]

Originally Posted by GoodSpeak

Marxism....you blame this all on Marxism?

[OMG]
You need to get out more, Hudson Bouy.

Whoa.

Yeah, I'm planning to get out more!

I believe that I said "Marxist type".

The Cultural Marxists have been been the ones primarily responsible for many of our society's problems that we're discussing in various threads here.

Here's some inspiration from the original source:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.

Manifesto of the Communist Party
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
http://www.intuitive.com/library/CommunistManifesto.shtml

[clinthopson]

Originally Posted by Hudson Boy

The Cultural Marxists have been been the ones primarily responsible for many of our society's problems that we're discussing in various threads here.

That, perhaps is the single most stupid line ever posted here.

[jesus marion joseph]

God only knows how my mother managed not to kill both my older brother and me, as we supplied plenty of provocation for a young, widowed, foreign-born mother to go off on a tangent! Especially my brother. He and my mother both had nasty Germanic tempers that went off like they were on a hair trigger.

Once, at the dinner table, my mother told him to do something (clean his room or somesuch), which he took umbrage with. He mumbled something about how living in her house was like being in a communist country (a favorite retort of his at the time), and she grabbed his extra large glass of milk (he was into weight lifting back then, and wanted to bulk up his physique) and threw it right in his face, and the fireworks went off! Holy crow, I just wanted to slide off my seat and hide under the table!

Another time she got so pissed off at him that she took off her shoe and threw it at him. The heel caught him on the head, and opened up a cut on his scalp that had to be stitched closed (two stitches, if I recall correctly). Nowadays, we would have been shipped off to a foster home! Back then, they just stitched him up and sent us all back home.

I think the worst I ever got was when she broke a wooden spoon on my (bare) ass while she was beating me for some transgression or another. Or when she would catch us sneaking from her stash of holiday cookies that she would bake in advance, a few batches at a time. Since she was always at work during the daytime hours, and we would have to mind ourselves after school, we had plenty of time alone to go searching for her hiding spots. Once, as punishment, she made us eat instant grits until we almost puked, and when we complained we needed a drink, she gave us chocolate milk, but it was powdered milk, light on the powder, and with only enough chocolate syrup to give it a watery, brown color. God, that was awful!

[Al in NYC]

Originally Posted by Hudson Boy

The Cultural Marxists have been been the ones primarily responsible for many of our society's problems that we're discussing in various threads here.

Here's some inspiration from the original source:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

...talk about misunderstanding a text...

[RBS]

Marxists are responsible for the so-called breakdown of the family, huh?

Holy friggin' guacamole.

I'm so dumbfounded I have no idea what to say.