I've been talking about how Western culture tends to loathe its children, and how a large subset of the West thinks that the best way to raise children is by hurling abuse and threats at them, military boot-camp style.

that reminds me of this poor guy: Todd Marinovich.

(1/x)
he's one of those sad sacks who ends up on "NFL's Greatest Bust" lists. his pro football career followed a rather familiar trajectory: he'd been schooled into a star football player, seemed really impressive (if erratic) in college, and then bombed on the national stage.

(2/x)
and then decades later people laugh over amusing #sports #journalism pieces about what a massive flop he was, and maybe search YouTube for some amusing clips of old games in which Marinovich threw an interception, or whatever. (I didn't find any myself.)

(3/x)
why did he flop? that's actually really easy to explain: it was his father's fault.

Marv Marinovich, burning with shame over his own lackluster #NFL career, hired a bunch of coaches and studied "Eastern bloc" training methods (@mtaibbi and @roddreher are in good company!)

(4/x)
and Marv drilled his kid again and again, controlling his diet even, trying to beat and hammer his child into a perfect athletic instrument.

"Some guys think the most important thing in life is their jobs, the stock market, whatever. To me, it was my kids," said Marv.

(5/x)
"The question I asked myself was, How well could a kid develop if you provided him with the perfect environment?"[1]

that's from the enlightening Wikipedia entry on Todd Marinovich: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Mari…

Marv's parenting method is @MattWalshBlog's or @dalepartridges's.

(6/x)
in general this is the right-wing daydream about how kids should be raised: through *force*. all those #Christian "boot camps" exist for this reason; all those special private academies and military schools, where rich parents send their kids, operate on this same premise.

(7/x)
Todd Marinovich was raised that way, through nonstop abuse—and the moment he was totally on his own, outside the relatively forgiving culture of USC, he crumbled to pieces.

Todd had learned only to *hate* the "discipline". it was *punishment* administered by a tyrant.

(8/x)
and clearly, once Todd Marinovich realized that he was actually desperately unhappy with how his dad had tried to *traumatize* him into a star football player, it was a downhill slide into self-medication with drink and weed, and the disintegration of his NFL career.

(9/x)
I wonder if Marv Marinovich ever realized he'd blown it. probably not—it's usual for abusive parents to duck moral responsibility for all their blunders. it would all have been Todd's fault.

"he was weak. he was *always* weak. I knew he was weak when he was a toddler."

(10/x)
I have no idea if Marv ever said anything exactly like that, but...it's common enough. it's a feature of abusive parenting: they write off their own children as born broken (cf. #Autism parents) and therefore worthy of being bullied and betrayed and everything.

(11/x)
just think: that's probably how Errol raised @elonmusk.

~Chara of Pnictogen

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More from @KrisAtLarge

Feb 3
I ask my few readers to consider the following possibility: ALL "#conservative" ideology these days—whether it's from @GOP ideologues or the @Conservatives' ideologues or #Christian ideologues or "gender critical" ideologues of the @bindelj sort—has a very specific motive.

(1/x)
not the motive you might be thinking!

I suggest that ALL these people—@DouthatNYT, @realchrisrufo, @Docstockk, @michaelshermer, whoever—adapt their ideology specifically according to who humiliates them in arguments the most reliably. because these people *can't argue*.

(2/x)
right-wing ideology can't be supported *logically*, because the core and center of "movement #conservatism" is irrational and emotional: they like old beliefs and old concepts, old ways of wielding power and regulating human beings, and they don't want anything to change.

(3/x)
Read 13 tweets
Feb 2
yes, @HistoryBoomer, it's entirely credible for @Yascha_Mounk and @conor64 and @bariweiss (who likes trying to get professors fired, if they're insufficiently deferential towards @Israel's genocidal tendencies) to want to ban books. it's almost _necessary_ for them to want that.
why do I say that? because the political beliefs of @bariweiss &c. are intellectually absurd, indefensible except via suppression of competing ideas. Weiss, for example, subscribes to "gender criticism", which pretends that masculinity is a scientific trait of the human penis.
the *only way* to preserve the ideologies of @bariweiss (and @conor64 and the rest of that gang) is through *cheating*.

and they all do compare notes, @HistoryBoomer; I rather hope you're not clinging to some illusion that these propagandists are independent of one another.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2
wow, I "love" how @elonmusk is such a contemptibly *cowardly* man-child that he's convinced himself that only "bots" hate him. @mtaibbi's bestest buddy really is THAT gutless—he's so scared of being hated, that he's forced to pretend that the people who hate him aren't "real".
@Twitter / @TwitterDev bot functionality was legitimately useful—and now @elonmusk's taking it away from us because he and his wretched fanbase have all been daydreaming that "bots" are why Musk's name is mud on #Twitter.

no, Elon—that's just you. you're a turd of a person.
you're a human turd, @elonmusk, a turd with lots of money so you've been able to buy yourself some chums who tell you day and night that you're the saviour of the world. but it's not true. @mtaibbi and @stillgray and @lhfang and the rest of them are *using* you.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 2
we've said it before but we really like the #KamenRider Build theme: "Be the One", by Pandora.



🎵 be the light / be the light
we'll take darkness into brightness, yeah
leading you into the light
be the light
oh, you'll be alive
be the one / be the one 🎵
#KamenRider Build and its overflowing heroic anguish served as emotional counterpoint to some of the most painful months of our lives—working in the slippery and dangerous biodiesel factory, then having to drop everything to go to San Diego and be with our dying father.

~Chara
Evolt was gearing up yet another diabolical plan (he had so many of them!) about the time that we were watching our father expire.

a lot of #KamenRider (and #SuperSentai) has chanced to line up with our life's worst moments—tokusatsu is woven into the fabric of our life.

~Chara
Read 16 tweets
Feb 1
the possibility of someone like Tetsuo existing is the inevitable result of humanity's intersection with the numinous. if this sort of thing is *possible at all*—if it's possible for an ordinary human being to acquire godlike powers over matter and energy—then Tetsuo is possible. Image
magic doesn't exist, so the #Christians and @michaelshermer both say (curious how they always agree in almost every way) but the human _fiction_ about magic seems to grasp this fundamental truth: magic + humanity = world-shaking catastrophe, with appalling ease.

~Chara
it's not clear that humanity *can* safely wield "true magic", which for the sake of discussion I'll define roughly as "magic capable of causing objectively measurable changes on matter and energy". casting a fireball ought to be *measurable*—producing real heat and flame.

~Chara
Read 9 tweets
Feb 1
Tetsuo isn't Akira but the onlookers don't know that; all they knows is that a freaky kid has popped up in Neo-Tokyo and is blowing up tanks—they're prepared to take this as *good news*.

they've been living under the bootheel of militarized oligarchy; ANYTHING is better.

~Chara
of course Tetsuo turns out to be bad news indeed but at least he's mostly blowing up military equipment; to the people of Neo-Tokyo, it must have felt (at first) like a relief from an intolerable deadlock. at *last*, the avenging rage of the people had some visible shape.

~Chara
the funny thing about our stylishly marketed faux-revolutionary "independent" crowd—the folks currently clustering around @elonmusk and @mtaibbi and @Timcast and all that gang—is that they're actually _terrified_ of that genuine full-blooded *wrath*.

~Chara
Read 7 tweets

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