The teenage girl fight in Lakeland, Florida is pretty disturbing. Basically six girls pummeled one of their erstwhile friends and fellow cheerleader after being insulted by some (possibly forged) myspace postings of the victim. “Demarcus” even said she did it, according to audio of the video. In the wake of this event, facile explanations focusing on myspace and youtube have ignored the larger cultural factors involved including the rise of lower class standards among society as a whole.
There are probably even fewer fights among white suburbanites than there were 20 or 40 years ago. I don’t think myspace or camcorders are to blame of this and other fights. What’s changed, I think, is any sense of fair play and proportionality.
In the past, fights were one-on-one, no weapons, and there was some sense of a “fair fight.” I know this from personal experience and my dad’s numerous tales of growing up in an Irish neighborhood in NYC in the 60s. The tribal ways of our new neighbors and lowest classes are spreading, particularly among the young, with their high regard for superfluous achievements like “keeping it real,” i.e., ghetto authenticity. Imagine how much more disturbing a video of the sucker-punching brutes in the Jena Six case would be, if it were extant.
I also think we need to look at some individual factors as far as these girls and this neighborhood is concerned. Lakeland has some trashy areas, where blue collar people close to the earth aren’t afraid to throw down.
And, frankly, these particular girls all look sorta funny . . . . like “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome” funny. I’m not joking. This is a disease associated with violence and poor impulse control. Notice the wide set eyes, dull expressions, thin upper lips, and small chins on all but the first girl Take a look:
Of course, this had to happen in Florida. We are the home of all things weird. Our only rival might be Clear Lake, Texas, home to nutty astronaut Lisa Nowak and the would-be cheerleader-killing mom, Wanda Holloway.
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If you’ve seen the video of the parents of the beaten girl speaking, it is clear that at least the victim (and presumably the perps, too) did not come from an upper middle class background; they were middle class/blue collar, no question.
I’d love to chalk this up, as you do, to a lack of a “sense of proportionality” and “fair play,” but I doubt that’s the case. I also doubt that it is the “tribal ways of our new neighbors” or a youthful lust for “ghetto authenticity.”
Most likely, it is the popular culture which today more than ever is a “vast wasteland” with reality television featuring ever increasing lows of human degradation and crassness that passes as entertainment, violence/drug/sex obsessed programming, etc.
It used to be that “culture” meant high culture, but the reality is that “culture” today means “mass culture.” And the mass culture is low culture (though not to put a racial or immigration spin on it–Jackass is as whiteboy as they come). Mind you, I’m no fan of Allan Bloom or other cultural elites, and I don’t care much for trying to turn back the clock on this stuff: it is what it is.
As a new parent, of course, I’m mildly concerned about how to raise a well balanced child in the present cultural millieu, but I dont think it is rocket science; positive parental involvement gets you 95% of the way, and I suspect the real culprits, if you were pointing fingers, are the parents of the perps.
No disagreements. It’s not just parents; it’s fathers. Women are soft. Men are hard. Men demand discipline, respect for rules, and concern for the family name. Single moms want to be your best friend, and their kids are notoriously out of control (and their daughters promiscuous).
You see there were tough, violent, fighting boys and girls in the 70s, though far fewer without fathers. Fair fighting, chivalry if you will, is a white middle class American thing that is really an extension of a hard-won, delicate, and rare European achievement: the widespread conflation of honor with the code of Chivalry. Poor minorities, people from other non-European lands, and the most rednecky whites generally do not appreciate chivalry.
It’s why the latter group used to perpetrate lynch mob violence on entire black neighborhoods. It’s why blacks retaliated with similar violence. It’s why all these groups love gangs so much. It’s why even educated blacks rooted for OJ. It’s why the utter unfairness of this fight and the picacyune nature of the cassus belli didn’t strike any of these trashy wretches as a problem–they’re white trash, which basically means they are whites who act like, live among, and merge socially with blacks. Of course, with friends like “Demarcus,” we already knew that.
How many of these girls do you think know their fathers? How many of these alpha hoes do you think roll with the football team’s running backs, if you know what I mean?
Like the Indians had the last laugh in the Americas, the descendants of slaves we brought here in chains may have the last laugh. Our society was never suited for people from the Third World. It was a European thing, and even there, a specifically English culture and people who made it work. The slaves will have the last laugh, at least at first, as we conform to their tribal value system or get swalloed up in the process. The age of the tribe and the decline of Europeans individualists is becoming more and more apparent. Perhaps I should be more forgiving and understanding. I don’t know what kind of violent, multicultural public high school these girls go to. But I do know that part of Florida well. My brother went a similar school, where blacks, whites, and Mexican routinely clashe din race riots. In the new America, the whites who will thrive best will be girls like the girls doing the beating in the video: merciless, fierce, unfair, tribal, brutal, hateful. These are the fruits of diversity: the whites who survive will act like people living in the Third World.
These kids don’t look any worse than the trolls who troop out of my son’s high school every day.They are poorly dressed and unkempt to boot (this is a relatively middle class HS in a California suburb but all but the wealthiest areas have a generous dollop of trash).
I think you’re being unfair to many blacks in that you segregate whites by class, but lump blacks into one group as if they were a monolithic identity. For instance, you say these lower class white girls hang out with blacks, rather than saying that these lower class whites hang out with lower class blacks.
I also don’t think you should write off descendants of slaves as perpetually unsuited to the U.S. While we will always likely have a significant amount of segregation, there are many blacks, including some in the lower classes, that accept middle class values and whose American loyalties trump their ethnic identity. There would be many more, if it were not for the efforts of those like Jeremiah Wright who explicitly instruct them to reject middle class values.
I think the culture of blacks as a group is far more defined by their much larger lower class than whites. Whites are defined by their large middle class. This sets the “white” standard and, once upon a time, the national standard. You are certainly right many blacks do not descend to the level of low class blacks, but they are far more exceptional than they are among whites. Just by way of example, something like 70% of black children are born out of wedlock.
It’s one thing to say that many years ago slavery was a bad idea and that blacks from the third world were not suited for American life. Our simmering racial frictions suggest this was a bad idea all around, and in an ideal world never would have occurred. But you are certainly correct it is something we must live with, and you are also correct that many blacks are patriotic and law-abiding and are as American as anyone else. Once again, this situation is far more exceptional than it is in the case of whites. I realize as an ex military man you probably served with a great many decent black people; I’ve met many such folks through my two brothers in the military. But the military, as you know, can do something society cannot: it uses the ASVAB and removes the bottom two quintiles (more or less) from consideration for entry even in the enlisted ranks. This goes a long way to removing anti-social types and the IQ segregation throughout the military does a lot to lead to good race relations within the ranks.
I do think, though, that there are some unique features of European civilization and that people whom we encounter elsewhere and import into our own country routinely don’t get it, not least because of IQ gaps, but also because of a secondary factor: our high IQs (and a lot of other factors) have led to a culture of individualism with a concern for universal rules applying to matters of right and wrong. It’s not just a white European thing but a mark of modernity as well. In other words, it is historical. We know Old Germanic Tribes certainly didn’t approach life this way. This view is not shared very widely in geographic and historical terms, and I don’t think it can easily be shared among the less bright folks from other lands, and we see evidence everywhere from Somalia to South Africa to Watts. Everyone’s thinking tribally out there except for whites. And our intelligence has led to another kind of self-imposed stupidity: we’re so clever through liberalism that we praise our objective destruction as the advance of social justice and equality, which only we really believe in, and which other groups use to advance their tribes as soon as our neutral structures are in their hands.
When you are talking about centuries and whole cultures, I am not sure you should list IQ as the driver of values and not values as the driver of IQs. While I don’t deny the likelihood that there are at least some genetic differences in intelligence, I think the weighted effect of genetic differences versus cultural differences is still quite a mystery.
Take Ireland for instance. The Irish were considered the idiots of Europe for the last several centuries. Now in the space of a few short years they are the high tech geniuses of Europe. Have they suddenly gotten smarter, or do IQ tests do an insufficient job in measuring intelligence potential, as opposed to measuring developed and practiced intelligence?
Take India for another example. According to the IQ stats they are a low IQ country. Have they just gotten very efficient at transporting all their high IQ people to Bangalore? Or is Bangalore a high IQ pocket of India? Or is what is happening in Bangalore helping to raise the IQ of the people who live there. I would argue that the last factor is likely to explain at least as much as the first two.
I agree with those who argue that developed intelligence is one of the best predictors of success in the modern world, but from a long-term historical perspective, I find it very hard to explain the success of groups in terms of the latest IQ stats.
There are a billion people in India; not to hard to send high IQ ones to Bangalore. India, like Ireland, too has suffered from malnutrition until recently. (Also, I wouldn’t assume the “Irish are stupid” thing had any merit; the Englsh hated them because they were Catholic above all else.)
Genetics are the major part of IQ. It’s why siblings can vary so much. It’s why the “achievement gap” with whites and blacks doesn’t go away with massive interventions. Nutrition, early childhood, and degree of stimulus (such as that of a modern versus a pastoral society) is the other part of the equation. Also, when you’re talking about big groups, it does matter how many guys with 120, 130, 140, and 150 IQs you are producing. The latter are the ones who design things, build things, organize things, impose order, etc.
Your last point is true to a point. IQ is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success. And IQ is highly rewarded today, whereas things like cohesiveness and military valor had a lot to do with succss in the past. Thus Asians do well as societies today but did poorly in the past, when they were embroiled in warlordism of some kind or another. Europeans are the pinnacle of world civilization and have been for two millenia. Africa and aboriginal Australia are the pits and always has been. IQ has a lot to do with this.
Someday we’ll have to take the time to go culture by culture and you’ll see how difficult it is to reconcile current IQ to civilizational performance in any ethnic categories but the broadest.
Suffice it to say, you’d have to suppose dramatic and rapid changes in IQ to explain the many discrepancies, and it seems reasonable to me to assume that culture is at least as much a driving force of IQ as genetics is.
Wow, absent for a day and I miss a blathering screed. You’re crazy, Roach, to think this story has anything to do with race or immigration. This is a story whose root causes lie clearly in mass media, absentee parents, etc.
What values does the mass media promote? Which group has the most absentee parents/fatherless homes?
These girls are, of course, rednecks bordering on whtie trash, in a trashy part of FL, where white country kids routinely battle Mexicans and blacks. That’s how Lakeland is. I know this place.
Now, I’m not saying this is caused by blacks or Mexicans or immigration. I’m saying that America is changing for the worse, and those are the biggest factors, and they dramatically and more quickly impact blue collar whites who live among, mate with, and generally are more exposed to minority values and lifestyles. In other words:
We assimilate to the newcomers just as much, or more, than they assimilate to us. The reason their power is disproportionate, in spite of our wealth and long-standing status, is the demoralizing effects of liberalism which prevents native born Americans, in particular whites, from having solidarity and cultural self-confidence.
Look at how much black culture has degenerated over the last 60 years. Their illegitimacy rates once were lower than white illegitimacy rates are today (although higher than whites at the time).
Rather than saying that blacks have dragged whites down, I think it is more accurate to say that modern liberalism tears down the standards and values that keep the uneducated, ignorant, and poor from descending beneath civilized conduct. Since blacks were disproportionately uneducated, ignorant, and poor, and to a large degree unassimilated, they have had a head start on the downward trajectory. As we see, whites are catching up.
Glenn Beck had a segment about this on his television show the other day during which he congratulated the mother of the victim for her daughter’s refusal to fight back. Ridiculous. Where is the honor in letting people pummel the crap out of you without even attempting to defend yourself? Furthermore, by not defending herself, this girl was encouraging these thugs to continue their onslaught.
What an easy target is the prey who won’t defend itself from attack. And for this kind of liberal-esque behavior, Glenn Beck applauds? Some conservative.
I judge cruelty more harshly than weakness. In the girl’s defense, I think she had been knocked unconcious at that point and had sustained a concussion. But yeah concucssion-incuded pacifism is not the best thing on Earth.
That said, conservatives I thought believed women shouldn’t fight. It’s not lady-like.
It’s a hell of a reach to conclude that it’s “the blacks fault” when a pack of white kids beat on a fellow white kid. I could just say it’s moronic and racist but I’ll be a little more productive: it misses the point.
You don’t need to be black to learn violence; all you need is to watch TV. Violence is not just condoned in our society; it’s rewarded. Why else would MSNBC and FoxNews play this tape ad nauseum? Why else wouldn’t YouTube delete violent and illicit videos? For that matter, why did the Sheriff release the tape? (It wasn’t to capture the criminals — they were in jail — or support of the victim).
As I pointed out in my post on this topic the reason kids commit these acts is because they see it every day. They see it every day because that’s what the corporations give them. Unfettered sex and violence on TV is the natural outgrowth of our “get-mine/screw-you” society: exorbitant CEO pay is “capitalism”; executive bonuse for laying off workers is “streamlining”; oil companies making record profits due to the war is a “supply/demand problem”; and sex and violence on TV is “what people want.”
These girls made this video for fame and fortune. They literally intended to put it on YouTube. Legally that’s a little clueless but economically it’s not. Everyone is getting rich at the expense of others, why not them?
And if you think I’m wrong I invite you to go to MSNBC’s website. Not only will they direct you straight to the video — “check out the teen girl being beaten” — you will have the privilege of watching the assault tape ONLY after you watch a 30 second commercial they stuck on the front of it. Maybe All TempaCheer is good for taking blood out of cheerleader skirts, I don’t know, but dear lord is that immoral. And more to the point it proves what I’m saying: home grown violent videos are an Internet sensation!
You want this to change; quit whining about “blacks.” The only thing blacks have done in the past 200 years is ask for equality. Blacks don’t run MSNBC; they don’t run FoxNews; they didn’t start YouTube; they don’t run the studios; and they certainly don’t come into your house, turn your TV on, and let your kids watch wrestling all weekend.
We need a new morality in this Country and it doesn’t require blame. It starts with looking in the mirror and putting your money where your mouth is. Don’t watch NBC if they’re going to feature garbage like American Gladiators (violence) and Deal or No Deal (sex). Don’t buy a Carl’s Jr. burger when they hire a moronic drug addict to scantily promote their product. If Fox insists on running crap like that lie detector show; stop watching.
FYI, had she fought back they would have had it on tape. Then they could have shown it to the police and said “look, she was fighting with us.”
That was, in fact, their plan. It also explains why the girl keeps saying “why won’t you fight back?”
Dickard, this paragraph is exactly why you cannot be taken seriously:
“They see it every day because that’s what the corporations give them. Unfettered sex and violence on TV is the natural outgrowth of our ‘get-mine/screw-you’ society: exorbitant CEO pay is ‘capitalism’; executive bonuse for laying off workers is ‘streamlining’; oil companies making record profits due to the war is a ‘supply/demand problem’; and sex and violence on TV is ‘what people want.’”
It’s hard to think of another leftist trope you could throw in. I’m especially amused by your statement that it’s not economically clueless to expect a fortune from putting a video on YouTube–a FREE video streaming service.
Pretty ladies opening suitcases and goofy actors in layers of athletic protection popping tennis balls at each other isn’t where these girls learned that this was justifiable behavior.
“I judge cruelty more harshly than weakness. In the girl’s defense, I think she had been knocked unconcious at that point and had sustained a concussion. But yeah concucssion-incuded pacifism is not the best thing on Earth.”
Don’t get me wrong; my criticism was not directed at the victim, but rather the wrong-headed liberal rhetoric of Glenn Beck. Certainly, the victim in this case would have been better off had she defended herself, but it’s understandable if fear and/or prior injuries prevented her from doing so. However, I don’t think her pacifism should be exalted or made to be an example of the honorable way to respond to a physical assault.
But she’s a girl. Girls are not supposed to have to fight.
It’s not her fault that she lives in a society that clings to enough of the concept of chivalry for her to know that it is unlady-like to fight, but not enough to offer her any protection from getting attacked by class-less bitches.
If it were a guy, it would be an entirely different story.
(of course, I don’t know exactly how Beck phrased it all)
So because you’re a girl you shouldn’t EVER defend yourself from physical attack? Better to risk death or a severe beating than to break some code of lady-like conduct — which doesn’t even apply in cases like this anyway?
We’re not talking about sanctioning women in the military here; we’re not talking about the greatness of women boxers or street fighters. We’re not talking about doing away with the code of chivalry and conservative, lady-like behavior. We’re talking about the employment of self-defense in potentially life or death situations.
And once again, my intention is not to lambaste this poor girl; she’s merely acting the way her parents and liberal society in which she lives has taught her to act, which is: defending yourself, under any circumstance, is wrong. Conservatives, even the phony ones like Glenn Beck, should be standing up against this type of thinking, not encouraging it. And that was my original point.
I wouldn’t blame her if she had fought back, or question her honor, but the thought is that a lady instinctively recoils from physical combat, and that excuses her from fighting in anything but the most dangerous situations. That’s a traditional, i.e. “small c” conservative, notion.
I am just guessing that she thought something like this, “I have class, I don’t engage in catfights, let me just figure a way to get away from these bitches”
Then again I haven’t listened to the audio, so maybe I would feel differently then.
[...] also discussed the famous Girlfight swirling across news desks and web browsers aplenty. Take a moment to review the footage, and see [...]
For the girl being attacked to fight back would have been foolish; it would have resulted in several of those female neanderthals assaulting her at once, perhaps resulting in a fractured skull, a broken leg, or serious internal injuries. If survival in one piece was her goal, she did the intelligent thing.
Sadly, this is what sometimes happens in women’s prisons. A female inmate who is attacked by a member of a larger group or clique in the prison will often accept her beating and simply try to protect herself as best she can by going into a fetal position or something similar. Punching the other woman or even pulling her hair would be semi-suicidal; it would bring on an instant mob attack that could very well result in death.