News worth reading

May 22, 2009 under curios

This cracks me up.

 Reports that some of the suspects were enjoying their stay in Dutch prison cells and were considering eventually claiming asylum, were met with disdain by the country’s foreign minister who was quoted as saying he would prefer it if they were being tried in Kenya under UN auspices.

Maxime Verhagen was quoted as saying that in his opinion, penalties should “deter” pirates, and that he did not want them to end up living happily in the Netherlands.

Somali piracy is not a problem of piracy.  It’s a problem of, “What do we do with these bored young men who are insanely poor?”

We tried ignoring them, which seemed to work like a charm, until they started plundering our shipping.

If you have a bored young men problem on the high seas, it looks like piracy. If you then take that bored young men problem off the high seas, without solving it, and throw it into a Dutch jail, the problem starts to look different. It now looks like, “Gee, it sure is nice in here. I’m not sure I want to leave.”

Because you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just displaced it. Same problem.

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Despairing young man

March 12, 2009 under thehumancondition, wholenessinreallife

Told people how he felt before he performed a desperate act…

…the message read: “I’ve had enough. I’m fed up with this horrid life… Always the same. People are laughing at me… No-one sees my potential… I am scared, I have weapons here, and I will go to my former school tomorrow and then I will really do a grilling.” 

Why report anything else on the story? Everything you need to know is right here, in the boy’s own words.

If you live in a world where life is horrid, frightening and hopeless,  what are you going to do? We can only react to the world we believe in. 

If you’re a subject of mockery and ridicule you’re nothing. If you stare down the world with a gun in your hand, you’re a man.

Did anyone ever show him something different?

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Bored young men pop up everywhere

March 7, 2009 under thehumancondition, wholenessinreallife

The article is about Pakistan’s passion for cricket and the shockwaves resulting from the terrorist attack against the Sri Lankan cricket team. But this quote is all about bored young men.

“But I wonder how many kids watching these attackers in action might think that playing Rambo in front of a world audience is more fun than a game of street cricket.”

It’s all about choices, and about which choices we perceive are available to us. While I’m not crying, “Victim! Victim!” (a free-will choice remains a free-will choice, after all) it’s a simple fact that if someone has an obvious choice in front of them, you can’t be overly surprised (or judgemental) when they take it.

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Bored young men turn to violence

February 27, 2009 under thehumancondition

Whenever a bored ten year old boy picks up a twig, he’s going to break it in two. He might stick it in his ear first, or push around some ants, beetles or worms with it, but when he’s done, he’s going to snap it. That twig has a limited life expectancy.

Ok,ok, he might just discard it.  The point is, there’s a tendancy towards chaos. If he throws it away, you can be quite sure it’s not in an orderly fashion.

Any mother of small boys will be able to tell you that they have a strong tendency towards chaos. That’s why they like to play with knives. Anything that they can chop, destroy, break or otherwise reduce to small pieces is an escape from boredom.

So what happens when bored little boys grow up?

If you try and solve the problems of the Middle East politically, you will fail, because the problems are not political. They’re people problems.

I’m a young man. If you take my self respect, my purpose and my job while killing my neighbors, what do you think I’ll do when someone comes along and offers a way to restore those?

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Somali Piracy

December 17, 2008 under curios

Everyone else seems to be talking about Somali piracy, so I may as well.

When I first heard about this, it struck me as a classic case of bored young men.

The practical thing that really puzzled me was, how on earth do ships get captured by pirates? What munitions do the pirates carry that allow them to capture a vessel the size of an oil tanker? Furthermore, the pirates may have these weapons, but can they actually aim them? It seems to me that from the elevated position of an oil tanker, you’re in a pretty good position to repel boarders.

Of course, there’s an answer to that: merchant tankers are not allowed to repel boarders. If they put armed men on board, they lose their insurance coverage. Insurance companies apparently don’t like covering ships that are likely to get into gunfights.

Gwynne Dyer has a beautiful article on the subject; the gist is that the Navies of the world lack the legal mandate to effectively deal with the pirates.

Most articles I’ve encountered seem to deal almost exclusively with the question of, “How do we make these pirates go away?” This is the same attitude I see taken towards terrorism, which is unsurprising. To be effective, piracy relies heavily on terror. Maybe we can enable our navies, maybe we can go through the UN and attack the pirates’ land bases, maybe we can sail around them…

These articles ignore the fact that as long as piracy offers the most attractive life for a Somali man, he will take it. It becomes hard to judge him for that, because his is basic human behaviour.

“Where can I find respect? Where can I make a name for myself? Where can I show the world, which doesn’t care about me, that I am something greater than they think?”

Defying the great world powers and collecting millions in ransom from them seems like a pretty good start. Given the opportunity to do that who wouldn’t? Sure, it suffers a few moral issues and there are a few personal risks involved, but they seem a reasonable trade off.

Of course, if you have the option to live a peaceful life that is fulfilling and satisfying, you may just pass on the chance to be a pirate.

I’ll bet they could use the Gospel.

If you insist on looking at piracy as an annoyance, and are only concerned with getting rid of pirates as quickly as possible, you’ll never hit upon the answer that really solves your problem.

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Mandatory Reading for Parents

November 25, 2008 under thehumancondition

On computer game addiction.

Again, this research isn’t surprising; it should be obvious. But if you don’t know the pressures and the temptations, it’s easy to misunderstand.

“This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”

…

“I liked gaming because people couldn’t see me, they accepted me as my online character – I could be good at something and feel part of a group.” [Emphasis mine]

Those are terrible things to say, terrible things to feel – not wanting to be seen, grasping at the chance to be good at something, anything.

The word that sums up the article for me is the first word of the headline: Compulsive. It means you feel you have to, you need to, you must.

People gotta eat. If there’s no good food around, people will eat the bad stuff. And you don’t need any further explanation for it than, “People gotta eat.”

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Bored Young Skript Kiddies

October 28, 2008 under technical

From the article,

Chris Boyd from FaceTime said many of the young criminal hackers were undermined by their desire to win recognition for their exploits.

In other news, small boys and teenagers turn to whatever means are available to them in an attempt to prove their manhood.

Different cultures and societies measure manhood in different ways. Traditional metrics involve women, work and provision, and killing things. Various other factors may be considered such as facial hair or other physical attributes.

Depending on the situation and metrics used, a boy can satisfy the requirements of manhood at 14 or 15. Such a man might not be the wisest or most mature man, but he’d make the cut. Regardless, 11 or 12 is not too young to desperately desire manhood, and every small boy does just that.

If youth don’t have a suitable definition of what it means to be a man, if they don’t have suitable challenges from which to learn how to be a man, and if they don’t receive recognition for their struggles and victories, what will happen?

They’ll strive for the wrong goal; they’ll follow the wrong avenues, and they’ll kill themselves (and others) trying increasingly desperate things, just to find the recognition and acclaim they need.

Sure, you can legislate teenage hackers into your prisons, but I fail to see how that solves the problem.

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Bored young terrorists?

October 10, 2008 under theology

People turn to terrorism for social solidarity.

I’ve blogged about bored young men before.

But here’s a funny thing: If people turn to terrorism for social solidarity, because they are bored and alone…

What does that say about effective strategies for dealing with terrorism? Prayer might work.

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What do bored young men do?

July 14, 2008 under Uncategorized

H4x0r j0r b0x3n!!

Or, they post on their blogs about bored young men.

I said previously that bored young men without jobs to distract them are a problem. The default actions that bored young men take to distract themselves are usually destructive. That’s why we like pocket-knives.

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Bored young men

July 14, 2008 under curios

I’ve hinted at this before, that bored young men cause trouble.

Anyone who has ever reared or been a boy can probably understand this.

And so it seems that China has a problem.

China probably has many problems, but a large number of only-child boy babies who are growing up without wives and without jobs to distract them are a problem.

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