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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I mean it quite literally isn’t their fault.

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

After all, even a dog can be trained.

Heinlein was directly on point:

“Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house . . . and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken—whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”

“Why . . . that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”

“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”

“Uh . . . why, mine, I guess.”

“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”

Note that training dogs with only rewards and no punishments is possible, and is indeed the standard approach in a number of dog sports including the one I am most familiar with (agility). The trainers of serious competitive sheepdogs say that a combination of rewards and punishments is needed in their discipline, and I respect their expertise. But that is the very highest level of dog training, alongside police and military working dogs - and there is an ongoing dispute within the police/military working dog community about whether sufficiently skilled trainers get better performance with or without punishment.

The approach Heinlein suggests to housetraining puppies (or toilet-training toddlers, for that matter) does not work and creates traumatised dogs. You housetrain puppies by appropriately directing their natural instinct not to foul their own dens. A smart dog practically housetrains themselves.

So Heinlein wasn't on point - either he was an idiot or his character was. (Note that Heinlein was a libertarian, so we can be reasonably certain that he did not endorse the decidedly non-libertarian Terran Federation as correct about everything).

Interesting analogy, because most people would say that if a dog behaves it isn't its fault. The fault belongs with the human who failed to teach the dog how to behave, not the animal which is gonna follow its instincts without guidance.

But you also put down murderous dogs. Once they get that way, you can’t untrain it easily and there’s nothing to gain by imprisoning it.

Sure, I agree that is the logical conclusion of this line of thinking (although people ascribe a higher value to human life than animal life so it isn't likely to fly). I was just commenting how the analogy doesn't really do much to dissuade the "it's not their fault" thinking.

One reason we get unchecked crime is the excuse that criminals don't have agency when committing crimes, but must be treated as if they have agency otherwise. As long as that and similar thought patterns are ascendant, any attempt to fix the problem systemically will fail

No, the only reason we get unchecked crime is that people choose to allow crime to go unchecked.

I’m a redneck with a GED. Who do you think is supposed to train them to act civilized? Man isn’t born knowing how to behave.

Neutral questions: Then what is anyone's fault? What model of responsibility do you espouse?

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