Ramifications of Depp v. Heard regarding the #MeToo Movement

Oh well...

Heard is a sociopath and deserves to have her vile behavior exposed for all the world to see. Even though Depp is a degenerate, he doesn't deserve to have to put up with her shit (no pun intended).

She is the classic "looks normal, but her head is full of crazy" psycho hose beast that men have always been warned to stay away from.

It almost seems like they're asking for society to swing the pendulum all the way back to the days when a man smacking his wife around was just considered keeping her in line.

We could have equality amongst men and women where actual sexual harassment and abuse were dealt with effectively, but it would require both men and women to be held accountable every time they falsely accuse someone. Instead of (over)reacting to allegations, authorities actually need to, ya know, investigate the facts...

Fair enough, although every normal teenage boy who sees a news story about a hot mid-20s high school teacher blowing one of her students probably thinks, "why couldn't that happen to *me*?"

No doubt, it should be against the law. But the question is was this *always* going on and prior generations of teenagers were worldy and mature enough to determine if they were being taken advantage of vs a mutual participant, resulting in some teens reporting teachers and others not?

Or is this a new thing and high schoolers were never engaging in conubial relations before recent times?

Or to put it more succinctly - were people generations of high schoolers much more mature at the same age than they are now? Does this go hand in hand with all of the other problems which seem to result from lowered expectations, infantilization of adults, and the inability to make people be responsible for themselves?

Honestly, no. They were never mature enough. Most kids simply don't have the ability to actually be able to make good judgements about someone older in authority over them.

It's certainly not new, and never has been a good thing.

Yawn. Typical conservative bullshit question laced with bullshit assumptions about the current day.

Exactly...

... and exactly.





There's two things going on here, I'ma split 'em and address them separately...

Firstly: The coddling of the modern youth. Yes, and no.

Yes, youth today are definitely (on whole, as a class) coddled and catered too far more than kids were in the past^[1], and yes, the length of time they spend as "kids" has also lengthened somewhat, in a way. However, this is classism.   The kids of the rich have always been treated thusly and have always had extended childhoods in comparison to the youth of the middle and lower class.  What I think we're seeing here is a combination of "we have more now than we did then"^[2], even some of the underclass have the means to cater to extending the childhood of their kids, and a bit of "we can now witness the daily minutiae of the lives of the rich and infamous".

Also, I think there is just a wee little bit of "Things Were Better When" going on here.  I know plenty of families that had the means, but that their kids stayed home up through and after college in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc, because it saved them money, they didn't have a spouse yet (and thus the need to "get out"), and previous to the fifties families were extended, multiple generations living under the same roof.  It was only the richiest who moved out post-college to "start their own family", that wasn't a thing in the 20s, 30s, 40s.  "Starting your own family" was a big step for families and was just unheard of in the lower and middle classes (and it was rare even n the upper class).  It was the "Dreams of 50s" that destroyed the ideal of the Extended Family and replaced it with the this 'need' to get out and "be your own man™".

So that shift in thinking, added to the shift in treating 'kids as kids' longer (we'll talk about coddling in a moment) has lead to our greatly extended 'youth' age limit (and I'm not getting into the crazed notion some Tumblr teens have that people are 'children' into their 20s^[3]). They rest that you're seeing? Just adults acting like children because they can get away with it. But then I suspect we've always had the Jackasses of the world, they just couldn't reach as a big an audience back in the day...


The "coddling".  This is a thing, definitely.  And in a lot of cases, yeah, it's probably bad.  Somewhere in a kids development they have to experience pain, loss, denial of wants, etc in order to develop the mental tools to handle those things when they become adults.  How much pain, loss, denial do they need to experience?  Certainly a bit, but not abuse levels, and that's where we're all going to have disagreements.  Personally I'm a 'spare the rod' thinker, with moderation.  Kid fucks up?  Punish the, mild punishments for mild infractions (time out, removal of favored toys, denial of treats, etc), moderate punishments for moderate infractions (longer timeouts - grounding, extended denial of treats/allowances, etc),  up to ass-whupping for things that put their lives in danger.

And fuck those helicopter parents.



Okay, now the "other" part: Not affording homes right out of college, that's down to some crazy bullshit like the way the minimum wage has failed to keep pace with inflation, how the housing market keeps rising and never falling (even when those bubbles burst), the crazy "requiring college educations" nonsense in all sectors, and the out of control debt-market of school loans. That is a massive shitfest that's built and engineered to keep the lower class low and lower the middle class. And I thank our fucking politicians for it, those fucking wannabe slave owners.




1 - While I suggest this is classist, and due to the increase in our tech-toys, it's also something that occurs, the poors try to mimic the riches, always have, always will, and I think we're seeing that more so now where the lives of the "rich and famous" are on constant display, every part of those lives, leading to a greater mirroring by the underclasses.  I know you saw this in the 80s, famous guy wears a brand of shoes and suddenly every poor kid in America is also wearing that same brand of shoes, regardless of price.  The "gin and tonic"ing of the lower class, "crass consumerism", etc, whatever you want to call it.   It's a very real thing, both the deliberate suppression of the mind and values of the slave class and the idealization of the upper, and they've been deliberately blended together in scary ways we'd never thought possible before the advent of the tv.

Here, take this tinfoil hatband and let's dig deeper into my yarn conspiracy map, as you can see the Irish and [[[Them]]]^[4] have teamed up to...

2 - Tech-toys, general life improvement and time wastery (moar Gin and Tonic please!) general goods. Our poor today are so much wealthier than the rich of a 200 years ago, it's not even funny.  I don't mean solid, family wealth (or even property and business ownership), I mean access to information and the means of their own betterment.  However it's a rare person who can boot-strap, many people are 'generational', they will make only incremental improvement to their Familial Wealth even if they make adequate to excellent gains to their personal wealth, and most will not exceed their Familial Wealth starting point as they lack the skills to get the skills to understand how to make those improvements either personally or Familially.

3 - Okay, because I mentioned it, it does bear a little discussion... and they might not be wrong.   Not wholly.  There is movement, and has been for decades, in psychology that the human mind isn't fully developed until the early to mid-twenties.  Now, does this mean 'we're still kids' until then?   Eh... I have grave misgivings about that notion, but as psychology is the squishiest of the pseudosciences, were really into "mah fee-fees" territory on this one.

4 - No dig at 'teh joos', but Jewish people as a group have a different cultural mindset about family and wealth.  They have, and have had for a very long time, a good grasp on the concept of Familial Wealth, and again as a people, tend to consider themselves "one big family" for that purpose.   A lot of it subconscious, it's how they are raised - in this order: you help your direct family, you help your extended family, you help out your neighbor (who is probably Jewish), you help out your neighborhood (again probably Jewish), etc.   And thus as a whole, and as individual families, they raise themselves up, keep themselves up, and are really only vulnerable (as a "group") to much larger polities (like States). No conspiracy, and no antisemitism intended. I wish more ethnicities learned this "one trick".  I think it's down to always having been an fairly insular and organized minority in most places they've lived as a people.

Okay, now lets tackle those redheaded bastards that the Brits failed to genocide, the Irish...

I actually disagree...

We allow for different sets of responsibility at different times, for instance teens can drive at 15 with Learner's Permit so long as a licensed adult (over 21) is in the passenger seat. I think this is perfectly fine, expanded "licensing" for responsibilities and indulgences has been a long practice and seems to work in almost all situations.

I kinda waffle on dropping the drinking age to 18. Those I knew in my teens who couldn't handle alcohol consumption responsibly, certainly didn't suddenly learn responsible behavior on attaining 21. However studies have shown that the longer someone goes before they begin drinking, the less likely they are to become alcoholics. Same with smoking and other sorts of addiction forming indulgences.

Which then leads me to considering if we shouldn't just push it all up to 21, voting, military service, legal emancipation, unattended driving, etc... just for simplicity (but no, I wouldn't want that either, but the fascist commie in me does sometimes cackle madly at the prospect).