From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 19:17:27 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: "White 'Punks on Dope" (w apologies to The Tubes)
Message-ID: <ae09d30700021004f018@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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(The explanation of "White 'Punks on Dope" will come in the second part of
this post, along with a baby's arm holding an Apple, for no fee or
waybill.)

At 1:14 AM 7/11/96, snow wrote:

>     Tourettes was brought up to explain one small boys behavior towards
>his mother. He would (IIRC) call her a "fucking asshole", yet he didn't
>seem to have these sorts of problems around his father. True tourettes is
>not an emotional problem, it is _very_ rare, and the person with tourettes
>does not curse at only one person.

I of course never invoked "Tourette's Syndrome" as a likely reason for the
kid's behavior. It is unlikely in the extreme, as I've seen the kid
firsthand for several hours and he has never uttered a stereotypical
Tourette's Syndrome sort of thing in my presence. The likely reason for his
outburst is covered below.

>    Undisiplined brats do have emotional problems. Parents who are under
>the ignorant mis-apprehension that children do not need disipline are the
>cause of more than a few of this societies problems.

Indeed, this is almost certainly why he screamed obscenities at his mother.
He did it because he _could_ do it, that is, because she refuses to punish
him.  And he gets a reward out of it, namely, attention. This is a pattern
as old as humanity, of course.

Mostly such temper tantrums and outbursts are held in check by the threat
of sanctions by the parents, e.g., confinement (grounding), corporal
punishment (beltings), denial of food (going to bed hungry), etc. Children
above a certain age--maybe 4 or so--are quite aware of the consequences of
their actions and the "game-theoretic" tradeoffs involved. Most reduce
their frequency and magnitude of "acting out". This has worked well for
millenia.

In recent decades, do-gooders have taken upon themselves to intervene in
the parenting process and have essentially succeeded in making such
sanctions harder for parents to impose. Schools routinely teach young
children to inform on their parents if they have been spanked, touched,
talked to "inappropriately," etc. Check out the parent's rights newsgroups
(and father's rights) for tales of interrogations by agents of Child
Protective Services, who are empowered to remove a child immediately and
without court proceedings if they merely _suspect_ a child has been treated
in ways the State has deemed no longer appropriate. (I'm sure many of us
agree that children should not have their jaws broken, should not be burned
by cigarette butts as punishment, and should not be confined in closets for
weeks at a time. The laws are well-intentioned. But as with many such
well-intentioned laws, the "law of unintended consequences" has given Child
Protective Services almost Gestapo-like powers to enter private homes, to
intervene in custody disputes, and to assume guilt until innocence is
proven.)

So, what to do with children who are otherwise uncontrollable?

Ah, the State has the answer. And its name begins with "R." 'Nuff said.

>     I will admit to the possibility of ADD being a "disease", but I think
>that the number of children who really have the disease is small compared
>to the number of childern recieving drugs for it.

This is the point I have been making. Not that ADD (aka ADHD,
hyperactivity, etc.) does not sometimes exist, but that giving Ritalin and
suchlike drugs to children has been a panacea for fidgeting, wandering
attention, boredom, "cutting up" in class, class clowns, and so on.

And perhaps worse, _parents_, such as the example I provided, are using it
to control children. Where once they would've paddled the kid for using
obscene language, or refusing to get dressed for school, now they pop a
pill in the child's mouth.

>     15 years ago I would have been diagnoised as having ADD. I had trouble
>paying attention in class, I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I
>was a mild behavior problem. I didn't have ADD. I was simply bored by a
>system that either taught me stuff that was irrelevant (I thought so 15

I suspect this was true of 90% or more of us on this list...we're a bright
lot, and it's hard to imagine that _any_ school could keep us from being
bored a lot of the time. (And hard classes can be boring, too.)

>        Ok, so instead of arresting everyone who uses PGP as a child
>pornographer and throwing them in jail, we should arrest them, convict them
>(after all, they must be hiding something with that crypto) and then throw
>them in jail. Is that what you are saying?

Obviously any school child who refuses to open his backpack for the morning
inspection has Privacy Fixation Syndrome. Any school child who refuses to
discuss his thoughts about his or her budding sexuality with the school
nurse has Privacy Fixation Syndrome. This Syndrome has become rampant in
recent years, say psychiatrists and social workers. Some of these children
are even using PGP to *encrypt* their files! This interferes with a
wholesome and nurturing educational experience. Child Protective Services
has begun to ask children if their parents are maintaining a proper
environment at home. Use of PGP and other such tools of the paranoid
crypto-militias is considered positive evidence of an unwholesome home
environment.

Fortunately, pediatric psychiatrists have discovered that Privacy Fixation
Syndrome is treatable in the school environment with Prozac, Xanac, and
Quaaludes. A moderate dose of these drugs appears to remove the compulsion
to keep things secret, and assists in the child's ability to share his
innermost thoughts with school nurses, teachers, and administrators. (Note
to school administrators: A side benefit is that this lessening of "privacy
anxiety" also makes investigation of the parental-units much easier. Prozac
appears to be as effective as scopalaimine in extracting the details of
home enviroments from children-units.)

--Dr. Klaus von Ritalin, specializing in Privacy Fixation Syndrome