Grow stronger from adversity, kids!
There’s also Michael Shermer telling us that the right way to raise a child is to toss her onto a steep mountainside buried in deep snow, use crampons to rush up to the top yourself, and then stand there and watch while she slides down the slope repeatedly. Anything else is pathetic leftist pampering that turns the child into a tragic weakling.
In this (happy ending) video a baby bear grows stronger from adversity. If this were modern America child protection services would be called, the mother arrested for child endangerment & the baby bear hauled off to a foster home. @FreeRangeKids @JonHaidt @glukianoff https://t.co/KYdBBVWcm3
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) November 4, 2018
He’s hilarious. I’ve spent quite a lot of time watching primate mothers with their babies and I can let you in on a secret: they don’t toss their babies down and watch while they risk injury and death. (Ok sometimes a new mother will put her baby down briefly when she gets fed up. I once watched a first-time-mother gorilla do that at the zoo I worked at. The baby went staggering after mama, and when she got close mama got up and moved farther off. She did this three times and the fourth time she got up baby let out such a scream that mama hastily picked her up again.) (But please note this was in a zoo on a balmy afternoon, not a snowy mountainside in winter.) They use their arms and hands and fingers (also legs and feet and toes) to help the baby out, and the baby has the ability to grip mama’s fur. (You know how infants instinctively grab a finger? It’s that.) The mother bear didn’t help the cub because she had no way to help the cub. Bear cubs have a very high mortality rate. The mother bear wasn’t doing an awesome job of raising a self-reliant cub, she was doing what she had the tools to do, which was stand at the top of the slope and watch until the cub made it. There was only one cub. Maybe all the others fell down the slope to their deaths.
Plus, also…why yes, actually, if a human mother took a toddler out onto a mountainside and then raced to the top while the toddler struggled to follow and slid down the slope repeatedly, child protection services would indeed be called and the mother would indeed be arrested for child endangerment. Sick burn, Shermer!
Even for a libertarian he’s a jackass.
Yeah, this is weak sauce. His attempted gotcha just makes him look like dumbass.
I’m thinking there are eighty million things that nonhuman mothers do that would be unconscionable if human mothers did. And?
Yup. Maybe he’d like to do away with all modern sanitation and medicines too, so that children can get stronger from the natural adversity of drinking parasite-laden water, fighting infections without antibiotics, and healing broken bones without properly setting or immobilising them.
Then we can go back to those venerable ancient times when men were men, women were women, and infant mortality to the age of 5 was >50%.
“Even for a libertarian he’s a jackass.”
Ouch. Never has Shermer’s entire existence and persona been captured and skewered so succinctly.
*polite applause*
snicker
Why thank you.
You have indeed burned him most sickly.
How much you wanta bet Shermer was raised that way? Like a baby bear? So he got toughened up and became a real he-man alpha male? No? You don’t think so? I don’t either.
Like most baby boomers, he probably had fewer protections than kids had today, and did fine, but had a car seat, seat belts, a mother who fed him regularly and drove him places he needed to go and parents who paid for his school…etc etc etc.
Something about Shermer’s tone suggests he doesn’t have children himself.
Hmmm, I can think of a few invertebrates where the female of the species kills and eats it’s mate afte breeding. Does he want to pick and choose which bits of rough tough nature we adopt, or will he be true to his libertarian beliefs…
Incidentally, there are examples in nature where one or both parents are tender and solicitous of their young, so like most such examples from shallow evopysch types, their opinions are worth about as much as a drunk tweens.
Today’s modern western family is on average mother, father and 2.4 children. But women have the capacity to deliver far more. My own Irish emigre great-grandmother had 11 children (10 of whom died in infancy); a reflection on the post-industrial but pre-modern times. I think she was fairly typical for her time.
The world record for one woman (Guinness) is 69 (!); apparently an outlier.
It would appear no accident that Nature has given our species such reproductive capacity. But it reflects the difficulty pre-modern mothers must have had bringing their offspring to adulthood, and the domestic tragedy that must have been routine.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prolific-mother-ever
I’m confused, do child protection services really get involved with bears in modern America? That’s amazing.
This “stronger from adversity” crap really irritates me. The cub went through a desperate struggle and survived, yes. But that doesn’t mean it arrived at the top of the mountain stronger than it was at the bottom. It means it arrived exhausted and probably somewhat bruised and battered, and now it needs to get back down the other side of the mountain in that state. We don’t know if the cub fell to its death 30 seconds after the point where the footage ends. Or starved 30 days later because of that time when they used a lot of energy climbing a mountain and didn’t find food for a few days. The last thing we do see is mama bear looking right at the camera, and running in the opposite direction, which suggests that the only reason that bear cub had to scramble up that mountainside in the first place was because they were being chased by a fucking drone.
There’s a book this guy needs to read:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/11/jean-liedloff-obituary
(Well this is the author’s obituary–which I think is a bit unfair, but I also think pretty much everything written about this book is somehow missing the mark, so I don’t have many online sources to reference.)
Part of the unfairness is labelling what Leidloff wrote about ‘her belief’, rather than her observation, which was, in essence, what OB just wrote–that for pretty much the entirety of the 300,000 years homo sapiens has existed babies spent their first year or so attached to their mothers.
@iknklast
Genuine meatspace lol. That’s exactly what I was thinking, too. Of course, I’m from the north of England and that’s exactly how kids are raised here, but it’s probably rare in [invokes freakish memory for minutia] LA, where I think Shermer was born.
It raises another issue that really pisses me off. Wildlife documentary makers are always so adamant that you shouldn’t help out whatever is under the lens because it will somehow hurt nature. If you happen to be filming the very last kakapo male incompetently attracting the last female, you shouldn’t interfere. If you’re filming a baby something struggling to get out of its egg, the best possible thing to do is let it die. Film makers are frowned upon if they step in to help.
That’s bullshit.
I was brought up on farms. Pigs and cows and sheep often had trouble giving birth and we did whatever we could to help them. We didn’t just shrug and say what will be will be, we called the vet. Sometimes the babies weren’t breathing when they were born, do you think we let the dice lie where they fell, or do you think 8 year old me blew into piglets’ mouths and massaged their chests? It wasn’t about profit, it was about the fact that I had a capacity to help something live that otherwise wouldn’t. Even though it was going to be eaten later anyway. Plus, well, profit.
My mother had the same sort of doctrine about the hens, geese and ducks she kept, which were her pets as much as a source of eggs. She felt that if a chick couldn’t struggle out of its egg, then it benefited whatever species was involved in some never-explained way that the chick die.
Again, bullshit. Makes me angry even after 40 years. I damn well did help the buggers out in secret – a little – if I felt they needed it. Incubator lights and artificially-produced food were totally fine, apparently. Breaking a bit of egg membrane to give a chick – who would live in captivity its whole life anyway – a fighting chance was breaking the species.
“Stronger from adversity” translated into English apparently means “leave the little shit be; if he lives, he lives, otherwise, fuck that weakling”.
I don’t know about documentary makers, but conservationists generally make exceptions for endangered animals, often taking them in for care if they spot a sick or injured specimen in the wild. Even non-endangered animals will be helped if they are being harmed by something human made, like a poacher’s trap.
@Holms:
I should hope so. Rescuing an individual isn’t fucking with an ecosystem. Unless, you’re, like, rescuing a cat on an island of flightless, delicious birds or a rabbit in Australia or squirrels or crayrish in Britain…
Well, yeah, OK, I know that ecosystems are sometimes easy to damage, but the mantra of letting ‘weak’ things die because ecosystem or evolution is absolute nonsense and it pisses me all the way off.
Stronger from adversity sounds like a bully’s mantra. Oddly, the bullied rarely seem to benefit from the experience.
At 1:15 the mother pushes the baby back down the slope. Too bad Shermer’s mom didn’t read the same childcare guide.
Sick burn? No, frost burn.
@AoS: Quite so. Unfortunately my generation of the bullied are responsible for such things as facebook so what the fuck is wrong with us?
Wonderful burn! Shermer’s ignorance and devotion to ideology over fact on parade.
Now Shermer’s gonna go all “lobster lobster lobster”, isn’t he?
Speaking of which, did anyone here bother to read the SKEPTIC that was partially devoted to Jordan Peterson? Was it all panegyric, or was there actual skepticism? I ask because I can’t be arsed.
I certainly didn’t, for one.
Michael Shermer has at least one child. I don’t recall reading if he threw her down a mountain or not.
[…] enough. Several of you mentioned a drone in the Shermer’s ursine childrearing advice post, which was news to me, but y’all were right. Ed Yong at the […]
And if creepy older men don’t take advantage of them, how will young women learn not to get drunk?
No, wait, isn’t that supposed to teach them how to put up with creepy older men raping them and move on with their lives, better and stronger?
I’m a Baby Boomer; huge numbers of my generation died in childhood from what are now vaccine-preventable diseases, and in car accidents; no seat belts, let alone ergonomic car safety seats so we travelled as infants on the lap of whichever parent wasn’t driving, and from toddlerhood loose in the back. I nearly killed the entire family by standing behind the driver’s seat, putting my hands over my father’s eyes, and saying “Guess who, Daddy?!”
Born with a heart disorder? Dead before leaving primary school. Severely disabled, intellectually or physically? Locked away in an asylum, and lucky to get even a basic education.
Yes, we were free-range; and many kids were abducted and/or assaulted as a result. My father, born in 1933, has said that the only reason his childhood was so very free and easy was because all the men who could have been a threat were away killing one another on the continent.
The unbearable suffering and death in previous generations isn’t something to yearn for.
And I’d like to slap the person who has almost certainly signed that cub’s death warrant for chasing the bears with a drone. Those objects should be banned.
Yep. My sister got a bad case of polio when I was 5 months old. The fact that I was an infant meant that my mother couldn’t even visit her close up, for fear of infection. She had to stand outside in the corridor and wave through a window. My sister was ten.
I had a friend who was mentioning the other day how horrified she is that her 7 year old daughter has to do various disaster drills in school, and it is frightening to her. The woman (in her mid-30s) was horrified that for the first time ever children have to do these disaster drills that frighten them. She was quite startled when the baby boomers in our group started reminiscing about duck-and-cover and other types of nuclear fallout drills. She had heard that the baby boomers had a basically fear free, guilt free, childhood of total hedonistic consumption without any risks of abduction or danger. We avoided mocking her because we all like her very much, and she had no way of knowing, since baby boomer culture is in the deep, dark past for most folks (except us baby boomers) and the mythology surrounding it gets it so wrong.