Garrett Smith’s personal musings and thoughts.
Have you considered learning English?
Your communication skills might not be as good as you think they are.
The greater burden of communication lies upon the one communicating the message. If you want to be understood, it is your duty to clearly and effectively communicate your intended meaning to your audience.
You don’t need school. All you need is your brain, a camera, and the will to speak well. Learn to speak by making videos of yourself speaking and watching them back.
The allowance for pretextual stops inevitably leads to fourth amendment violations.
Pretextual stops, or “looking for a reason” to initiate a traffic stop, by nature, form the basis for fourth amendment violations.
While it is possible that an officer could pull over an individual for a traffic infringement and happen to find suspicious criminal activity, that’s not usually how it goes down.
It’s important to differentiate happenstance observations during a traffic stop from pretextual stops, where the officer is actively looking for a reason to pull over a vehicle.
In Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), the court determined that such stops were acceptable when it could be determined that “a reasonable officer would have stopped the car for the purpose of enforcing the traffic violation at issue”. This opened up barn-door wide leeway for officers who went above and beyond the court’s decision to profile, follow without cause, and use spurious reasons to pull over their target.
The latter form of stop, a pretextual stop, looking for a reason, provides officers with broad leeway to pull over drivers under the justification that the driver may have committed some infraction out of the almost uncountable number infractions on the books.
Such reasons can range from nitpicking license plate headlamp violations to reaching “dangerous lane change” and even speculative non-infractions such as “I couldn’t see if your seatbelt was on” stops.
Such pretextual stops can be identified when it is clear that the reason for the stop is poorly justified and the officer is looking for a reason to pull the driver over. They can be identified with the following characteristics:—
The officer either (a) did not clearly and immediately articulate the crime or infraction, (b) cited vague or spurious laws, (c) used reasons that occurred after initiating silent pursuit for the basis for the stop and did not articulate valid justification for pursuing the target, or (d) used insufficient evidence for the stop.
Such stops inevitably lead to fourth amendment violations and should therefore be ruled unconstitutional.
In the case of the video below, the officer began following his target before initiating a stop. The traffic stop had nothing to do with the officer’s unstated reason for following his target. The officer followed his target to “find a reason” to pull him over. Therefore, the constitutionality of the stop is questionable.
Any stop determined to be pretextual should be deemed invalid, thereby invalidating anything that came from the stop as “fruit of the poisonous tree”.
The duration of human maturation now includes an additional 4–6-year pre-adult period. “Emerging adulthood” is used to explain problems of delays in learning about intimacy and mutual support, socialization, and the attainment of social skills needed for mating and reproduction.
Social scientists contend that the period of emerging adulthood has an “evolutionary context” and cite developmental markers as evidence to support the rapidly growing consensus of the hypothesis that post-adolescents require protection as they are still learning and maturing.
Society, with poor understanding of personal development, influenced by dogmatism and false beliefs, is producing children in a way that is not well optimized. It doesn’t seem to be getting better, either. Rather, it seems to be going in the opposite direction, towards inhibition of maturation.
Modern psychology’s new developmental phase, “emerging adulthood”, describes individuals who did not not socially mature but have reached biological maturation. It is a way of further categorizing people into age groups to explain the effects of predefined stations in life.
Looking for something to attribute this phenomenon, social scientists point to the further development of the prefrontal cortex that continues to develop into the early twenties. This single-factor hypothesis has scientific consensus.
But how can they be so sure that they’re correct? How did they rule out developmental socialization as a factor?
During early college years, emerging adults exercise freedom they have never experienced. Many find themselves in out of control situations, drunk, hurting themselves and others, exhibiting behavior that does not quite fit the definition of informed consensual sex.
Is this harmful behavior explained solely by underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex, as the social scientists claim, or could the social skills be addressed by better socialization and enculturation?
Early college students also show increased demand for psychological services. Are they inadequately adjusted? And if so, can that be helped by better socialization?
Social conditions in adolescence, compared with other stages of life, have unique effects on brain and behavior that can last a lifetime. During adolescence, the brain can be developed to acquire tasks more suited towards that phase of brain development. The parts of the brain that undergo most change during adolescence govern internal control, multi-tasking and planning, self-awareness and social cognitive skills, and the understanding of others.
Traditional model of schooling and obedience prevent such skill development. This system is also not suitable for disagreeable persons, which is why it favors girls who are more agreeable than boys.
The same social scientists that point to the prefrontal cortex as a single factor cause of their newly-coined phase “emerging adulthood’ also either don’t acknowledge the fact that physiological maturation starts earlier than it did in the mid-1800’s or they do acknowledge that and claim that it’s a bad thing, warning of the dangers of “early puberty” or the more pathological-sounding “precocious puberty”, natural phenomena which they blame on obesity or hypothetical overexposure to harmful EDC’s.
Archaeological evidence shows that in modern humans, from 10,000 years BCE to the mid-1800’s, the age of onset of menses rose by roughly 6 years fro age 10 to over age 16, and has since returned closer to where it should be naturally, with good sleep and nutrition.
Menses comes with hormonal maturation and is accompanied by development of neural networks in the brain.
The physical maturation of the brain is beginning closer to where it should be, at earlier ages, closer to where it was in the Paleolithic man. Brain maturation now begins in earlier life years, closer to where it was 10,000 years BCE. This can be attributed to better health and nutrition.
Researchers have observed that maturation extends later into life, into the mid 20’s, a period of continued maturation, not a loss of ability.
Over the past 10,000 years, human brain size also decreased, another phenomena that can be explained by diet.
Yet as brain maturation begins earlier, requisite social skills are not being concordantly exercised and developed. Children are being overprotected and prevented from developing, capturing helplessness and sealing it into the physiological development of the brain.
As physiological onset maturation improved, social and mental development worsened with neglect. Yet this phenomenon of delayed maturation is being attributed to and explained by the hypothesis related to new discoveries of neurological development.
What is the error correction mechanism? Who will be the changers? Overprotected and controlled children? Emerging adults? Where does the overprotection from “harmful ideas” end?
In the last decade, from 2011 to 2021, we have seen a drastic increase in censorship and a loss of privacy. There is an increase in the social need for psychological safety shown on platforms like facebook that protect against speech deemed “offensive”. Rather than moving in the direction of mental toughness, we are overprotecting to create fragility.
Keeping kids in protective bubbles while their brains develop physically does not give them the skills needed for mating and reproduction. Rather, protecting kids from interpersonal activities prevents them from developing the skills needed to thrive as humans — skills they desire to exercise — often against their consent.
A good parent is a good mentor. They observe the strengths, inclinations, aptitudes, interests, and weaknesses of their children to help them develop, apply themselves, and find teachers.
More and more, teens across America express transgenderism and a desire to use puberty blockers. Why now? And is it bad, or are there some downsides?
Pubertal development affects the brain physically. Puberty blockers stop brain maturation and physically affect the brain and bone morphology (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5694455/).
There is some social support for children using puberty blockers among LGBT and also Youth Rights supporters. Youth Rights advocates say that minors are able to give proper consent. But why are kids now turning to them?
The want for puberty blockers might be, in some, but certainly not all cases, a side effect of extending childhood and denying personal sexual development into adulthood and further infantilize children by delaying adulthood.
There are individuals whose brain gender does not match their body gender. But where a young person wants to delay puberty, is it always the case that they were definitely, from very early ages, male-in-female body or vice-versa? Possible causes in the rapid increase in transgenderism are biological or sociological. If they are sociological, it may be due to increased desire to transition or less negative pressure than historically present.
If transgenderism is biologically influenced, it would have to be by some environmental factor, such as endocrine disruptors. A 2016 study “Gestational exposure to phthalates and gender-related play behaviors in 8-year-old children: an observational study” found that mothers with high pthalates resulted in children who at age 8, exhibited different gender play patterns. Thus, some chemicals may have epigenetic influence on gender identity.
This is important, because, play behaviors are “an accepted method to determine gender identity in children, are a critical factor in diagnosing Gender Dysphoria”.
Specifically, higher maternal diethyl phthalate (DEP) levels was associated with girls who exhibit more feminine play and higher mono-isobutyl phthalate (MiBP) was associated with with less masculine gender-related play behaviors in males:—
increased urinary MiBP concentrations were associated with less masculine gender-related play behaviors in males.
Increased transgenderism
Childhood has been extended into adulthood. In Western society, this is especially true. Children are isolated from adults and excluded from sexual interaction with them. They’re left in the dark.
Leaving kids on their own, in the dark, for sex and intimacy, can have different types of bad outcomes.
One of those outcomes can be not developing at all, and this can be out of fear of social transgression. Another is actual social transgression, including sexual harassment or sexual assault. That’s pretty common too. And although many of those “criminal” sexual offenses by youths are actually mutually wanted, and parent-unwanted, some of them are actually bad choice experiments by the kids (e.g. trying anal with their little brother, etc).
The social behavior required to be sexually successful is not taught to children. Instead, it’s eschewed.
The idea of individual sexual development for kids or of children learning to become sexually successful is a taboo manifest in so many things in our world from “age appropriate” behavior to PG-13 ratings to explicit condescension with “you’re not ready” and “you don’t understand what love is” (awful).
Sexual success is, like any success, individually defined. Like, if you’re eight, it might be getting a girl to kiss you or even let you touch her in places when nobody’s looking (wow!).
But if goals and dreams are delayed from age seven to eleven to fourteen to eighteen, what is learned is to ignore one’s desire and internal drive. What is learned? Stay in school, get good grades, go to college… Yeah, that’s alright, too, but it’s missing personal sexual development, a significant personal change.
Some people get to age twenty and beyond, graduate college, and their only reason for not being successful, for not being able to get a girlfriend or boyfriend, is lack of skill. Either they’re awkward, or shy, or don’t know what to do.
I have seen women in their 50’s in tech companies with the idea to try and find the right one to marry. Sorry lady, you are too old to have kids and you seem to have missed life!
Yet schools approach sexual education with the idea that it’s mostly biological and they ignore the social aspects of it.
I suspect some teens might want puberty blockers because their childhood has been extended, they have not had much chance for personal sexual development, and transgenderism is fantasy play. Before tinkering with the endocrine system, look closer at why you’re doing that; they affect the brain, bones, and neurological system.
Childhood is extended, personal sexual development is at best ignored, at worst somewhat discouraged, and — not for all, but for some — transgenderism seems to be, fantasy play.
Include children. Treat them as individuals, imperfect and developing, as we all are to some degree. Don’t discount their romantic or intimate inclinations. Don’t extend childhood into adulthood.
This is a blog where I post more of what I want without censorship (hopefully).
Some interests of mine are psychology, sociology, youth rights, guitar playing, music, biohacking, and software development.