Did you hear, folks? Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death by their 32-year-old drug addict son. A terrible tragedy.
One thing that is invariable from one culture to another is that actors and actresses are exceptionally crappy parents. They raise more junkies and completely off-the-handle crazy types than truck stop prostitutes and their pimps.
What I find annoying is that people are already making this somehow about Trump even though the utter incapacity of actors to raise semi-normal children was proverbial before Trump was even born.
Clarissa's Blog 
Given the outcomes, there ought to be some kind of award for raising kids who turn out normal, if you live anywhere near Hollywood. Kind of wonder if it would require some very old-fashioned “sending them out to live with relatives on the farm” arrangement, as it seems to be a curse of both the parents and the social circle they hang with.
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Totally. Obviously, this Nick guy is terrible and should get the death penalty but he became an addict in childhood. And the parents enabled him for 20 years, milking his addiction for movie plots.
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“ob Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death”
Some years ago there were….. rumors about him being a…. rhymes with “mild editor”. I have no idea if those were true but it’s something I thought of when I heard this news….
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Whether he is or not, there seem to be so dang many of them in Hollyweird that unless you aggressively shelter your kids from your workplace associates, there’s no avoiding contact. Add access to unlimited drugs… it’s a wonder anybody gets out alive. Seems to be why you hear, now and then, that some Big Hollywood Star got married, had their first kid… and bought a farm in the middle of nowhere three states away.
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Classic example: https://badlandsranch.com/about-katherine-heigl/
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Horrible story.
I kinda wish we’d stop making this about upbringing though. There’s something very biologically wrong about the kid. Haven’t had a still picture raise my hackles so badly in decades. And I think it’s one of the biggest blessings of the world that no matter who we are, our parents will love us and believe in us and think we’re not monsters…
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On the one hand: yes.
On the other hand: stabbing suggests it’s *personal*.
-ethyl
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My mother thinks I’m a conflict-avoidant Jew but I get your point. The dude looks very weird. A disturbing face, if I’ve ever seen one.
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What I’m amazed is the uncanny ability of hollywood actors to adopt orphaned kids who would later turn out to be trans. They sure know how to pick ’em!
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This is why the ‘upbringing’ question is relevant. The sheer rate of drugs, insanity, and genderfreak (but I repeat myself) says: there’s something else going on there, beyond “gosh how random and unexpected and tragic”.
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OT.
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I read the article. You can see it clearly in American literature. While in Spain, for example, it’s a whole generation of young male writers, in the US it’s a vacuum. You go to the bookstore in America, and it’s piles of books, one after another, by young women, all identical. Young men you can find only if they are minorities. A lot of white men over sixty. But under 45? It’s like there was a war and the fighting age white men were all killed in battle. It’s eerie.
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The problem with literature is that it’s like a chain. Once you break it, it’s very hard to repair. Writers first become readers. But what’s there to read if anything beyond people complaining about how they are misunderstood has been eradicated?
This is a problem we’ll continue feeling for decades.
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Luckily, old books don’t disappear and we can still read them. But nevertheless readership is declining in general and most sharply among men.
While a particularly irritating kind of feminist is happy to use low male readership as yet another reason men are terrible, they do not actually want to see more men reading. Any man who reads is criticized for how he reads. Either he is reading the wrong books or he is simply wrong in a general sense.
Reading self help is bad and also means you are and also probably listen to “problematic” podcasts (I agree this kind of reading is hardly high literature but what’s wrong with it?) If you read literary fiction that’s slightly different than what the median woman reads you are a “litbro.” If you read the books these women claim you should be reading you are pandering. Any man who reads in public is doing so “performatively.” Male reading is like male crying; it’s great that you do it, but please don’t do it in front of me because it gives me “the ick.”
It’s quite reminiscent of how some women will micromanage and criticize a man over how he does housework until he gives up and leaves it to her. These women don’t want men in their online book discussion forums or whatever. Their ideal man just watches Marvel movies or something, I guess. Obviously no self respecting man cares what these women think, but the hostility towards men who read is strongest from women who read (present company obviously excepted) and I find that odd.
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“But nevertheless readership is declining in general and most sharply among men”
According to Paul Skallas, we’re re-entering an era of oral culture. IIRC, Umberto Eco drew parallels between modernism and medieval times (in terms of the importance of imagery).
https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/the-return-of-oral-culture
more:
https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/the-return-of-oral-culture
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Illiterate medieval peasants at least has centuries of tradition and an incredible ability to interpret symbols in woodcuts, etc. Kids now often don’t even know nursery rhymes. But I suppose you can’t sustain a common culture with mass immigration and the internet; instead we just have the crummy meme subcultures described in the second article (first one is mostly paywalled so can’t comment.) Worst of both worlds, lacking both the positives of literate society and of older oral societies.
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Historical and human normal is for men and women to have entirely separate social lives. Women go out visiting other women. Men go out visiting other men.
The idea that we should all hang out together all the time makes *us* the weird ones.
This sounds like reversion to normality: of course women want to have women-only book groups and stuff. Excluding men isn’t the unhealthy thing going on there. It’s the part where men-only socializing is discouraged.
-ethyl
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I’d be totally fine with a “woman’s book club” or something of that nature. The problem is as you say they want to take the entire book space with no room for either male or mixed gender alternatives for anyone.
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What do you think?
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Yes, the ending of the article is stupid.
We can parse it into older men or younger women. But the actual issue is that the entire Western civilization is trying to put itself out of business. It looks like the only people who really care are people from the margins – be they racial, ethnic, religious, or class-based – of the Western civilization. Like the readers of this blog.
Like the author of the Compact article. It seems like you and I are more eager to stand up for his rights than he is himself while he dissolves in self-blame at the end.
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Kid, do you honestly not know that there has been an open war against men, and most particularly against white males, since the second-wave metastasized into widespread hatred of the other. You admit that there are no functional men at your meetings, but how exactly did that develop? And what, and exactly who, do you imagine created the resultant groypers and the like, and how do we remedy it?
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Of course, I’m in academia where people say the words “white men” with the same facial expression I use to say “cockroaches”. Many of them are white men, which is deeply bizarre.
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LOL, “deeply bizarre”, c’mon Kid, I am sure that you have heard the evolutionary biology term “sneaky fucker”— after the Summer debacle, every male academic knows the penalty for telling the truth ;-D
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I have been loosely following the blog/newsletter from Ben Dreyfuss, son of actor Richard Dreyfuss (whom I think of not from “Jaws” but “Duddy Kravitz”). Ben is quite forthright about his mental health issues.
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OT re the recent terror attacks:
I read there were 5 policemen or less ‘protecting’ 2000 crowd in Australia.
I read this foreign intelligence agency was Israeli on some Israeli telegram channels, but haven’t searched for proof.
Global intifada won’t target only Jews, no matter what pro-Palestinian protesters (the ones who aren’t Muslim) think:
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