Outraged by common sense as always
Alaska politician Don Young made a speech at a school and said something about suicide that SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED OFFENDED OFFENDED OFFENDED OUTRAGED OUTRAGED OUTRAGED all decent Experts and Journalists and Teachers. Apologies are required! Investigations are pending! The Iron Maiden is being sharpened!

When you see MAXIMUM SHOCK AND OUTRAGE by media and inquisitors, you can be 90% sure that the object of the SHOCK is a plain ordinary obvious tautological truth.

Not quite 100% sure in this specific situation because Young is a successful politician.

Successful politicians usually start as high-status kids. [Not max-status jocks. Jocks don't have to compete at all. They avoid all problems and punishments, so the concept of campaigning and competing is foreign to them.] The upper-middle status layer learns that competing is worthwhile, learns that status depends on your presentation. That's how you win elections and jobs if you are starting from an above-median status.

So politicians often fail to understand the feelings of lower-status people. They think we're just not trying.

Is that the case here? No. Young shows that he DOES understand low-status problems.

He said that suicide comes from a lack of support from friends and family.

Simple truth. Not the whole truth, but close enough for a sound-bite, and much closer than we usually hear from Experts of all stripes. Friends and family may think they're supporting the bottom-dweller, but the bottom-dweller feels (rightly or wrongly) that the support is superficial and fake. Usually rightly. And the discovery of such fakery is often the final straw.

Solving the problem does not mean improving support, because the improved support is going to seem fake by definition. The best solution is to bypass the need for support from family and friends. Find a job or project or mission where status is irrelevant, where your efforts can lead to real success. This may involve inanimate objects (arts and crafts, building and fixing stuff) or it may involve animals (horses or dogs) instead of humans. After you make it through adolescence on the Bypass Route, your skills and results may well give you real status (or at least money!) in a more adult setting where natural attractiveness is not the ONLY thing that counts.

What we truly need to investigate is the hyperwacked thought-diseases and satan-theories that these Experts are feeding these kids. I don't know what alien dyslogic is passing through these cranial cavities, but it must be wildly alien and counterproductive if Young's common sense is SHOCKING to them.


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Quick check of Young's biography: Sure enough he's not the standard politician. Grew up poor, moved to Alaska after serving in the Army, worked in construction and shipping in summers while teaching in a BIA school in winters. Didn't get pulled into politics until age 40. So he does understand low-status kids from internal and external perspectives.
  ¶ 6:58 AM