Is there a pattern? On Winston, Dantonio, and Thugs

I hear you. And I apologize for my offense. I think at 18 I might have responded the same exact way, and been just as offended. Thanks for setting me straight. I think I vowed a million times since I hit my teen years that I'd never be the kind of condescending asshole who says "kids" instead of "men" when referring to 18-year-olds. From your writing on MGoBlog (we have the same first name so you kinda stick out for me), I imagined you were much older than 18. Perhaps instead I simply forgot what it was to be 18. I'm sorry about that. If you'll allow me to re-state my position: it really isn't about age mitigating moral responsibility. I didn't really mean it was just age. I had that "society" qualifier. This was to say that if you're 18 and privileged/adored, and have been under a dictatorial thumb. Did you ever see numbers on alcohol-related crime in foreign countries? The countries that have a drinking age of "bipedal locomotion" have way, way, way less than we do, especially from citizens in their teens to early 20s. In the States, we have a ludicrously high drinking age, meaning most of us are introduced to alcohol in a sub-legal binge atmosphere, a hyper-freedom. Psychologists see this same kind of effect among people who have been freed from bondage, and, here's the kicker, privileged/adored 18- to 20-year olds going from a strict high school atmosphere to the freedom of college. I'm not saying it happens to everybody. You may be a big exception. So it's not that they're 18. It's that at 18, this man is not characteristically all that different than he was at 17; but his environment has been radically altered, and how he reacts to this radical shift has a lot to do with what kind of people are around him at that time. Make sense? Becoming an "adult" isn't just successfully sucking air for a certain number of days. You don't wake up one morning and "pop -- I can now make decisions!" You didn't realize that violence was morally wrong on your 18th birthday, did you? You didn't learn that you are responsible for Planet Yourself by filling out a voter registration card, right? So if this is a gradual, herky-jerky, very uneven process, it stands to reason then that you'll never really be "grown up" in the sense that you have learned all of life's lessons. You will never be entirely "responsible" for all of your actions. There's a Philosophy Class you can take at Michigan that will spend a third of the semester proving to you exactly that.* In other words, just as I forgot that an 18-year-old is a perfectly capable adult, may I impress upon you that in many ways, adults are still juveniles. You sound like you've learned culpability already. I can't tell you how many people twice your age and more have never learned how to take responsibility for their actions, or that "I can do it" is far, far more important with regard to getting things done than "what is fair." And that, for our purposes here, just like children, adults need to keep learning, need to be taught lessons, need to be shown when we are wrong, and convinced of it, and given the chance to admit our wrongdoing, understand what why it was a fuck up, and take action to rectify it. I think adults are entitled to fuck up every once in a while. I'm saying I believe in second chances, in opportunities to admit responsibility and fault, serve one's sentence, and get back on track. However, I think second chance shouldn't come free, else the adult at fault is never discouraged from repeating the behavior. From the tea leaves of Dantonio's disciplinary policy, it seems that this is exactly what he's not doing. Instead, he gives his players a "get out jail free" card, then goes nuclear when the player (who had no repercussions the first time) repeats the act. I'm saying, considering the paradigm shift these guys are almost unanimously going through to varying degrees, that this is a pretty shitty way of going about that. * If you wanna piss off your GSI in this class, do what I did, and suggest a "Percentile Determinism" which, when placed on a population instead of an individual, proves the existence of free will, and thus responsibility for one's actions. While you're at it, you can tell that asshole that if you're a brain in vat, and you can still experience pain and love and cheeseburgers, then your best option is to choose to operate in the reality you are given, and in which everyone else around you is pretty much in accordance. Then, when they tell you a 3-O God cannot exist, ask said GSI to find you a deity in mankind's infinite imagination who has ever been Omibenevolent, Omniscent, and Omnipotent; certainly the "I'm gonna drown your asses because I don't much like you" big guy of Judeo-Christian tradition isn't any of those three. Nothing gets a Philosophy GSI uppity like proving the irrelevance of his question.