[dvan]

"But I do think we should pay dysfunctional people not to have children, rather than to have children. For all we know, Euric Cain’s mother may have been a good, working woman who tried hard to raise him right, but he grew up in vicious surroundings that made him vicious. He paid tribute to his mother in some social media post marvelling that he had lived to be 21 years old."

Urrrgh! the evironment made him do it!!!!!

[heartwood]

Young people are often shaped by their peers and their culture - by what is glorified. I don’t excuse him because of his environment at all, but very few of us are self-directed moral paragons who rise above our environments, and that is why environment matters, and that is why a society should not create that a dysfunctional environment by paying dysfunctional people to have children, and then pay more to try to fix those children, and then take blame for not being able to fix many of them.