The Boy Scouts Is No Longer A Place For Young Males

Back in the 1970s, my big brother was a cub scout and our mom was den leader. We put paper bags on our heads and beat each other with rolled up newspapers and went to the state capitol in Salem but that is about all I remember. Never once did I think, “How can my mom teach boys to be men?” The scouts have rapidly changed for the worse since then.

My experiences hiking near scouts

At sixteen years old, after a lifetime of my super dad teaching my brother and I to hunt, fish, shoot, fight, hike and swim, I took a seven-day hike alone in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness prior to my senior year in high school.

There, one afternoon, as I set down my lightweight, streamlined pack to set up my small tent, a scout troop of pudgy kids my age showed up. The entire twenty-boy group showed up in a delicate pristine alpine lake meadow and dutifully began attacking every tree in sight with the hatchets they had carried in their clunky, falling apart ancient-ass backpacks.

After thoroughly destroying the meadow full of trees that took a hundred years to grow ten feet tall in order to build a bundle of sticks they called a “raft,” they all tried to light the remaining trees they had cut down on fire to cook the cans of beans they had brought.

Eagle Scout material

Since I had been hiking alone for a week I hung out with them and learned that they were all Mormon boys from the same “ward.” The ones who could swim jumped off some cliffs with me into the lake. One ran off because there was a bee chasing him (recall that we were all about sixteen). Out of the twenty, maybe two were interesting.

All of them had no idea how I was hiking the Alpine Lakes Wilderness at sixteen alone for seven days. Their minds were blown. Most hoped that, someday, their moms might allow them to camp alone overnight someplace near their homes. Most had never killed anything larger than a fish and, though all had dozens of merit badges, not a single one had any practical outdoor skills.

As night came so did an amazing thunderstorm. As I enjoyed it in the comfort of my tent, two of the boys who thought it would be cool to “sleep under the stars” came to my tent asking for shelter. I let them in because I wasn’t an asshole yet back then. A moment later their leader came and took them back to his tent because they weren’t allowed to share tents with strangers. No doubt those boys learned a lot that night.

I hike and climb a lot and the scene I just played out, in one form or another, repeats itself everywhere I go. Fat leaders hiking with shitty, Walmart gear lead equally clueless kids with full garbage bags over their shoulders, miserable and breathless after three flat miles on easy trails. They camp in groups larger than the sites can support and proceed to trash the place, leaving shit everywhere.

The new and improved boy scouts

Welcome to scouting in the 21st century. A white-knight factory of political correctness where odd-ball omega boys are sent by their uninvolved parents to learn “scouty things.” If the boys are lucky they will get trained by a merit badge counselor who learned the task they are teaching from YouTube the previous week using the most outdated methods and gear possible. This five-minute exposure to a task earns them a little patch for their sash.

It wasn’t always like that.  At one time, scouting represented traditional American values of dignity and honor, so the left decided it must die. They won. Not only are your boys being taught by the nice old man down the street who just so happens to have a lot of extra boy-sized backpacks (child molester?), but today’s boy scouts can also be mentally ill girls who think they are boys or they can be gay boys who want to touch other boys’ naughty parts.

“Daddy, why don’t we do scouts?”

Once, one of my five kids asked why we didn’t do scouting and I said it would interfere too much with our mountaineering, hiking, hunting, and fishing trips.

My kids and I have climbed the highest volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, skied down them, caught salmon, killed deer, ducks and pheasants and at eleven they begin belaying each other as we rock climb. We built our damn tree house together and they all received their own pocket knives at age eight. My boys can fold an American Flag and my girls cook better than most twenty somethings. The LAST thing my kids need is some pansy, milksop chi-mo scout leader teaching them to become the fat kid from the movie UP.

Most of my acquaintances who have odd-ball, nerdy kids send them to Boy Scouts meetings (after karate practice, we’ll talk about THAT joke another day) where they learn things like how to tie a sheepshank (a knot that can get you killed) or how to start a fire using anything and everything EXCEPT the way we all do it with—a $0.99 Bic lighter.

Craig knows how masculine men father their boys and he is missing a leg. What is your excuse?

A sampling of what scouting has become can be seen in their rule books: “Water guns and rubber band guns must only be used to shoot at targets, and eye protection must be worn.” And, “For water balloons, use small, biodegradable balloons, and fill them no larger than a ping pong ball.” We used to beat kids up who said faggoty shit like that.

Conclusion

If I could design a factory to produce beta losers, I could do no better than the Boy Scouts of America. So if you need babysitting once a month and you are worried that your son isn’t becoming enough of a mamma’s boy you can send him to scout meetings and sleep peacefully knowing he will never see female genitalia without supplying his credit card number first.

Read More: 15 Ways Masculine Schools Can Turn Boys Into Men

359 thoughts on “The Boy Scouts Is No Longer A Place For Young Males”

  1. So… here’s the question: is merely posting in the comment section of this article too close to “camping” for lolknee?

      1. Nah, he definitely didn’t write it. He’d drown himself in hand-sanitizer before finishing typing out the first paragraph.

  2. All of this comes down to proper parenting and cultivation of good qualities. Here’s how the samurai used to do it:
    “There is a way of bringing up the child of a samurai. From the time of infancy one should encourage bravery and avoid trivially frightening or teasing the child. If a person is affected by cowardice as a child, it remains a lifetime scar. It is a mistake for parents to thoughtlessly make their children dread lightning, or to have them not go into dark places, or to tell them frightening things in order to stop them from crying.
    Furthermore, a child will become timid if he is scolded severely. One should not allow bad habits to form. After a bad habit is ingrained, although you admonish the child he will not improve. As for such things as proper speaking and good manners, gradually make the child aware of them. Let him not know avarice. Other than that, if he is of a normal nature, he should develop well by the way he is brought up.
    Moreover, the child of parents who have a bad relationship will be unfilial. This is natural. Even the birds and beasts are affected by what they are used to seeing and hearing from the time they are born. Also, the relationship between father and child may deteriorate because of a mother’s foolishness. A mother loves her child above all things, and will be partial to the child that is corrected by his father. If she becomes the child’s ally, there will be discord between father and son. Because of the shallowness of her mind, a woman sees the child as her support in old age.”
    —-Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

    1. There’s more:
      “In bringing up a boy, one should first encourage a sense of valor. From the time he is young the child should liken his parents to the master, and learn everyday politeness and etiquette, the serving of other people, the ways of speech, forbearance and even the correct way of walking down the street. The elders were taught in the same fashion. When he does not put effort into things, he should be scolded and made to go the entire day without eating. This is also one of the disciplines of a retainer.
      As for a girl, it is most important to teach her chastity from the time she is a child. She should not be in the company of a man at a distance of less than six feet, nor should she meet them eye to eye, nor should she receive things from them directly from hand to hand. Neither should she go sightseeing or take trips to temples. A woman who has been brought up strictly and has endured suffering at her own borne will suffer no ennui after she is married.
      In dealing with younger children one should use rewards and punishments. If one is lax in being sure that they do as they are told, young children will become self-interested and will later be involved in wrongdoings. It is something about which one should be very careful.”
      —-Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

      1. Modern Japanese males need to take a leaf and reflect on their past wisdom like this.

      2. Sounds like exactly the same thing written in the holy Quran, yet people have an issue with Islam.

        1. There are things in the Bible that are ridiculous. There are things in the Quran that make sense. That doesn’t mean that everything in the Bible is ridiculous, nor everything in the Quran sensical.

      1. Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai by Alexander Bennett is probably the best translation.

    1. I have to admit, the part about the Boy Scout rulebook discussing balloon knots kinda triggered me a little.

      1. Once they allowed openly gay scoutmasters….let this org burn, something else will rise up

        1. What the leftists don’t realize is, now that they’ve burned a wholesome, centrist institution like this to the ground, they are just creating space for the Junior Nazis of America to get fired up.

        2. If those idiots keep calling their opposition Nazis, they are only drawing attentions towards Nazism. Soon, the people who had enough will not only become Nazis, but they will be unapologetic about it as well.

        3. Well they’ve already overused it so much that it has become a joke. Calling someone a Nazi is literally (Hitler) meaningless now. I’m sure the guys that hit Omaha beach would be damn proud of that shit.

        4. Honestly, I take being called a Nazi as a complement… Especially when it comes from a liberal.

        5. nah, my friend has a 16 yr old. From what he sees, he thinks we’re doomed. softness everywhere. I posted a link a few weeks ago about how out of shape the 18 and under crowd is these days- they get as much physical activity in as a 60 yr old.
          My scoutmaster was an old men, saw time in Korea. #2 in Vietnam (wore a beret with a patch, yellow background with a mule/horse on it). #3? He was a homo.
          None of us ever listened to #3

        6. Every troop had their “gay scoutmaster” and at least one “gay scout” – whichever were most fun to make fun of. But I never thought to actually worry about that sort of thing until after I got out and the BSA started openly allowing homosexuals.

        7. Drop the socialism, and that’s pretty much the Alt-Right.
          Too bad Marx coined the term “capitalism” for the way things usually are (as opposed to “communism” and its offspring). I’d love to be called the “Nacho” party.

        8. Actually “Capitalism” was coined before Marx, although that’s a common misconception.

          The Oxford English Dictionary (Vol II, p 863) locates its first usage in English in 1854 by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel, The Newcomes.

    1. I still claim that T level is inversely proportionate to amount of facial hair

      1. Very true. The less facial hair you have, the lower T you are assumed to have. Good observation. The problem is that hipster “men” think that this is the only thing required to be a man, and have let everything else, literally everything else, wither on the vine.

        1. Inversely proportionate
          More hair = less T
          This is universal and across the board rabbi

        2. Ah, that’s why women are high T and men are low T. This explains it!

        3. I wasn’t talking about women, I was talking about men.
          The more facial hair a man wears than lower his T count.
          what I can’t figure out is whether allowing facial hair growth is testosterone signaling from low T men or if low T men just avoid that most masculine of activity — shaving — because it’s too manly
          I’m guessing it’s a mix

        4. “that most masculine of activity — shaving –”
          Is that even more manly than a pedicure?

        5. Girls, pre-pubescent boys, clean shaven Asian men (most of them) all associated with low T and meekness.
          You’re doing your “Here is my preference, I want to make it an objective universal law” thing again.
          Take hipsters out of the equation and facial hair is and has always been considered a sign of masculinity and strength. Whether you happen to prefer it or not is your business, but you don’t get to make faux rules that call those of us with beards low T. If this applies, then I’m going to make a rule that says that any man who doesn’t camp in the deep woods at least once a year is a closet homosexual. I mean hey, why not?

        6. “You’re doing your “Here is my preference, I want to make it an objective universal law” thing again.”
          cant begrduge a guy his thang!

        7. Well-groomed facial hair is manliness oozing from the pores.
          Hipster beards are vain efforts to appear to be men instead of idiot boys.
          And those sad three-hair mustaches, well…

        8. That’s the code. Exactly correct.
          He’s just trolling for fun, end of the day we all have each others back.

        9. You know you have the right facial hair when threatening to shave it off works as a nuclear response to the most vicious shit test.

        10. You’d have to be a REAL Hair-Cuck to let anyone else have a say in what you shave or don’t shave…

        11. I’m mostly bragging with this one. Only my mama wants the beard gone, and that’s just because she still sees me as her baby boy.

        12. Indiddly do. And God help the man who has no say in his own hairstyle. The shame must be unending.

        13. Heh, Bem posted that meme on our Telegram channel a while back. Funny stuff. Always…always….remove Hipsters from any equation when discussing masculinity.

        14. “Have you always been a chick?
          I mean I don’t want to offend you but you were born a man weren’t you? You can tell me , I’m open minded”
          ..
          – Otto , to patty or selma

        15. I couldn’t live there. I’d open the conversation with “Sup, faggot”. Social mores and norms would be violated. I would be shunned…by people I could give two shits about. So win.

        16. I think he’s just talking about hipsters, in which case that law holds true.

  3. As an Eagle, I can say this article is more accurate than inaccurate. While there are still ways to have meaningful coming-of-age and development experiences, the BSA does not particularly help with any of that.
    Let me describe two eras of my troop to show you what I mean. When I joined up,we had a scoutmaster who was a drill sergeant in the Army. When it was full-uniform season (any time but summer), we did pushups for every minute detail off about our uniforms. We did fitness runs, camped in miserable weather (and were told to like it), and were never allowed to let anything serve as an excuse not to execute our pre-trip plans (we’d wade through mud to go swimming, that sort of thing). We learned that “Be Prepared” meant constantly being ready for all manners of issues, from heat-stroke to 60-odd bee stings to tent fly’s ripping off the tent in 30 mph winds. I hated a lot of it, but looking back it was necessary.
    Fast forward a few years, just before they allowed homosexuals. We’ve got a Muslim scoutmaster who refuses to do the Scout handshake because of his religion (it’s a left-hand shake), coddles his boys, and refused to let us older boys straighten out the younger kids (teach them some basic skills, set rules and enforce discipline, etc).
    I can only imagine what sort of nonsense must go on, now.

    1. ha! second para reminds me of my experience! dont be such a faig!

        1. haha! we almost died once, hypothermia(in their infinite wisdom, they thought we should still go camping in 15 degree weather- in lean-to’s)

    2. Remember the Selous Scouts. Their training made the Navy SEALs look like boy scouts.
      That article written about them was an excellent source of inspiration for me.

    3. I made it to Star before I lost interest in the Scouts back in the mid 90’s. There were a lot of guys in our troop going for Eagle as if it was little more than fap-fodder for their eventual college entrance credentials. Says a lot about the nature of the organization really. Youth virtue signalling.

      1. Life rank, then I discovered girls and gasoline and the rest, as they say, is history.
        Early to mid 1980’s Scouting was a fun thing and it taught me a lot. Also was something free I could do that helped better me, which was great because I didn’t grow up with what people today call “means”.

        1. A church sponsored my troop and covered dues for us, um, poor kids. Even then I think it was annual and not weekly at the time, but I don’t know the amount.

      2. “Eagle as if it was little more than fap-fodder for their eventual college entrance credentials”
        yup. Just another trophy these days….seems like they’re cranking out more and more of them!

    4. Can’t stand hearing stories like these…another Muslim a-hole coming in to stick his nose into non-Muslim kids’ business, spoiling tradition and tainting the American way. Muslims are happy to be disrupting western life.

      1. The only good thing to come out of it was we weren’t allowed to cook bacon on campouts anymore. Kids tend to run bacon pans too hot, and guess who often wound up cleaning that up?

        1. This is the first time I have ever heard someone say that the only good thing about something was a reduction in the amount of bacon. Your suspect Taignobias, suspect I say

        2. I’ve got a scar on my left arm from a burst of bacon grease that flew ten feet across the camp. And that bacon was burned to a goddamn crisp before it hit our plates.
          Thirty minutes with a shitty sponge later, I swore my patrol would never eat bacon on campouts again.

        3. That is the first time in my nearly 45 years that I heard a story that truly stirred me emotionally. That should be a movie. I’d go alone to the theater and cry

        4. It’s like saving private ryan if that movie didn’t have tom hanks and was about something important

        5. Those are good but my favorite thing is (Mg,Fe2+)2(Mg,Fe2+)5Si8O22(OH)2

        6. Seriously? You’re still screwing around on the Internet this late on a week night and still plan on having that element in your immediate future? You’re a helluva a man or either you’ll be draggin’ ass tomorrow, lol. 😉

        7. One more thing. Are you sure that’s even an element? I thought it was a song by Rick James…

        8. I worked a summer at a boy scout camp (big mistake). A Indian troop or muslim troop can’t remember came for the week. They could not eat bacon and bacon was on the menu for breakfast. One of the camp traditions was troops could select items for staff members to sit at the table with them. I got to sit with the muslims. It was great, I got a whole plate of bacon for myself and they didn’t care at all as I ate it.

        9. Muslims are good because they do not eat bacon. Which means more bacon for me. A reduction in bacon for them means more for me.

      2. To be fair, the Muslim Scouts were terrible. Instead of camping and learning to build fires and tie knots you just kill yourself and take out some infidels

        1. Well, it was a highly sought after merit badge, and it took a real dedication to achieve it.

        2. yes, I assume you get all the other big Muslim Scout merit badges first: ululating badge, sitting on floor barefoot eating with hands out of a bowl badge, monkey bar badge etc

        3. That’s not what the Muslim Boy Scouts do. We all know exactly what the Muslim Boys Scouts do, and it is a lot less fun than that.

        4. They can’t help it, they shave with claymores, and those just don’t give you a good clean shave. Plus they grow a full beard in under 18 hours usually.

        5. I’m pretty sure the monkey bars are involved Thales. I’m not sure why but Muslims love monkey bars

        6. Butt sex is involved, lolknee. I don’t know about monkey bars, but butt sex is definitely involved.

        7. This lol fucker didn’t design shit.
          He copied it off the internet and took it to school for no reason.
          It was not an assignment.
          ..
          Would be cool if he accidentily blows himself up in some future lab accident.

        8. When I think about a clock, that’s exactly what I picture in my head.

        9. Pretty much took the plastic off an alarm clock, attached it to an alternate power source and put it in a pencil case. What a genius….

        10. Why do Scots wear kilts?
          Because sheep run when they hear zippers!
          *I’m officially exactly half Scot Gael. I can tell this joke. So can you but you probably won’t. Your mileage may vary. See dealer for interest rates.

        11. I not only have Scot blood, but worse I keep sheep. One of the neighbors asked me if I was raising them for wool, meat or (wink-wink) breeding purposes, lol! So I told him about my cousin Ian going to Scotland to hitchhike around the countryside and study our “roots.” It seems he met an older gentleman named Seamus in a pub. When he asked the old man what it was like living in the highlands, the old man pointed out the window and replied: “Ya see that stone house with the sod roof across th’ way lad? Well I built that with me own two hands. D’ they call me Seamus th’ architect? Nay. They d’not. And lad, d’ you see that pond in front? I built that dam with me own two hands, a shovel and a wheel barrow! D’ they call me Seamus the engineer? Nay. Not these folk. But let ’em catch ya’ fookin’ one sheep…”

        12. But that is what libturds admire. A kid that steals ideas to help with terrorizing Western culture.

    5. He’s probably a wahabi, they work on christmas too, even when it would have been the day off anyhow

    6. Seems like maybe the author got touched by a Soutmaster. You know, down there.
      The BSA is soft and mealy because our kulture is soft and mealy. Nothing escapes the imploding suckhole of progressivism. Not even the good ‘ol Boy Scouts of F’ing America.
      I too (Eagle Scout (c)1989) enjoyed Scouting for what it was, though like you I was often not overly enthralled a lot of the time; most of its value would show up later in life. For me, like the braggart author, I was already a kid well-acquainted with the ways of the woods. So Scouting was not my first or only outlet. But for many boys it was – and is.
      For many boys it is the only way to get outside and get among other boys and men in any sort of structure or fellowship. My dad saw to it that I developed a mastery of my environment. But he also recognized the importance of humility in mastery, in leadership, the skill of teaching and being taught, a sense of duty to myself and others, and the gratitude for the gifts of nature, family, community, god, and country.
      I grew up poor but my dad came from even less. There were boys in my troop with much more than we had and some with even less. But we learned, competed, and bonded as young men in the making – even if to the arrogant outside observer our methods were impure or unsavory.
      Yeah the BSA has slipped into line with the rest of our culture, for the most part. But something still remains of its essence. Even as the BSA has been converged into the abyss, there is still value to its mission. Or said another way, who is going to go out and creating something better? Who is willing to risk their precious social capital to fight this kind of “Progress”. *crickets*
      There is no need to tear down one of the last bastions of youthful male camaraderie and fellowship to make a point that – at this juncture, goes pretty much without saying.
      The BSA is not the problem, but is merely one more masculine organization presenting symptoms of a deadly infection.
      Instead of attacking the victim, Real Men(TM) should strike back at the source of this infection. Instead of kicking a lame horse, try this: quit Facebook, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat and all the other shit propagated by the very forces that have worked tirelessly to gut the once fine BSA organization (along with the rest of what was decent and good in this country).
      Most of the super outdoorsy fucking lumbersexual pussies that brag about their mountainy accomplishments and REI-member skill sets are just water-wicking plaid shirt versions of Instagram like-begger whores who spam your Iphag with all the pictorial reasons why their precocious and worldly crotch spawn are better than your weak-ass BSA kid. Weak.

    7. You got a Muslim scoutmaster? How the hell did that happen? Where do you live?

    8. yes the Boy Scouts were supposed to be modeled on military structure. Think the founder was a British office Baden-Powell who fought in the Boer War… Maybe someone ought to create a new alternative to the BoyScouts…red pill version…

    9. The only Muslim parent in my Troop was cool. His blatant disrespect of women helped keep the moms from making the boys effeminate by shutting down their pansy agenda. Although that was mostly his culture, religion he wasn’t so fundamental on because he did the left hand shake and drank beer. Ate during the day too during Ramadan on camping trips.

      1. It would have turned out wonderful if it wasn’t for the meddling Jews and their Communists!
        EDIT: In case you didn’t get the reference.

        1. Love their explanation of the uncertainty principle. Things happen in multiple ways, until you observe it. This probability wave collapses into what you observe. Sounds straight out of a Cheech and Chong flick.

        2. No doubt there is some dynamics we cannot predict when we get down to the quantum level. It does not mean God plays dice, or we continually split into different universes.

        3. The uncertainty principle is a problem of technique, not of matter. In order to find the speed of particles, we bombard them with so much energy they necessarily move. In order to find their location, we bombard them with electrons (usually) and change their speed.
          My take on uncertainty is that it’s just like real life. If I show you a picture of an arrow mid-flight, you can only speculate as to its speed at that time but you KNOW its location (it was right there). If I measure the speed of an arrow with some apparatus, we can’t say where it was because it was in many places over the course of the measurement.

        4. Yup, So much is like that. The double split experiment showing that an electron beam shows properties of waves. Could it be that energy and matter are similar at a small scale? Where have I heard that before?

        5. The idiotic ways that uncertainty is explained by any number of groups is shocking.
          Anytime someone brings up the uncertainty principle my first question is whether or not they’ve read Heisenberg’s original in the same way that everytime someone brings up a bible quote to support an argument I ask them if they’ve read the bible

        6. Meanwhile, when I create the idea of Schrodinger’s Nigger to explained that black people only move slowly, listen to music too loud and eat smelly food on crowded subways and pretend to know all other black people when they are being observed by whites just to annoy them people think I’m nuts

        7. 100% true in nature. I’ve even observed measurable increases in kinetic expression of said music.

        8. Yeah. My personal theory is that it is reteoactive reparations through petty annoyance

        9. My favorite is how they measure light waves and other mumbo jumbo and then make conclusions about things happening in solar systems 1,000 light years away based on what we’ve observed in our solar system. They have no fucking clue.

        10. My pet theory (which I don’t actually believe, but it’s fun) is that ten light-years out is an invisible wall upon which all the other galaxies and such are painted in beautiful ephemera.
          It’s a fun theory because all we have are pictures and guesses. In order to prove me wrong, we need something to go past the limit and tell us what’s there.

        11. You forgot the part about always asking me for a dollar and/or cigarette.

          No! Motherfucka ! I ain’t got shot for you except sharpened metal if you come near me

        12. The super slomo street crossing(not at a crosswalk).
          Blackadaisical is the technical term.

        13. Yo you got a qwata
          Yes, all black people need “twenyfie cent” at all times.

        14. I love fucking with the bum on the corner near my office. My favorite was when he says “scuze me suh do you have sum change” and I put me hand in my pocket and said “yup! A whooole lot! Thanks for asking”

        15. Ha.
          A fun way to respond is to say
          Hey that’s really funny, I was just about to ask you forba dollar.

          Then be serious about needing a dollar

        16. I knew this one joker who used to do pre-emptve begging – he’s scope out a bum and run up on him asking for change before the bum could!

        17. There is plenty of stuff bad to say about Freud but is isn’t famous for no reason. He was very smart when it came to understanding the human mind.

        18. Going back a few years into the archives I will tell you a story of when the kneeman had his heart get the best of him. I was living at my old apartment on the upper west side of manhattan. After work I would take the B train from herald square up to 86th street to get home. I left my office on madison and was dressed like work, the city was all done up in christmas lights, there was a light snow on the floor, I passed the empire state building walking west to herald square for the subway. As I got to the station on 6th there was a young homeless guy who looked pretty clean, white kid, didn’t look high or tweeking or anything, young, maybe early 20’s with a sign that said “Need $20 to get back home to my family in Boston for Christmas”
          Well the kneeman usually ignores this. I grew up here. I am totally cold to the scene. But there is something magical about NYC during christmas time and in an unheard of gesture from me I leaned over and gave the kid 20 buck and took the train home to my apartment feeling really good about myself and kind of understanding what people mean by the joy of giving charity.
          Well the next day I was making the same walk form my office to the train and there is this kid, a little out of it, worse for wear, still with the sign. So I say “what the fuck. i gave you 20 bucks yesterday” and he looks blank at me and i said “don’t you remember me? i gave you 20 dollars yesterday? how many people give you 20 dollars you fucking shit? Why aren’t you on a bus to boston?” Something about the fact that he didn’t even recognize me triggered me and I just starting kicking him right there where he sat on the floor. Now Herald Square at Rush hour is pretyt packed and after a few seconds i stopped and realized I am a man in a suit kicking a bum on the street and just walked away. I was fucking infuriated.

        19. LoLz! That is funny as hell. As a bail bonds and, I am around the jails all the time. One thing I have noticed is that a vast majority of homeless people, CHOOSE to be homeless, so I dont give them shit unless they have a REALLY entertaining story.

    1. I’ve never been fond of those memes. I get what they’re trying to do “Fascists are beautiful!” but I can find countless photos of FREE capitalist, Republic loving, Constitutionalist Americans from the 1930’s where the people are all beautiful.

  4. In defense of the sheepshank, it’s sometimes a useful knot. More than once I used it to salvage a clothesline (because some kid used a bowline where a taut-line hitch was called for, and I couldn’t be assed to untie it).

    1. On synthetic rope the sheepshank will slip. Which, with your clothesline, is probably not life threatening.

  5. Back when I was young (early ’80s) my dad pushed me to join the scouts. I was still too young for the regular Boy Scouts so Dad signed me up for the Cub Scouts. My Dad’s love of the scouts was due to the support they gave him when he was young. Dad’s mom died when he was 12 and his own father was all sorts of f***ed up from a mining accident. The Scouts filled in what his own father and late mother could not provide.
    I think my Dad was profoundly disappointed in what he discovered the Scouts had become: Women having a coffee klatsch and adult men giving awards to each other. The outdoor stuff had been tamed down to being about as exciting as setting up a tent in your suburban home’s backyard.
    Now the Scouts have become pos’d, which has made it prime hunting ground for kid touchers.

    1. Cub Scouts is a complete joke. It’s all bake sales and daycare, usually run by moms.
      You’re better off taking your kids to the YMCA’s youth groups. At least they go “camping” sometimes (though I think having electrical outlets and standard gas grills is cheating).

  6. The 11th edition scout handbook is an urban picturebook compared to the first edition. Back then they even taught ya how to make a two way radio!

    1. The Wilderness Survival merit badge is as close to the original Scout experience as it gets these days. By no coincidence, it was everyone’s favorite badge.

      1. I wonder what new merit badges they have introduced?
        Gamerpoints badge(awarded to you by an Xbox representative)
        what else?

        1. All the home-ec stuff women used to do. Since training boys/men is now the only way it gets done.

        2. We laugh, but it’s been traditional for scouts to sew their own badges and patches on (another thing they’re pussifying – they have iron-on badges now), cook their own meals on campouts, maintain a clean and orderly campsite, clean the equipment before stowing it, etc.

        3. Luckily, my scout master thought it was as bullshit as I did. I may not have earned the badge exactly as planned – we had a half-hour wikipedia hop, then talked about the basic principles of nationalism for a while.

        4. SJWs will play the long game if they have to. The BSA has been under siege for so long, but we only notice when they lose ground.

    1. Like young Indiana Jones’ bumbling sidekick at the beginning of ‘The Last Crusade’

        1. My god they would learn EVERYTHING back in 1912 scouting. Wilderness survival, horse riding, knots, telegraph, telling the time (roughly) by sun position, you name it.

    2. Is soy really bad? I read that ninjas used to eat soy because they were a rich source of protein. Nobody will deny that ninjas were badass.

        1. I don’t know how an average ninja’s sex life was like, but they were skilled warriors.

        2. When soy was eaten in ancient times (and, remember, the Japanese diet has always been heavier on fish), it was fermented. Fermentation seems to wildly reduce the negative effects of soy.

        3. It’s also worth noting that what we know of as “ninja” is largely an invention of the theater. They usually trained in secret and lived largely normal lives as peasants. This made them virtually invisible to their targets (who habitually gave no shits about the common folk), so they could kill them easily.
          Classic ninja weapons are not swords, but farming tools and occasional daggers. The sorts of weapons any peasant would normally carry around.

        4. Yep. They were mainly low level assassins, tops. The black costume thing didn’t exist, that was an invention of the theatre as well, to make it seem like they were “invisible” on a dark stage.

        5. Better, still, it was the costume of the stage hands. The theater-goers were used to ignoring the stage hands, so when they suddenly became assassins it was shocking and exciting.
          EDIT: For a modern comparison, the musical “Curtains” has a moment where the conductor becomes part of the show. He’s got his own solo and everything, and he does it from the pit. Musicals usually try to drive attention away from the musicians, so it’s fun and interesting.

      1. Asian are more adapted to soy, having eating it for millenias.
        People develloping too much eastrogen tends to have no kids. So, most asian have a genetic structure that can handle soy better than caucasians.
        Another exemple, Caucasian tends too hold there booze better. For a long time, this was a precious source of sugar, and way to make water ‘clean’. And to hold cold climate without suffering too much depression. Well, booze will finally kill you, but few people would live very long back in the days.
        To have a good health, try to eat like most of your ancestors. And above all, the type of food they wood have eaten in the very same season you are .
        Try to avoid overpriced organic food and to have a little garden, as a beguining. It’s not so difficult.

  7. I don’t think it is because they need more kids to sodomize, like women trying to push into websites like this so they can change things, the gay SJW’s have been doing it with the BSA.

  8. Fathers – get involved. Take it back.
    Who was watching the store?
    How did things go this far?

    1. This is key. You don’t need a national organization to turn your boys into men – you need a few good men to beat them into men as a blacksmith beats hot iron into form.
      When I have boys (and I do earnestly hope I do), we’re going camping and they will never tell their mother how much shit I put them through. Before they hit middle school, I want them to be able to survive comfortably if I drop them a few miles into the middle of nowhere with a knife and a daypack of basic gear.

      1. My kids rode in my pack on hikes before they could walk. After that they carry a whistle and a water bottle. They move on to carry more until, around 12-13yrs old, they are self-sufficient.
        Now they say that they saw more snow on summer hiking/backpacking trips than in winter.
        Many trips have ended with a wink and, “we’ll just tell mom that everything went fine.”

        1. I agree, if they arent strong enuff to blow the whistle, then they arent strong enough to live

        2. Same with my kids. Every year I will take the ones 6 or older on an overnight backpack trip or two. My oldest are starting to outpace me. Sucks, but in a good way.

    2. “In politics, nothing happens by chance; and, if it does, it was probably planned that way.”-FDR

    3. We were given no say in the matter. As soon as the first “let gays in and let’s give them awards for their braveness” thing hit, my son quit the next day. So did many others, whether on their own or their fathers pulled them out.

      1. I knew they let faegs in, but “awards for braveness”? they have boyfaeg merit badges?

        1. I kid you not. The “scoutmaster”, a rotten betraying sonofabitch who promised a no vote and then delivered a yes vote, sent out an email right after praising gays in the scouts and wanted to organize recognition events where they could be honored for their bravery. He CC’d the entire troop mailing list of parents, which I did a “Reply All” to calling him out for being a traitor and for going against Scout values and the values of all of the major religions that support scouting. He got snitty. I got a lot of “reply all” responses from a whole lot of parents congratulating me and agreeing. We lost a lot of young men in that troop, I don’t even know if it exists any longer to be truthful.

        2. In my older issues of Boy’s Life, they have bravery medals for the kind of boys who rush into fires to rescue people, or perform vital first aid on a heart attack victim, or things like that. I assume you could go back further and find bravery medals given out to the early Scouts who managed to off enemy officers and slip away into the wilderness.
          Being gay isn’t brave. Hell, in this day and age being openly straight and male is braver.

        3. A faeg can be brave is he stares down a bunch of dudes looking to kick his ass, but not for simply acknowledging to be one in the most tolerant atmosphere that ever existed.

    4. With a decent, masculine dad, you don’t need anything like Boy Scouts, or Girl Scouts for that matter. The boys of single mothers tho, I fear for them.

      1. I tell you, as a scoutmaster, it was very easy to tell who had an engaged father in the house, mostly from the amount of whining and being able to cope with a situation.

      2. No, a boy needs to learn to depend on himself regardless of the type of dad he’s got at home.

        1. That’s true in a sense. A father however, a good father, is a catalyst to make that happen and make it a shorter path to follow.

  9. We all know homos are far more likely to be pedophiles than straight people. So yeah the Boy Scouts are not safe for boys.

    1. “We all know Florida has far more lightning strikes than other states do. So yeah Florida is not safe for people to live.”

  10. Liberals are not interested in transforming boys into men these days, they are clearly more interested in turning transforming boys into girls and girls into men.

    1. There never should have been a “Girl Scouts.” What we needed was a female equivalent to the Boy Scouts, not penis envy.
      A society where girls dress up and gather to cook, learn essential female skills, socialize, and the like. A place to break up cliques and sift them around so they form one bigger clique (because, let’s face it, women like their cliques). A place for girls to compete in their way, hone the skills they should treasure, and learn the things their mothers are ashamed to tell them but they need to know.

      1. Girl Scouts has become so beholden to the feminists through GLAAD, NOW, and NARAL that any girl who goes in pure emerges as a feminist-leaning slut. Anything they might have once taught as good values has gone out the window. My wife and I refused to let our daughter join that POS organization, and we were key in keeping our pastor from chartering a Girl Scout troop. I’m surprised they don’t yet have a merit badge in blow-jobs, to be honest!

  11. The troop my sons worked with taught useful skills. Our troop could out-backpack any troop we met (and we met plenty). The scoutmaster’s rule – “if you’re gonna be dumb, you better be tough.” No coddling at all. No women AT ALL. Every single male leader did solo and high-adventure backpacking. One guy wanted to be an assistant leader, and he was run out for being too much of a wuss.
    Alas, that’s all out the window, so I’m glad my boys did their scouting before the troop turned to shit.

    1. I was a scoutmaster for quite awhile (recently moved) I tell you, the amount of hassle to put together a decent adventure is unreal. Medical records, physicals, plans, approvals, trip tickets, not to mention half the kids have no idea what to pack or helicopter moms worrying about tall these details…..blah blah blah…
      No wonder troops are typically at the meetinghouse, doing crafts.

      1. Our troop’s scoutmaster had a rule – if the mom packed, the kid didn’t go. He got a lot of flak for that, but he stuck to his guns. And if the kid forgot something – like a poncho or rain jacket or his eating gear, he did without. It was guaranteed he’d NEVER make that mistake again.
        But yeah, I was troop committee chair for years, and the paperwork got worse and worse as time went on – and the amount of ‘risk mitigation’ shit was sucking any potential adventure out of the whole experience. Like I said, I’m glad my kids got their Eagles when they did (and the rank was still meaningful!).

        1. Good rule. The “be prepared” is overdone. The kid might be cold, but he wont die.

        2. We eventually started carrying peanut butter and bread for scouts who failed to plan their meals effectively. Honestly, if you can’t go a weekend without food because your sorry ass didn’t bring food, you don’t deserve to wear a troop number.

        3. I can understand helping out stupidity for a week long trip, but most trips are just overnighters. Maybe next time they won’t be so stupid.

        4. A lot of kids subsisted on Ramen for campouts. I, personally, would have confiscated it and let them starve so they have to learn to cook a half-decent meal.

        5. Be prepared seemed to, at one time, mean “be the kind of person who can handle whatever life throws at them” and then at another time meant “make sure you bring your epipen in case you have an allergic reaction”

        6. Or, if you are just pickup camping, splurge and get some steaks, potatoes, carrots, etc. for a proper meal. We would usually make some cook it, and others clean it.

        7. We laughed at troops who did that shit. If we were lucky, the few days before weeklong summer camp we’d be in a rundown cabin sleeping whole patrols to a room.

        8. a few of the moms would always prepare lasagna or something in a pan, just in case; they knew there was a good chance a bunch of 14 yr olds would burn dinner. Plan B- thanks moms!

        9. I’ve done a lot of cooking on campouts, particularly drive-up campsites, but for two- or three-day hiking trips it’s easier and lighter to carry MREs from a local army-navy surplus store. No clean up, no pans.

        10. As a kid, I don’t remember anyone being allergic to anything. There was one kid who was allergic to penicillin but as long as he didn’t fuck any Vietnamese hookers, he was okay.
          Now it seems like every other kid is allergic to every thing in the room. “Oh, Bobby is allergic to Red Dye #5 so all he can eat is dry pasta and boiled coconuts.”

        11. It’s just conforming to the crowd because it seems trendy and gets a lot of “awwwww” sympathy for basically no effort.

        12. That’s because every kid now has been loaded up to the gills with vaccines. The vaccines contain adjuvants to stimulate their immune systems. And an allergy is an overactive immune system. Hmmm. Probably the same as when I got an ass load of shots at 12 y.o. and that summer was suddenly allergic to honey bee stings (never had been before and I’m not now). I also developed hay fever which I’d never had before. So fast forward a few years and I’m over both issues, go in the military and they shoot me full of God only knows how many vaccines. Guess what? The hay fever comes back and is gone again in about six years. Purely a coincidence I am sure…

        1. Every local congregation has it’s own troop, which means it is not uncommon for the leadership to outnumber the boys, especially if you are in an area where there are few that age.

      2. even back in the dim ages of the 80s my shitty troop barely got one camping trip off the ground. And that was little more than camping in a field with a thousand other tents.

        1. Been to those, annoying. What size of town do you live in? Two days ago, I went with our son’s troop up this canyon, then went repelling. It was pretty good, but the Young Women wanted to come, so we cooked breakfast for everyone so they could show up in the morning, eat half the food, then we had to wait around for hours until you got your turn. Still, I don’t think the boys minded them coming along.

        2. That was my experience as well. My backyard at home had more nature and adventure that what I experienced at the camp site.

        3. It was a crummy lower middle-class suburban zone surrounded by identical ones, hour from the city, hours from anything poaching ‘natural’
          mediocrity was actually in the water. With the PCBs.

        4. I think the small town kids can get away with more. Heck, last spring we were at the Town Hall park, shooting .22s at targets (there is an open field in one direction).

        5. Holy Christ our troop never got anywhere NEAR a firearm….
          But in all honesty we were a bunch of knuckleheads.

        6. We went to one of the scoutmasters’ relatives’ ranches and popped as many clay pigeons as we could stomach. Sometimes we even got to shoot black powder (pain in the ass to load, but what a boom!).
          All the guns were carefully monitored, though, and we went through a few weeks of gun safety beforehand (a good idea – I wouldn’t trust the younger “us” as far as I could throw them).

        7. I don’t know about the scouts but most kids had access to firearms in Brooklyn in the 80’s

        8. “we were a bunch of knuckleheads”…probably because all you got to do is camp in a field of tents.

        9. There are always the young ones you got to watch out for, but the older ones usually know the routine and they will keep an eye on each other.

        10. My son was a counselor for a month at a camp where shooting was a feature. He was a range master. They even had an armory for firearms storage and if a kid didn’t bring his own firearm, they’d lend him one. I’m not talking about only .22’s here either, my boy brought his over-under 12 gauge and his Mosin-Nagant 91/30. A scoutmaster with some class III stuff brought in a Browning Automatic Rifle and some other full autos for after hours for the range masters to shoot. This was, let’s see, a year before Faggageddon.

        11. I dropped out of cub scouts, only to return when I was in my 30’s. Maybe that’s why I enjoy camping so much.

        12. I never had a dry campout. Usually we set up in the rain, did our activities in the mud, and packed up in the rain. That’s my only hangup with camping.
          Still, I suppose a boy who can go a week in shoes made of duct tape because he lost his to the sucking mud on day one, can accomplish just about anything.

        13. Yeah, you are from the South huh? We are in the desert. Usually most kids will, but I will often just roll a sleeping bag out on the ground.

        14. We went out to West Texas for summer camp my first year. Sunday night we broke the annual rainfall for the past decade, and it didn’t let up until Thursday.
          EDIT: And the ravines flooded, so we weren’t allowed back to our campsites until Tuesday for fear they couldn’t get emergency response out there if necessary.

        15. Ah…the misery. Funny how that is. Some of my fondest memories are from miserable trips, whether having to hike 20 miles out from a bad float trip, 30 miles from getting locked in the woods, hearing bullets whiz by, 35 miles when I was 9, breaking the pickup through the ice, or 30 below zero. None of those trips involved the Scouts, BTW.

        16. Ha, largely the same. My favorite is the time we were taking the young scouts out for their five-mile hike. Five minutes in, some of the boys took off ahead of the group, and towards the halfway mark they stirred up some ground hornets. They had their own straggler who managed to catch the fury of the hive.
          So there we are – the Troop Guide (me) and SPL with a bunch of little morons trudging along, when a shirtless pasty nothing of a kid comes running at us, screaming incomprehensibly and surrounded by a buzzing cloud. My SPL whips off his shirt, soaks it in his drinking water, and charges in to beat off the wasps while I order the rest back a hundred yards to start setting up triage. When the SPL brings the kid in, he’s covered in welts and going into shock.
          Wouldn’t you know it, only two of us had our first-aid kits on hand, and our radio wasn’t charged (great job, Scoutmasters, giving us a walkie without juice). Fortunately, our SPL revealed that we were close to coming out by a neighborhood where the Scoutmasters were waiting to make sure we were alright, but to get there we had to go past the angry swarm.
          While the SPL took over the first aid, I gathered together all our raingear and sweatshirts to bundle the bravest and fastest kid (I think he’s Army Airborne, now). A rousing speech along the lines of “Good luck, kid,” and he was off.
          We sat tight while the adults plotted a course to get the kid out safely, and there was an ambulance waiting for him on the other side. He got 63 stings, but the rest of us got out with only one or two by the end.

        17. We gave him one of the hornets we’d killed encased in an orb of epoxy. I hear when he went off to college he took only a backpack, and that hornet was the first thing he packed.

        18. His is 1938, screws in the sling cutouts, etc.. My daughter’s is 1942 when the Huns were literally 2 miles away. His is well constructed, hers….lacks a bit. I have full documents on both based on serial number actually, we researched it as a family for fun.
          Yes, that’s what the OfJefferson family does for post Christmas present unwrapping fun, we research the guns we give each other.

        19. Sweet.
          Id like to get one of the American ones that were made right before the (((Russian revolution))).

          Neither of your have a hex receiver do they?

        20. God I wish. I looked for that specifically. The store had some but sold them a day before I came in, same price, $129.00. Pissed me off lol

        21. bem, I grew up in rural Tidewater Virginia and never belonged to a scout troop. I was raised in the woods, big rivers and creeks. By the time I was ten I’d been reading Boys Life, the Boy Scout Manual and the USAF Survival Manual for years. One summer my parents sent me to a rural summer camp with a bunch of city kids. The counsellors decided to take our tent (I think there were ten of us to a tent) out for a “snipe hunt.” They left us holding the bag while they went off to flush out the “snipe.” Well, being a seasoned country boy, I explained what a “snipe hunt” really was. Having plenty of moonlight to work with, I took all the boys back to our tent and we went to bed. About five AM after frantically searching the nearby woods for hours for the “lost boys”, one of the counsellors finally decided to check our tent, LOL! Oh they were pissed and tired too. But what were they going to do? Punish us for them going off and leaving us alone in the dark in the middle of a forest? Word of it got back to my dad and he thought it was hilarious.

        22. That’s a great story!
          Raised in the doldrums of 70s-80s suburbia I envied the city kids and country kids BOTH!

        23. I had virtually no social life and was sixteen before I learned how to remove a bra. But it was a great way to grow up. We were essentially feral children running around in the woods with various pointy and sharp things, air rifles and later, firearms. We got in trouble from time to time, but usually for just doing stupid shit without anyone getting hurt. When I was fifteen I got on my ten-speed early in the morning, took the Jamestown ferry over the James river and rode the parkway to Yorktown and back in one day by myself (it was a 70 mile round trip). I was bike riding all over from the time I was about six, but things were different then. I suspect that if someone let their kids run wild like that now the state would take them away and put them in foster homes.

        24. That’s a great way to grow up. I had a good share of that freedom too — forests, lakes, enormous empty state parks. All by bike. If you have a tree trunk and an imagination, you’ve got a time machine and you can be playing in the Jurassic time period running away from dinosaurs.
          Fireworks, M-80s, pellet guns, old swing sets, artful pieces of scaffolding, abandoned cabins in the woods, skinny dipping, catching frogs, hunting turtles, tick bites, hot dogs over bonfire at high noon, astronomy lessons on beaches at night. Man, I miss those days.
          If I had kids, they’d be raised like that, plus an hour of mandatory reading every day, and no video screens of any kind whatsoever. Kind of like this guy. HIghly recommend this movie:
          https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Fantastic-Viggo-Mortensen/dp/B01I2D82K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1498534912&sr=1-1&keywords=captain+fantastic

        25. Amen. We had a house full of books. I did a lot of reading in my youth. One of my dad’s close friends was a botanist at William & Mary. He would bring me college text books when he came to visit. In order to get the next book, I would have to know what was in the last one he brought. In my senior year of biology I didn’t participate in class or even study, I just comped all the tests. I still have the copy of Anna Botsford Comstocks’ “Nature Study” that he brought me. I’m inclined to agree on the video screens myself, but it does seem a bit hypocritical posting that here through a personal computer…

    2. Great story…I hope this kind of thing is still going on all across the USA. Our scoutmaster even had us go out for some dead-of-winter, back-country 3-day excursions in the snow. Not only was there astonishing isolated beauty to behold in the desolation of winter, but our fathers and scout leaders were laser-focused on making proper men out of boys who were considered “toughened and never needing to be rescued.”

  12. I also blame the meddling Nanny State regulations for some of the wimp-ification of boys we’re seeing in the Scouts, etc. Here’s a brief anecdote about how it used to be not too long ago, for the youth of Gen X:
    I was a Boy Scout in the 1980s. We had an experienced ex-Vietnam vet badass as a troop leader, one with this infectious enthusiasm for the role. He also taught wood and metal shop at the high school I would eventually attend. Dude looked like Grizzly Adams. Our troop was really similar to most of the others we’d meet at the jamborees other BSA meet-ups.
    Similar to the author, my father brought me up with all the necessary skills and trusted me enough with guns, knives and other “man” gear (and tracking/foraging/survival skills) to set me loose for 4 days of solo orienteering and survival in the pine barrens when I was 14 years old (the highlight was being treed by a small pack of feral/wild dogs for several hours in the twilight, which was super-scary but also liberating in a way). The next summer, at 15, I led an overnight backpacking excursion in a deserted part of the Adirondacks and was put in charge of the welfare of my older sister and three cousins, and was responsible for getting them to a map point 20 miles away where my dad was confident I’d make the rendezvous. This was all before GPS…just map and compass. Good times and trust bonds were made this way, let alone the life skills necessary for boys to truly hone their manly instincts. My sister and I were both blessed to have a father who would let us go “outer limits” in sports, recreation and exploration.
    These days, I think my dad would be arrested for what he did, and DYFS would probably seek to get protective custody. “Child endangerment” or some stupid thing like that. This country has gone to the wimps…boys these days are both bitchier (as in girlish) and softer than ever. Resist at all costs!!!

    1. My dad unfortunately didn’t do any of that stuff with me, but I got it elsewhere. For example, at age 16, I went on a two-week canoeing/camping trip through Canada.
      One afternoon, our counselor let me and another boy cross the straits in a canoe alone to explore a nearby island. We saw fresh bear scat on a rock near the peak of the island and immediately hightailed it back to the canoes and paddled like maniacs back across the straits until we were safe back at the camp site. We told the counselor what we saw. He shrugged and said, “That’s why they call it Bear Island. Highest concentration in the entire park.”
      Much love to that guy. He let us have the adventure, make our own mistakes. Boys need more of that. It’s how we become men.
      Another highlight: Pitching over in a canoe in the middle of a large lake, all your provisions floating in bags all around you, with a black thunderstorm racing towards you across the water. It was **literally** sink or swim — and that was the first day. The next thirteen were a cakewalk by comparison.

        1. We caught three-foot-long pike nearly every day. I remember that at first I couldn’t lift the canoe by myself to portage, but by the end of the trip, I was flipping ’em up in the air like spoons.
          Another life lesson: dry socks are not overrated. If I have to choose, I will in fact choose dry socks over a bed. Every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

        2. I remember being designated as a Jihadi during training once. We were left to roam the swamps and get the guys in fighting positions to shoot blanks at us. I stepped in what looked like a puddle at the time. Was all I could do to keep my weapon dry as it went to head-level. Wasn’t so bad overall, considering it was nearly 100 degrees outside, and I dried off quick, but my boots were waterproof, so they ended up holding in all the water that came over the tops of them. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life, especially considering I didn’t get to change them for a good 5 hours.

  13. I was a Scoutmaster* when I was 26. The only follower in my troop** was a hot 25-yr old half Greek, half French model. I issued imaginary merit badges for her to earn at night in our tent. She loved it.
    I swear, she was the only print catalog model in the entire world who loved to go deep woods camping.
    sigh. memories.
    *metaphorical
    **not a real troop

  14. Truly, it depends on the scoutmaster or adult leaders that you have, plus if the troop (or crew) has enough money and guts to get past the Bullshit Boy Scout Regs. But Wayne Star hits it spot on with his assertion of the Boy Scouts today.
    I was in a Boy Scout Crew, in a very rich town on the Chicago Northshore, in my high school. Our scoutmaster was a former Navy SEAL who grew up in Northern Wisconsin with almost nothing, and then eventually made his way to becoming a dentist. He’s a old man who’s been leading the troop for almost 30 years and always was very no-nonsense in the way he dealt with boyish nonsense, and he dealt with it in a stern but amusing way. Thanks to him, we managed to go on pheasant trips, snowmobile winter trips in northern Wisconsin where we had to sleep outside in bitter cold for a night (almost -15 at some point) and then went on trips where we jumped rapids in just a wetsuit and a big tire tube. We also went paint balling as well (which I planned). It was great, molded and matured you into becoming true men, and they still do this today.
    You might ask how can we do this. Apparently, our Crew gave our local council a huge part of the fundraising money, so thanks to that we could do whatever the hell we wanted. And we never accepted any girls into our troop, so we could talk what boys really want to talk about, things that girls would find offensive.
    To this day, I still miss my Crew. That was the time of the boys and men.

  15. I remember as a kid in school that one kid who got out of class early for Boy Scouts. The first time he was told he could leave for whatever it was he has to scout he might as well have held up a huge sign that says “don’t worry fellas, I’ll be back on Monday for my beatings”

    1. Worth it! Skipping some boring class shit to hold a flag ceremony was worth every beating I never got (being the biggest kid in class with a mean temper helps).

    2. Part of why most of us quit by early high school.
      Except this one poor fukker who’s dad was the leader. His ass stayed until he made Eagle. I swear he had to be about 21 by the time he achieved this….
      The best part was his father would publicly and unabashedly beat the shit out of him for every one of his never-ending bone-head infractions….

      1. I picture his dad being the kind of guy who says “it’s go time” like Mr Mendlebaum

    3. That’s too bad. Scouting in our day was actually a worthwhile activity.

      1. by the time I was in highschool it seems like doing ANYTHING was grounds for mockery, beatings, etc….

        1. Maybe it was because by mid sophomore year I was 6’2″ and starting to get really muscular, that the vultures generally opted to turn a blind eye. Dunno. I don’t recall anybody saying anything negative or positive about scouting in high school. Most of the guys who did it were the same ones that would go hunting in the fall during school hours, etc. Maybe we were the Butch Scouts or something.

        2. It was cultural. Where I lived had a societal attitude problem. Everybody wanted to be the disaffected bad-ass who made his own rules.
          Looking back it was really the early stages of the lazy-minded, navel-staring, fukkit, why bother, hate excellence worm that eventually became pop-culture.

      2. Yeah, I can see it as being cool if done correctly. Here it was more for anti-social weirdos who would eventually grow up to argue about who got to be the Palladin while I was (edit) learning how to remove bras.

        1. As Bem noted below, it’s probably just a cultural difference. Scouting was just what young men did out here, it wasn’t constrained to the weirdo class. I mean you wouldn’t bring your merit badges to school or some stupid shit like that, but there was no animosity given towards guys doing scouting.
          Basically growing up here you were expected to know how to handle yourself outdoors, shoot, fish, hunt, finagle a six pack of beer from an older person for consumption under the bleachers at a football game, remove a girl’s bra and more or less traipse across miles of cornfield for no good reason.

          argue about who got to be the Palladin while I wasn’t learning how to remove bras.

          Oh you poor man. All those D&D dudes having fun, and you were denied practice removing bras. Pobre cito. heh

        2. Lol. Nice autocorrect.
          I guess cultural thing makes sense. Kids just had (I say had because I really don’t know wtf kids do now) different hobbies….other than beer, finagling beer is a universal (kids now finagling soy milk?)

        3. I’m just happy that I had an opportunity to legitimately use the word “finagle” correctly in a sentence.

        4. Didn’t even have to wear a zoot suit to do it.

        5. I expect that YOU of all people will help in my quest to reintroduce good, decent, relevant words back into the English language in real life. Heh.

        6. I’m tying to think I feel I ever knew anyone who had one. I don’t believe so

        7. I cringe at the thought of the type of “scout” NYC produces. No wonder ya’ll would beat them up. Haha

        8. I wasn’t kidding. Boy Scouts here was more or less just the precursor to dungeons and dragons, video games and a life of acne and virginity. I get that it was different elsewhere, but BSA was for the social misfits, losers and weirdos here.

        9. I was in cub scouts when I was eight because my dad was when he was little. I even wore his old school kerchief and cap. I was in scouts I in HOUSTON. Suburban Houston…so you can imagine how little exposure to anything useful I got
          My mom was a den mother. I was pissed because all we did was go over to one of the other kids house and do whatever dumb craft activity was in the book to get some stupid to get some dumb patch. I quit after a year because we never got to do the cool outdoorsy shit. And our trip that started out as an overnight camping trip, ended up being an all day pic nice, which eventually turned into us just running around in a park for a couple of hours. When I turned nine, I said I didn’t wanna do scouts, so my dad taught me how to squirrel hunt and every outdoorsy thing I would need to know.

      3. I was in the scouts in the late 90s and the two years I was in, both our “tribes” or whatever they are called were run by women. I told my mom half way through the second year that I didnt want anything to do with that crap anymore.
        I imagine the Boy Scouts used to be cool and something worthwhile for kids to get in to. But I think it’s been completely watered down and ruined at this point.

        1. Agreed. Once Faggapocalypse hit, they were done.

  16. I have some fond memories of my days in the boy scouts, but that was a long time ago. Our Troop was led by five men, all of them retired military guys, and they had a very simple philosophy. The boys did everything.
    Twice a year, the troop held a vote to select various officers to handle things such as the treasury and camping events. We usually deferred to the higher-ranking scouts, who were older and had more experience, but we had to do everything. The old guys would offer advice if asked, drive the bus if we wanted to go somewhere, and would sign the actual checks for events, but otherwise left us to our own devices. We had to schedule out year, make arrangements and camp grounds, select our own merit badges and find people to teach us, everything had to be done by the boys themselves. It worked out very well, and there were never any issues. Everybody knew what they had to do, and did it.

  17. As I understand it, the Boy Scouts were originally intended to prepare boys for military service. After all, the founder was a seasoned British military officer. If one intends to run a worldwide empire one needs reliable, resourceful and compliant soldiers. Hence getting them into uniforms, teaching outdoor living skills, discipline and chain of command as young as possible. Just like the modern military, the scouts have now normalized homosexuality. The old NAMBLA slogan: “sex before eight — or it’s too late”. Hardly a coincidence they want them in scouting as young as possible. If I had boys of scouting age there is no way I would risk putting them under the guidance of sodomites and pederasts in the BSA.
    If you wish to participate in an outdoor organization for your boys, then look into Trail Life USA. It is a Christian organization, not that that is any guarantee mind you. But I have a friend with two sons participating in it through their church and he is very happy with it. He has assumed a leadership role, so he goes out camping and hiking with them. Being a very conservative (and stout) police officer, I would pity any pederast that approached his boys. As always, it’s ultimately up to the parents and dad in particular to see to the upbringing of his sons.

  18. The boy scouts was a spontaneous orienteering-camping movement begun and managed by the kids themselves. As it spread adults and bureaucrats seeking to channel the energy for state purposes took over led by Baden-Powell, it’s been downhill every since.

    1. That’s the same issue I have with that other piece of American culture, organized sports. Let the kids organize their own games. Eventually they’ll learn common sense stuff on their own by trial and error, like not kicking someone in the knee while doing a sliding tackle in soccer, or backing off if a kid starts bleeding profusely during an impromptu boxing match.

  19. The perils of outsourcing masculine character building to a brand in decline. If you want something done right…

  20. There weren’t Boy Scouts around here. Some of the advantages of growing up in the country- driving around in old farm trucks or tractors by myself at 10-11 years old, going to dove shoots or deer hunting with my Daddy and older brother, rabbit shining at night, fishing, trapping with my brother, going swimming in water I wouldn’t touch as an adult, frog gigging, coon hunting with friends, playing cowboys and indians in the woods stealing watermelons out of the field, eating blackberries or plums off the bush in the woods, sneaking into neighbors ponds to fish without permission, playing in the cotton warehouse(love that smell) sneaking off from work to go swimming in the spring, getting an asswhipping for being caught in places I had no business being, those were the days.

    1. If you take the tower off, it looks kind of like Georgia State Prison in Reidsville Ga. lol

  21. I never bothered with the Scouts but joined the Junior Army Cadets and loved it. Weapons training, fieldcraft, patrolling you name it. I remember when we were about 15 and 6 of us were dropped off in a mountain range for 5 day hike, along with Girl scouts, Boy Scouts Navy and Air Force Cadets. Girls were given a days head start and we still over took them on the morning of the 3rd day and the rest on the 4th. Lot to be said for the military life.

    1. That sounds like a collapse scenario where a group of girls get pursued by a group of men. The stragglers are caught first. It must have been so fucking castrating with saltpeter icing to pass the girls and not be allowed to then split off into the woods with the girl of your pick and then just chat, sit on a tree branch and share your dreams, show her your muscles, play tag, improvise a shelter after skinny dipping, bun roast your dog and marshmallows under a full moon. What the fuck is ‘Rangers’ and service to the state if the state ultimately works to atomize families while synthetically empowering women? There’s a such thing as being ‘too good’ and compliant. You always have to have a reservation to say “fuck this shit” and take the course that your bloodclan identity, your instincts and nature tells you is right.

      1. Get what you are saying, and agree. But we were indoctrinated with The Lie that all females are snowflakes even back then. As a result, and because we were focused on joining the military when we hit 17 we just powered on by. Tragic it is way.

      2. ” That sounds like a collapse scenario where a group of girls get pursued by a group of men. The stragglers are caught first. It must have been so fucking castrating with saltpeter icing to pass the girls and not be allowed to then split off into the woods with the girl of your pick and then” have to admit I was picturing something decidedly violent and nonconsensual here, which turned out to actually be “just chat, sit on a tree branch and share your dreams, show her your muscles, play tag, improvise a shelter after skinny dipping, bun roast your dog and marshmallows under a full moon” kinda romantic in an innocent, first childhood crush kind of way. I blame feminism for putting such unsavory ideas in my head, and apologize to men and boys everywhere for thinking even for a moment that “rape culture” is real. I can’t know myself what it’s like to be looked on as a destructive, rutting animal that can’t control it’s instincts, but I can imagine it must be very dehumanizing and degrading. Rape culture hysteria and over the top consent requirements completely tear asunder the very foundations of normal human courtship. Yes, rape is horrible, but so is being so terrified of being accused of rape that you have to second guess every gesture of affection.

        1. Well put. I had a feminized in-law once who was so crazy and jittery even in the house around family. What a bitching complaining sack she was. I can’t ever remember physically touching her, not even a handshake. Was she afraid of being ‘violated’? Who the hell knows. She always produced a distance shield of bitching so no one ever physically touched her. She was tight with her bitch shielding, always spitting out a hot and bothered bitching triade that no one came within arm’s length of her and no one touched her. She did cook awful greasy shit, but walked away from the table and away from people. She was so tight with preventing her own physical contact, it was like she resembled the tight ‘anus’ string on the top of a duffle bag where you pull the top string and the bag closes into a wrinkly looking pinkie hole that looks like an anus. That’s exactly what I thought artistically or impressionistically every time I saw her. She was a tight ass insulated bitchy feminized anus hole that was clammed shut from even her own family. I just wanted to walk up to her some day and do puppy hands all over her and shout “BOO-GOO-BOOBALOO-BU-BU-BU-BUH” as I rubbed and messed her hair and slapped her back like an outside big dog and paddled her rear. She would probably have had a meltdown. Damn she was so fucking feminized crazy. I think there’s a psychiatric term of that kind of extreme hypersensitivity. Yes feminism kills.

  22. A couple thoughts….
    Here’s what I hear when reading your article:
    When I was 17, I was a bad ass and ran into a group of scouts with shitty gear that left a bad taste in my mouth.
    I see a big problem with the scouts but I’ll be damned if I’m going to do a thing about it–I’d rather bitch.
    Let me share with you my experience with scouts. I was a cub scout. When I was a cub, we had a den mother. Can a den mother form a young man? no she can’t. It isn’t a den mother’s job in scouts to form young men. Cubs are still young kids. Cubs go from first to fifth grade, that’s age 7 to 10. When I was a cub I looked up to the boy scouts. The older kids in the joint outings were something to aspire to. They went on big hikes, they had fires, they got to do all the cool stuff we just weren’t old enough to do. For me, my first experience with scouts ended with cubs. I got into flying after cubs and never bridged to boy scouts. Fast forward about 25 years with some hard core life experience, shit that almost killed me, major tragedies and some long hiking expeditions under my belt and a bunch of other stuff in my life. I had two sons of my own and there was a cub scout recruiting drive at my kids school. Guess what, it was my old pack. I signed my kids up. I attended the meetings. I didn’t think it was the best environment for the kids in the pack. There were a few bitches and some beta dads half-ass running the pack. Right after I got there the kids who’s parents were running the pack either bridged or dropped out.
    Because I lived in a small town, the remaining parents knew my history. Well, it was obvious what was going to happen. I was asked to run the pack. My oldest was stoked and my youngest couldn’t wait to get in. I taught the cubs that they were there for one reason, that was to learn how to be boy scouts. I emphasized in everything they did they were working towards a goal. I wound up getting a lot of kids from single moms who’s fathers had checked out. Some were truly concerned moms who knew their son’s needed a strong male input. It was either because they couldn’t handle them, they’d chased off their fathers or they’d just married deadbeats who’d checked out. I treated all those kids like they were my own. Some dropped out but all the one’s that stuck it out earned Arrow of Light and their religious pin–two awards that mean a lot even to adult leaders if they stay in the scouts. When my cubs bridged to scouts, they couldn’t have been more happy. They were on to the next step. They had finally become what they’d looked up to for years. They were getting to do what some of them had been looking forward to doing for almost four years.
    When my youngest bridged, I handed over the den to a new father. At the last ceremony I asked for a volunteer to run the pack. There was a firefighter and a couple other guys that were prime candidates. None of them wanted to step up. I said “fine, it’s all of yours”. The firefighter stepped up. At the next ceremony I ripped the leader patch off my uniform and handed it to the new leader. Some of the moms looked bewildered and couldn’t understand why I did it. All the guys got it.
    I had been attending the boy scout meetings with my older son and running the cubs with my younger. When my younger bridged and I handed off the den, I figured I could relax and sit in the back of the meetings. Guess what, the kids with parents that were running the troop, Eagled out and I again found my self stepping up to run the troop at several parents request.
    In the cubs the moms hung out but stayed out of my way and tried to help any way they could. They were great for doing menial stuff that I’d rather gouge my eyes out than do. It also helped keep that “old man in the cave” mystique the boys seemed to love. In the troop, I cut way back on female participation. I told the moms that the bridging ceremony we did (there’s actually a bridge the cubs walk across. They’re sent over by the cub leader and their parents. They’re greeted by senior boy scouts–Eagles, on the other side where the boy scout neckerchief is donned and only then the cub neckerchief is removed–symbolizing their never leaving scouts but moving on. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it) was more of a cord-cutting ceremony where the umbilical from mom is finally cut–rightfully so–the kid is after all 10 at that point. I told the moms to stay home from the summer and winter camps. I left a lot of moms and dads sobbing in the parking lot as there kids were off to their first summer camp where they’d be out of cell range for an entire week and they could only call home on a payphone with my permission. The kids would usually call home half way through the week.
    I ran the boy scout troop for 11 years. That’s 14 years in scouts as an adult leader. When my oldest, youngest and my nephew made Eagle, I was done. Every kid that stayed in my troop till 18 made eagle with the exception of one. I wasn’t an Eagle mill either. Every one of those kids worked their asses off and all but one one is successful now.
    The big misnomer about scouts is that all of scouting is the same. It isn’t, the troops are run by the leaders with little to no oversight by the council. The leaders run the cubs, the scouts run the troop with the help of leadership as more of an advisory roll. That’s the way it’s supposed to be done. The problem with scouts is not enough men stepping up and the guy that wrote this piece is guilty as hell for being a selfish prick and refusing to get involved. What’s the matter, you don’t think you can rise to the top of a group of beta chumps with your badassary. Most of scouting is run by the MoMo’s, that’s something you have to live with, there are good and bad MoMo troops. They’re all friendly but you’re an outsider and they speak a different language. The MoMo’s loved us even though we didn’t play the scout game. We didn’t have any fag leaders–they don’t like it any more than we did–we didn’t participate in scout-wide competition at all the camporees, summer/winter camps and jamborees. However, the line-tower council guys were at our camp come dinner time.
    Another reason troops are run by dweebs is who the hell can take a week off during summer, a week off during winter and be available for all the other crap that scouts do and still take a family vacation? It’s government feed-baggers. Yea, the guys that work civil service jobs on the military bases, teachers, cops, firefighters and other government group-thinkers. Every once in a while a guy with an abnormal jet-flying job gets in there and kicks ass…. Some of the stuffed shirt troops were what we called the doctor/lawyer troops. Spit and polished troops with exactly matching uniforms and all dripping with a lot of cash. My scouts were encouraged not to fuck with them but boys will be boys.
    I remember one night I got an email (the camps usually had wifi near the lodge so the scout leaders could keep in touch and download pictures for the parents to see, it was good for the parents to see their kids were having fun) from one of the moms. She was freaking out because she’d never been away from her son without hearing from him. It had been five days and he was having so much fun he didn’t want to call home. I’m sure her husband just gave up and said “fine email Aero and see what’s up”. I sent her a picture of him I’d taken a few days before and said he was fine but he was in a merit badge class and he wouldn’t be done for several hours. Well, he was in a merit badge class alright, he was doing Wilderness Survival. He was bivouacked a mile away doing primitive shelter building where he had to spend the night in the muddle of nowhere with zero provisions. I wasn’t going to see him till the next morning…..HAHAAH, him and a buddy were out there in the dark without so much as a flashlight. The next morning, they came into camp before breakfast with huge grins on their faces having cleared one more hurdle towards eagle.
    A message to the OP. Guess what, camping can be expensive. Not every kid is going to have a fucking $50 titanium cutlery set or a faggy $100 MSR stove. They didn’t go to REI and drop a grand or support those fags at Patagonia for a $400 jacket and a $200 pair of shorts. Some kids are leaving the pavement for the first time and yes, they may have poor leadership, they probably have parents that can barely afford to pay for the trip much less outfit them with a Spot and the newest internal frame pack. Ya know what though, they’re getting out there despite some some holier than thou elitist who will never step up to help fix the problem. They’ve left the couch and PlayStation for an outdoor excursion.
    I put in my 14 years in the scouts turning boys into men. I challenge you to do the same or something similar. The scouts have become what they are because fewer and fewer people can afford to invest the time. We use to use the term “The Three Gasses”. The three gasses are what keep a kid from making Eagle. They’re perfume, gasoline and alcohol. A kid gets a whiff of those and chances are he’s done for. In recent years, I added one more to that mix, high school sports. Kids are so desperate to get a damn scholarship for their underwater basket-weaving degree they wind up playing sports all fucking year and during the summer. Men can’t break away from more work for less pay long enough to be leaders. Blame women, blame the Jews, blame corporate America. We also need to blame the individual.

      1. Your attention wasn’t held long enough to read a few paragraphs. Cool thing is now we can have an exchange of ideas over who’s at fault that is.

  23. Wow, lets all go scounting then, fuck all this shit, fuck political correctness, and fuck any woman who even remotely identifys with this feminist bullshit whatever the label they give it, “humanist” what ever fuck all of that.

  24. I agree with eye protection against rubber band guns. Rubber bands sting like hell when you get hit in the eye with them.
    Except maybe that’s a good lesson. Strike that.
    No eye protection. Unless you are the cool kid wearing shades.

  25. That last sentence referring to female genitalia and a credit card, did the author mean seeing panocha up close in person, or a digital version?

  26. I was a scout (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth). I had 4 sons who participated in scouting to some degree. I have even been a scout leader. I have washed my hands of the organization and tell any man who asks my advice on the matter to not have their sons join scouting.

  27. All three of my boys are Eagle Scouts who attended a troop that was aggressive in teaching real skills and giving them memorable experiences. Their actual experiences do not mirror the author’s concerns at all. Today they are all gainfully employed gun owners working in fields of their own choice, voting conservative, and very much cynical of their millennial peers. They are more red pill than I have ever been.
    My only shame is that two of the boys received a presidential letter of commendation signed by Obama (he never bothered sending anything to my middle son) and I agree with the author that the Boy Scouts in the United States is now nothing more than a huge joke.
    When they were debating whether or not to let gays into the Scouts, I wrote two long, lengthy letters expressing in a calm, dignified manner the logical reasons they should say no. Little did I realize that logic would have absolutely nothing to do with the situation.

    1. I voted no. I often wonder if the votes were even counted. The scouts had lost all public support and no politician could be photographed with one. I was fine with that. After the decision came down, nothing changed in our council. There was still not going to be an ass-pirate in my troop. I really think it was a move by the MoMo’s because they’re all about the money and saying it was OK to have rump-rangers in the organization equaled more money. Some of my scouts even came up with a no gays merit badge design.

  28. So it looks like that the bsa has cuckified itself. Is it the only scout organisation in the USA ? Isn t there rival scouts organisations that remained traditional ?
    I am french. In France, the main one, the scouts de france became rather liberal, but there is rivals like the scouts d europe, scouts unitaires, etc, that have kept the good old ways and where my children will go.

  29. As an Eagle Scout, I’ll say criticism of the Boy Scouts as an institution is valid. Like everything else in western society (schooling, dating, working, exercising) it has become weaker and watered down. However, I’d still choose to expose a kid to scouting vs not scouting.
    Knowing how to tie knots is cool and useful, and knowing life skills will actually help you get women later, even if you don’t know how to undo a bra as a teenager. The skills scouting will teach you, and just the male bonding and enjoying nature, and some of the hardships of having to sleep without constant air conditioning and coddling are life changing.
    Just because scouting in the past was something much better than it is today, doesn’t mean one should abandon scouting. If you took a man from just one lifetime ago, and introduced him to modern society, he would be shocked and appalled at what passes for marriage today. The idea of marrying a girl who is not a virgin or a widow would simply be unfathomable. The reality is, if you live in the west, there is a 99% change you’re not going to marry a virgin. Does that mean all men should give up on marriage?
    I understand many would say yes, and I certainly have so far in my life. But the fact is, we are on this planet a short time and we must take the best options available to us. I’m mostly at the F Trump stage at this point, especially after the threatening of Syria again yesterday, but he was supported merely because he was the best option. He is the modern, pro-gay, inclusive, politically correct Boy Scouts. You can hold out for perfection or you can accept the best available to you in your short time on this planet.

  30. Scouts varies wildly by troop. It’s still a good option for young men provided proper vetting is done. Firstly, the troops should be run by the boys and not the parents. Especially the moms, although sometimes the dads are just as bad. Parents should only do certain administrative functions that minors typically cannot do (like pay for shit). Otherwise all planning should be done by the boys. Second, avoid the Mormon troops. Third, avoid troops that have a high number of autistic snowflake weird kids, usually this step can be avoided by finding troops that fit the qualifications of the first step.
    Sadly however, it is getting harder for the Boy Scouts so your mileage may vary. When I was in during the 90s and early 2000s it was great. The boys ran the troop but our scoutmaster was a woman. However, she was an experienced hiker and very adamant about letting “boys be boys” so her tenure was very hands off. Lots of fun. Her hands off approach taught me a lot. Things went downhill as I left as some bluepilled guy took over the leadership and started micromanaging the kids. Also, the new cuck put an end to older kids hazing the younger kids, which the previous woman did not mind as “boys will be boys.” This part is absolutely instrumental to the development of young scouts as it toughens them up and builds trust.
    Which brings me to my final point, join a venture crew. It’s boy scouts affiliated but co-ed and has way less rules and organization.

    1. Have you looked at Royal Rangers? It is Christian but more like old scouts.

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