US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1761

On August 17 2019 11:00 Falling wrote:

Spanking ≠ Abuse, unless you define Spanking = Thrashing

I hadn't heard of the organization, but the two stories that popped up, sounded like serious government over reach to me.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36026458
First one- some analysis of lack of eye contact in a home video = baby "suffering serious psychological harm"

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/a-big-state-versus-a-poor-family-canadian-s-son-forcibly-removed-in-norway-1.3804956

Second one- kid gets bullied and threatened with death in school. Parents pull kid, temporary homeschool until they can transfer to another school. Authorities show up and tackle the kid because he didn't want get taken away by the authorities- then they take him away.

I don't know. Maybe there's some follow up stories that reveals more, but on the face of it, seems pretty horrific to me.

On August 17 2019 11:46 KwarK wrote:

Would you be fine with being spanked by someone as an adult? Because usually the rules are that nobody is allowed to hit the parent doing the spanking but hitting a child is okay. And that's always struck me as a little unreasonable.

On August 17 2019 11:50 GreenHorizons wrote:
I think spanking is appropriate in situations where the child put themselves in serious harm.

Darting out into a busy parking lot is a good reason to spank a child and I know I'd have preferred that to a Cadillac bumper.

It's not an excuse to not do the rest of parenting but I disagree that spanking is always wrong/abuse. Granted we're talking mostly psychological (they are frightened by the sound and sudden sensory input, not welts on their ass), not kicking a kids ass.

My understanding is that psychological science's best analysis shows spanking is never superior to not spanking. Since spanking has no benefit over just putting more effort into being a good parent, the fact that it can only be neutral at best means it should never be done. Choosing to spank is choosing to be a worse parent. Never justifiable.

On August 17 2019 11:46 KwarK wrote:

Would you be fine with being spanked by someone as an adult? Because usually the rules are that nobody is allowed to hit the parent doing the spanking but hitting a child is okay. And that's always struck me as a little unreasonable.

On August 17 2019 12:01 Muliphein wrote:


How does harming the child and damaging the trust relationship make it ok when there is a more serious harm?




What an idiotic false dichotomy. Yeah, yanking the child away from being hit by a Cadillac bumper is of course the the right thing to do, while that same yanking of a child to stop it from taking a cookie would be corporal punishment. But that is not what you are saying. You propose it as a punishment.

But otherwise, I don't see how doing harm to a child and your relationship with it, using a method that teaches them nothing about proper behavior, and learns them to copy from you a terrible way to behave is a good thing. I want to make an argumentem ad absurdum now, but honestly anything I can come up with that that follows the same logic and that is more absurd that this exact argument you make is completely ludicrous. It all assumes that there is no way to stop a child from getting really hurt by deliberately hurting it just a little bit. I'd say that any parent for which this is true should indeed get their child taken away from them.



Yes, the actual damage to the child is psychological. If it were physical, it wouldn't be called spanking. And because we are talking about kids and a parent raising the kid, it can be very damaging. Your actual good parenting won't have any effect if it is common for the child to spank.

I feel that this entire argument from spanking can only be made if you 1) Think the child is your property and not an actual human with human rights and 2) Think that it doesn't really matter what happens in the brain and with the development of the child, as long as it follows your instructions right here and right now.

And then you can spank it if it doesn't listen and the direct result would be that it will avoid doing the behavior associated with being hurt. And then you don't have to worry at all about actual parenting and the actual burden of having a child.


I'd also like to point out that reward and punishment ie positive and negative reinforcement, as a teaching method for both humans and animals have lost their scientific support about 30 years ago. We know kids, or dogs or any other animal, do not actually learn through being punished or being rewarded.

On August 17 2019 12:12 Falling wrote:

I'm not convinced most studies have filtered for open-handed swatting vs being struck frequently with objects, beatings, whippings, thrashings, etc and whether the household on the whole is nurturing. I'd have to see the studies to even see what they were grouping together. I mean, it's rather hard to study in the first place given that it's not like you can just run an experiment with a control and experimental group and expect an ethics board will sign off on. So you have to rely on correlations in a more roundabout way.

And it matters what you include and what you exclude- what the definitions are.

It's like the average life expectancy in the Middle Ages is supposed to be 35 or something. But that number was the average, including all infant mortality, which true that is the average. But it doesn't mean people are keeling over at age 37. It meant 50% of children didn't make it out of age 2 or 3, but if you get out of that age bracket, you could live till your sixties or more. But I took it at face value until I reached 30 myself, and started telling my students, if I were in the Middle Ages, I'd almost be dead. And then, I thought, that's gotta be B.S. Something's fishy. Which is when I started looking at where the numbers came from.

Or that cynical 'you only have a 50% chance of your marriage lasting'. Turns out they were just comparing marriages to divorces in a given year- but that made no allowances for serial divorcees- which if you are on your third marriage, that has a 75% chance of failure. We can talk upwards of six different marriages by the same serial divorcee. Hell, Hollywood might even tip the scales. So there's a lot of divorces alright, but a lot of the failed marriages are the same people failing again and again. Once you start filtering for that, it's nothing like 50% fail rate. Definitions matter.


Would you be fine if your neighbour confined you to your room with no TV until their say so? Or if your neighbour denied you your dessert until you ate your vegetables?
Or to put it in a more productive way- are you maintaining that there is no essential distinction between the relationship of a parent and their child (when they are a child) vs two random adults?

Meaning behavior is changed to avoid the authority figure finding out vs changing a bad act.

My neighbour can refuse me access to their house or not buy me dessert as much as they like. That's a really bizarre comparison you're making there. Not being given something is not the same thing as being assaulted.

On August 17 2019 12:13 GreenHorizons wrote:
I don't know what reasoning skills the 2 y.o. around you have but ...

... the point is spanking them gives them a negative association to doing something like darting out into a busy parking lot. So instead of flashing back to getting hit by a car (or being dead) they remember the spanking and think "I'm don't want that to happen again" as opposed to just having it explained and forgetting what they heard by the next time they are in a parking lot.

I think you can hit adults under certain conditions too and it's not because I think I own them but does have a lot to do with the critical nature of following instructions immediately.

That said violent domination is how our society is regulated so spanking (If I refuse commands from a criminal cop I'm going to get my ass whooped or killed for example) is probably a lot closer to how society really functions unless you want to just actually make children debt slaves.

On August 17 2019 12:52 Muliphein wrote:


How do you think humans get reasoning skills? You think it goes automatically. The brain of a 2 year old is a sponge. Of course you cannot reason with a 2 year old, which is exactly why you should try to do it.



So your literal argument for spanking is that if you don't do it, the kid will end up dead. wtf man, I always knew you were a right wing lunatic. If this reasoning is valid, you can justify literally everything. I have argued with many right wing lunatics on this over the years, and this is literally the worst argument in support of spanking I have ever heard. I cannot get over the fact that you literally said in parenthesis 'being dead' as the alternative to spanking. Yeah, spanking must be a good thing then!



If I had believed you, I would literally beat the crap out of you.



So because the US has violent insane cops, and you are obsessed with that, Europeans should start beating their children again?

Donno where the 'debt' part comes in.


All an American cop defender ever has to do when you attach cop violence is point this exact post here and anything else you say will drench from a level of hypocrisy never even reached by DauntX or Dangler.

On August 17 2019 07:48 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think this article does a better job portraying the issues in xm(z's post. I'm obviously not defending the cases where they've wrongly accused people of domestic abuse, but here the 'false allegations of abuse' referenced refers to the parents admitting in an interview that they spank their children and pull them by the ear - both being illegal and abusive practices..

Children are increasingly being considered autonomous humans rather than future adults, and I think it's a very positive development.

On August 17 2019 13:03 GreenHorizons wrote:
lmao there must be some serious communication failure going on here. You're welcome to come to Seattle and try it under our mutual combat laws though if you're feeling froggy.

On August 17 2019 13:21 Muliphein wrote:


Yes, because you still seem to be under the delusion that what you said is believable. Otherwise, you wouldn't have brought this up because under the assumption that you are not believable, my position is the opposite of what you now seem to think it is.

Is there someone worse at (deliberate) bad reading comprehension than you?


You literally said:

"I think spanking is appropriate in situations where the child put themselves in serious harm."

And then your clarification:

"So instead of flashing back to getting hit by a car (or being dead) they ..." should get spanked.

This is literally what you said in your post.


But maybe you are trying to say "The only case where spanking is not bad is when it is the only thing that saves the kid from sudden death (ie never)."

EDIT: Just curious how you feel about "boogie man" stories to get kids to do stuff and whether you would include notions of heaven or hell as a punishment for misdeeds in that?

On August 17 2019 13:46 Pangpootata wrote:
There are certain circumstances where spanking works better at correcting behavior.

Let's say you have a child with down syndrome who is never going to develop past a certain mental stage.

The child cannot understand explanations of what is wrong and what is right. Spanking creates negative reinforcement (Action -> Pain) that causes the child to avoid taking that action in future.