| U.N. rules Canada should ban spanking

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003 22:29:50 -1000, "Brandon"
wrote:


"Kane" wrote in message
. com...

Asking for proof of schooling one's child is objectionable? Well, I
can see it would be if there were no allegation.

Are you saying then that an allegation, a claim, of wrongdoing
should
be ignored by those charged with investigating such claims?

Such allegations should be investigated just as an allegation that
you had
murdered someone would be investigated.

Yep, that's just what I expect. Though I do think you are overstating
just a tad. I don't think, for instance, that someone pilfering from
my tool shed would or should be investigated in quite the same manner
as a murder of someone in my family.

If you can overstate to make a point, you give me license to
understate. Kinda silly, no?

The government should *assume* that every parent is a good parent who
is
properly providing for their children, just as the government must
assume
you are innocent of murder.

Yep, that is the case in this country, though again I wouldn't go so
far. In fact the minimal acceptable standards for CPS investigatings
being triggered are usually much LOWER than you or I would label as
"good parent."

They cannot simply walk up to your house and
demand that you prove your innocence.

Yep, they cannot do that. They don't. Not without risking you turning
them away.

But they can walk up and ask you questions about your parenting if
they have received ANY information that you the safety of your child
is imperiled.

There is due process.

Yep, and there is. You haven't described one such instance of it so
far. Everthing you have listed IS within due process limits.

CPS investigators take the same kind of accusatory calls that 911
police calls receive...in fact many child safety allegation calls are
to 911.

CPS investigators, unlike police, to not patrol looking for violators
or public safety concerns. They still have the same responsibilities
though if any come to their attention that involved children.

The police go out without a warrant and investigate. CPS investigators
do the same.

Requiring either to obtain a warrant prior to gaining enough knowledge
to convince a magistrate to issue a warrant would be quite a nice win
for criminals and abusers. They wouldn't get one.

Hence, I, and I presume you if you are the least civic minded,
understand why families are INVESTIGATED.

The limits of what police and cps investigators can say and do are
quite careful proscribed. If you don't personally know those limits
neither LEs or CPSIs are required to advise you of them. Only when an
arrest is affected and charges are in the offing (either the LE has
witnessed a chargable offense, or has enough to get a warrant and is
back to investigate further) are they required by law to so advise
you.

Have you noticed there is a movement afoot to end Mirandizing
suspects?


When it comes to intrusion into the home, due process is frequently
thrown
out the window "for the children."

Give us some instances. I know there are a few, and the perps were
charged and often civil penalties were levied as well as disciplines
for officers or investigators. But that does not show that all such
investigations are not pursued within the limits of due process.

Kane

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 16:09:23 -0500, "Michael S. Morris"
wrote:




Sunday, the 12th of October, 2003

(beginning of part 2 of 2)



************************************************* *********

Kane:
and that is not what happens when a child who is
busy experimenting and exploring (no matter how
YOU interpret that behavior) is met with pain
from the one person that she should be able to
trust as a teacher...a true teacher.

He is not met with pain for exploring and experimenting.
He is met with pain for disobeying a commandment I have
given him. That is all.

His activity that you command him to stop or modify was exploring
experimenting. You deflect him to slavish attention to you at the
peril of his development and the safety of others on the planet.

Certainly not everything I tell him or
do with him counts as a commandment I have given him.
In fact very few things count as commandments, and
he knows which ones those are. The commandments are few
and are designed for his safe and for his good behaviour
*until he is an age to know and understand and,
possibly, choose for himself, safety and goodness*.

He has had to aquiese to you what he should be encouraged to discover
for himself.

It is simply laziness that you do not simply phsically supervise and
modify the environment sufficiently so you do not have to give
"commands" until he is old enough to learn by other means.

You are imposing your arrogant will on him.


There is no such thing with me, or I doubt with any
other parent around these parts, with using pain in
order to teach academic lessons or bicycle riding
or anything else like that. A spanking is simply not
about that. At all. It is about punishment for disobedience
to a commandment, and that commandment given for the child's
safety and to inculcate a habit of good behaviour.

The same principles of teaching a child to do things without using
pain apply in those things you have chosen to use pain for.

Read the Embry report.

Kane:
Pain does not bring out the ability to ride a bicycle,
nor to ponder the moral issues in hitting one's sister,

Whoa! Not at all the desired thing. Pondering the
moral issues in hitting one's sister is something I
want my child to be able to do at age 15 and at age
18 and at age 40. *When he is of an age to ponder,
then let him ponder*. What is desired now is simply
that he does not hit his sister!

He can "ponder" it far younger than that. He can get the basics
without much understanding as early as four if he's normal in his
development...but given the reliance on our mediating his learning
through the use of pain you may no other choice but to continue it.

I do not have to hit a child to get him to stop hitting another one.
Even young nursery school attendents are taught how to do that.


Kane:
or the empathy that is the basis for the
development of conscience. Empathy is retarded
by distraction, built by focus on the other person.

Sympathy is possible, empathy, no.

Sorry, you are a product then of someone that pounded the seeds of
empathy out of you. It's evident in your inability to fathom why pain
parenting is counterproductive.

The seed of empathy, and empathy being the path to conscience, is that
response a tiny child, a crawler, has to cry when another child cries.

It isn't sympathy, it's an automatic reaction. It is not controlled by
the child thinking about the other child's experience that made them
cry (that is what sympathy is...feeling sorry for someone on observing
or learning of their discomfort).

Empathy is a very different sort of thing indeedy. It is a form of
feeling what the other person is feeling. Often it's clumsy when being
learned and inaccurate as all getout if intellectually modulated, as
it is a feeling, not a thought.


And, no, I do not think it is the basis for the development of
conscience, so I quarrel right there with another of your pop
psych tenets.

There is a very long line of researchers and investigators that I'd
hardly refer to as pop psi that I drew that information from, and my
own late in life discovery of the feeling of empathy.


Kane:
You can't even get a child to pay attention
to YOUR feelings, let alone another's feelings,
by the use of pain.

This is the part that is nonsense. I'm not trying to
get him to pay attention to anyone else's goddam
feelings, fer chrissake.

Tsk tsk. I am, as later when it counts and I'm not their to enforce
compliance and he is tested in an ethical matter I wish feelings of
empathy...conscience, to come into play.

Their feelings are their
responsibility. And I am not the keeper of my brother's
feelings.

Damn certain. The attention to another's feelings is a highly self
interested exercise. If I know his or her feelings and can avoid
getting my ass shot off. It's worked for me in Northern Cambodia, and
in parts of China, as well as in our own more isolated communities in
the US.

About the time I stop paying attention to what others think and feel I
get knives pulled on me...or did.

All of society would plummet into the
emotional basket-case level of daytime talkshow
therapy were we to agree to that kind of principle.

Hyperbole. Never happen. Empathy was a key component of Jesus message,
and I'm not a Christian so this isn't some slavish adherence to
doctrine, and the foundation of a new way of being in the world.

**** other people's *feelings*.

Tell you what. You try comin' over to my neck of the woods. I'll
introduce you to some of my neighbors and I'll watch you get very damn
interested in their ****in' feelings PDQ, or end up in the river
feeding fish your toes and eyes.

Am I being clear enough
about this point for you? I said I am liberal. I mean that,
and absolutely so.

Sure you are, and you are chicken **** to exercise it in the manner
you just claimed, "**** other people's *feelings*."

Try it and watch what happens.

This is why I refer to your kind, child pain enforcers, as cowards.
They are helpless to stop you ****in' other people's feelings. We are
not.

Free speech as an absolute and inalienable
Right,

to the end of my nose and no further. That's my physical, virtual, and
metaphorical nose.

and precisely because an auditor's *feelings* about
what I say to him are *his choice* and his responsibility
under his own self-discipline to choose his feelings wisely.

Excellent. I see evolution at work once again.

Spanking my child is about punishing him for hitting his sister,
when I have told him not to hit his sister, so that he does
not hit his sister again.

Yes, I understand that perfectly and it works perfectly for you? He
doens't hit his sister any more? And he hasn't yet worked out other
ways to get her?

My kids stopped squabbling the day I learned to listen to them in a
supportive way, respecting their thoughts and their emotions in my
reponses. Funny how that worked. My son talked for six days straight
he was full of pent up thoughts and feelings, then became a very
quiet, project focused little boy, learning a great clip (we
homeschooled) far more than ever before. To this day he is the same,
quiet, thoughtful, moral as a deacon (well, more moral), and the best
roomie I ever stayed with.

It has zero to do with having him
think about how his sister might *feel* about being hit, or
whether, regardless of what she feels, it mightn't be cool to
go ahead and hit her anyway.

So morality is not going to be based on his obeying you, not on his
being helped to understand why we don't hit?

There will come a time when he
will be of an age of reason and can think about those
things, and if he decides, like Raskolnikov, he wants to go ahead
and hit his sister anyway, he will be ethically, and then of
a certain age, legally responsible for *his* decision. What we
are talking about when he is 3 is not "reasoning it out" but
simply not doing it in the first place.

At three I don't have to hit a child or teach him a damn thing except
by example. I see far too many parents moralizing and preaching to
three year olds. All I have to do to be responsible is remove him from
the play area ( a bit of a lesson in itself ) and comfort his sister
if he managed to hit her.

I don't have to demonstrate how to hit to try and get him to stop.

Kane:
Now this conversation may well end if you are
one of those that believes that morality is
not human based but rule based.

I haven't a clue what you could mean by that. I believe
in Natural Law (as a distinct belief from my belief in
scientific Laws of Nature). I.e. I believe ethical rules
are written into the fabric of the universe and into the
human condition. I do not believe that humans have
any choice, any autonomy, about being able to rewrite those
ethical rules. I reject utterly the idea that "To the Nazis,
Auschwitz may have been the right thing to do". I reject
moral relativism. But that certainly does not mean I think
ethics is reduceible to 10 commandments or to 37 approved
sexual positions.

That's nice. Now wipe the spittle from your chin. It's embarrassing
me.

You are assigning me characteristics again that I haven't exhibited,
but if it makes you feel better and gives relief, have a go.

Kane:
I don't follow rules because they are rules and they
come from some authority. I follow rules because
they have proven to be the wisest choice of all in how
I feel if I break them, and how I feel if I keep them.

Why is it this pop psych stuff always comes down to
waving around feelings like some banner?

Oh, maybe because they are one of the factors in morals. I can get a
whole lot more long term trustworthy compliance out of a child the
respects and trusts me than one that is afraid of me. Respect is a
feeling as is trust and fear.

So feelings it is. I think you are feeling disabled. You assume
feelings are somehow mawkish and useless. How one feels about
something is a very powerful part of humans.

Are you not having feelings right now about this exchange? Do those
feelings not drive you to some thoughts?

You may think you think in a vacume but that is just a feeling....r r
r r

God save us
from government by feelings!

There is no God.

And government is one huge bundle of feelings and our government was
based on a great many motivating factors that were feelings. Feelings
of being exploited by George, of being abused by his minions, of being
empoverished by practicies, and most especially over all this, the
feeling of being negated, disrespected, by him.

The refusal to admit to feelings and to face up to them has created a
lot of agony for humans.

In any event, I don't care
if "thou shalt not commit murder" comes from God or
is written into your Freudian subconscious

I don't have a subconcious. I have memory tracks I don't access
regularly. Thats about it.

so you feel
uneasy about it when you break it.

Uneasiness if for the timid about feelings. I look'em squarly in the
face and know them to be nothing or damned important in the moment.

Saved my ass in some very hairy situations.

All I care about is
you don't commit murder.

If I did would you have a feeling about that? Like someone you loved?

You big old liberal macho posturers are the first to fall into a heap
sobbing and helpless when something really imporatant happens and you
suffer a loss.

It's not because you are wimps. It's because you don't practice having
feelings and are stuck with your poor coping skills, like booze, and
drugs, and moralizing, and pontificating, and being the village
buffoon.


Kane:
If we all did that there would be [no] need
for enforcement, and whackin' away on kids butts.

I stuck in my emendation, which I trust is
what you meant.

I don't recall seeing any improvement to your prior statement. It's
just more of the same offal.

And sure, if men were angels
there would be no need for enforcement of any kind.

I have no hope of nonenforcement.

But, guess what? Men come hard-wired for evil.

They also come hard wired for good. It's all in the way you cast the
world around you in the image you believe in.

And
that is the problem. And they are hard-wired for it as
children

Bull****. Children have no concept of evil. They are explorers, even
of the concepts of evil and good. They don't know it in any sense
until later in life.

Forcing them to identify themselves or their actions as evil early in
life is what hardens the wiring...and it can go either way, good or
evil.

Good and or evil are taught because the child is available with both
for the nurturing and teaching.

long before they get to an age to reason
about it.

Bull**** the best quality. You could grow a champion Pumpkin on yours.

Behaving badly is easy.

Behaving good is easy. Children do it all the time. The problem here
is that they don't know it is good or bad, only if it passes or it
doesn't. Goodness or badness is taught.

It takes reason
and it takes long habit to be able to behave well.

That is obviously spoken by someone that had to work at it. My kids
moved right into angelic behavior with an eager and happy enthusiasm
shortly after I had my first empathetic experienced and learned that
they had feelings I could tap into respectfully.

You have a desert in your heart.

I said:
then he has just ruled out all of our
common sense and common experience.
Kane:
R R R R, I've ruled out nothing but your neurosis
and your lack of common sense. Common sense based
on ignorance is not sense, it is just ignorance.

Kids who are disciplined are well-behaved. Kids who are
not disciplined are ill-behaved.

At one, six months, two, three?

And you are dead wrong there bubbah. Kids that are disciplined is what
I had. Very. Highly. And are disciplined adults as a result.

Droves of kids that I say "disciplined" with pain are not self
disciplained in their adult lives.

There are numerous examples among public figures as well, some coming
from highly moral venues. They fall apart when tempted. My kids have
been tempted just as all kids.

I did not have to supervise them as teens. They had their own powerful
discipline to rely on and they did very well indeed.

Spanked kids end up in jail rather a lot. Unspanked kids are a super
rarity in prisons. Researchers, like Fischer of the Chigago School of
Social Science couldn't find any when he tried to find them. He was
just looking for unspanked kids and probably expected the place to be
loaded with them. Nope, not a one.


Kane:
How common sense is built is by observing.

My point exactly. The child, on a visit as a guest to
another house, whose hand has not ever been whacked
for disobedience, will destroy anything he finds that
he is curious about and which, lacking self-discipline,
he reaches for and finds, too late, fragile.

Not if he's young and properly constrained and supervised. If he is
older one cannot be sure of what he will do. I have often heard
parents say things, after a particularly eggregious offense declare,
"I don't understand it, he's never done anything like this before, we
have taught him better." And we all in this society know what "taught"
stands for in this format.

I took my children everywhere with me, even my tiny baby son to
college classes. They were welcome everwhere and enjoyed by the
adults. They did not interupt adult conversation without asking
permission, they did not touch other's things without asking, they did
not destroy anything ever unless it was a complete accident and I
can't remember one anyway.

This from the earliest age I could release them from kiddie restraints
of various kinds, at about 2 and a half, to their adult years. They
still are respectful of others things, and my son is a damn compulsive
neatnick...embarrasses me, something of a slob, to visit his house and
after all these years see him still making up his bed the way I taught
him at 8 or 9, with military folds. He can bounce that pervervial 50
cent piece now just as we played with to teach him to make that
hospital cornered bed then.

My children were gracious hosts at as young as 9 or 10 to visitors,
but oddly my daugher once asked me to kick a man off our ranch when
she was twelve.

I was stunned by the request given the kindness and friendliness of
this kid. I asked her why. She told me he had been threatening to hit
children that were watching him work on a bunk house I had hired him
to build.

My kids and the others there never got in anyone's way, but they
wanted very much to learn by watching and imitating...I sanctioned it
strongly and he had been told about and agreed to it.

I drove him forthwith the the highway and put him and his bags out and
invited him to ride his rude thumb out of the country. He went. He was
incredulous when I told him I was firing and kickin' for what a child
had requested.

No one threatens children in my presence and certainly not on my land.
You come here and hit a child, even your own and you are going to pay
big time. And I own the local law so you can forget going that way.

I have observed this
too many times to count: How a lack of discipline---probably
parental fear of imparting discipline, and probably resultant
from the infection of society with pop psychological beliefs---leads
to a child's disregard of and destruction of other people's
property and, ultimately, to a disregard of other people's
person as that child's default mode of behaviour.

And you can prove to us these where unpunished children then? In a
country where folks claim that 90% are spanked?

They may not have been hit when you were watching but my guess is they
were reactive children. I've seen it, since I have about 90% of the
population to observe, rather a lot.

Spanked children that are NOT well behaved. Unspanking isn't the
problem you are seeing. It's undisciplined. They have not been taught
to repesctfully to respect others. Far more likely to have been
spanked.

I never had to hit my children in public to make them behave...because
I never had to hit them to make them behave, and they were high energy
extremely active and curious.

I could be laying in the hammock napping, they'd come screaming and
chasing each other with their freinds into the yard, and suddenly
withint about thirty feet dead silence and running past on tip toes.

I never asked them to do that. They chose to and asked their friends
to, and we had a supremely joyful life.


Kane:
How it turns into valuable knowledge that can
be applied is by never closing the loop....always
being open to new interpretations and new views
being considered.

Consider this.....everything the child does, no matter
how YOU might interpret it, is no more or less than an
experiment to learn how to live.

You know, I'm a physicist. We fry things and blow them up in
experiments. My children are not "experiments in how to live".
They are precious trusts to me, every one of whom I have to do
right by, and none of whom I will actually be able to do 100% right
by. Anyway, you sound like you are quoting glib language from
a pop psych book again. And, well, it's just wrong.

I can't believe you are a scientist. Oh, not that I don't believe what
you are saying but that you are so locked into a traditional belief
about human beings when you have to, by your discipline NOT be about
the physical universe.

Do you think I meant that one had to do distructive testing on humans?
One can try things without harm of all kinds with humans. And kids
love those things.

They used to really get kick out of experiments in social change. We'd
have a switch day...they could be anyone they wished, and so would we.
Every had to play or we wouldn't do it...no hurt feelings.

It was fun, and a bit embarassing to seem my son stand with his hands
on his hips and ask me, "are you going to line up your shoes by the
door or not?" You can easily guess who he was that day.

We learned a lot doing those things. My kids got to lecture and
discipline me. And at the end of the game happily gave up that role.
It gets tiresome quickly.

We would take rides on public transportation (because we lived so far
out I had to find ways to expose my homeschooled kids to society) and
watch families and individuals and speculate on outcomes of how they
treated each other.


Kane:
When you, their assigned guardian and protector,
their trusted teacher of how to tie shoelaced,
feed themselves, bake a cupcake, think their
throwing of objects out of their play pen is
defiance and just to make you pick up after them,
and you resort to the shocking act of hitting them,
they just were betrayed.

Well, you are, quite stereotypically

Bull****, Mike. Utter. I've been admired and abjured as a damn
annoying pioneer in many things human behavior wise. I am not anything
like anyone you've known before though you want to pretend I am.

I might add, confusing
several things together here.

If you, in a discussion of the elements listed everything in the
periodic table would you be mixing several things together? And that
would be wrong or bad how?

Since my children wouldn't be
put in a playpen at an age when they could bake a cupcake.

I didn't name an age. There you go again.

In fact, at an age when they were in a playpen, I doubt spanking
would have been the appropriate response.

Ah, a spark of humanity. I kept on with when I was tempted to just
give up because I had a "feeling" r r r r

Since, for spanking
to work, they have to be able to take a clear command before
they can be punished for disobeying it, and I associate a
playpen with probably too young a child for that.

So do I. I happen to associate any age under six as being too young to
meaningfully take a command. I will not punish a child for not obeying
me if they cannot understand the meaning of the commmand, but then I
don't punish at any age, not need to to discipline a child.

But, no, the betrayal is in not punishing them for misbehaviour
that you have told they shall not do. *That* is betrayal.

Bull****. The betrayal is in using any punishment at all. And not
using other painless means instead.

Of your
responsibility as a parent.

Odd. I didn't punish in any sense, and hardly before, from the time my
children were very little. The outcome is marvelous. What did I do
wrong?

My kids, outside of being the fine folks I know then to be, are
otherwise pretty ordinary. No jail, no violence. Just nice people. Pay
their taxes, work extraordiarily hard, pay their bills, have hobbies
that are pretty innocent of harm to the environment or others,
photography, long range target shooting, and a whole lot of ongoing
college education...still.

What evidence do you have that I didn't meet my responsibilities as a
parent by not giving them commands and then hurting them if they
didn't obey?

I explained to them that if I ever gave a command it would be only the
direst of dangerous situations and to respond instantly to the
directions in the command. We played practice a few times and that was
that. I never had occasion to test it as my kids, after their very
early learning with a kind and gentle father, 6' 1" and 250 lbs of
axeswinging fencepost driving martial arts practitioner father, just
didn't get themselves into dangerous situations on their own.

And it was pretty hard for others to lure them into trouble as well.
It could be done, but on the rare occasions it happened they elegantly
solved the problem with no harm to them or others.

Do you think I was just lucky?

To show them the rules that invisibly
surround them, Spanking is one method of that punisment.

You can't show them the rules without punishment? You can't teach them
the rules without pain?

Hell your kids learned all they needed to know about gravity to be
safe when they first learned to walk and laid the groundwork during
that time they ran you or your wife after things they threw out of the
crib, playpen, and highchair.

A child development specialist tipped me to that. He called little
kids practicing experimental physicists. He also taught me that like
all of us lessons have to be repeated, and for a newbie on the planet,
many many times, to accept and learn basic physical principles.

My eyes opened when I got it the kid wasn't running me at all. She
thought I was helping her learn about gravity. We did similar
exercises in sound and light. What fun and painless too. Well, except
for my sometime tired back r r r r


Often
it is the best method available.

Naw. It's a lazy thoughtless and dangerous practice. One slip is all
it takes.

And the sexual organs are too close to the seat of the spankings and
become excited by the impact. Risky I tells yah!

But I certainly would not insist
that it is the only method.

Well, I wouldn't ask you to. And there is not method I use that is the
only method. Mine just happen to be based in child development reality
and no pain or punishment involved. I only use pain based and pain
free parenting like a shorthand symbol.

While I only used a few at a time, my repertoire of ways to teach a
child without punishment grew huge by the time my kids were old
enought to be on their own. I went back to school and into work with
children.

Even there I ran circles around the other staff who were not free of
the pain models. They gave me the toughest problems. Everything from
violent attacking little animals, to sloths that barely would move.
What ever it was I had them reacting to me positively sometimes in as
littel as two minutes. Some would take a couple of weaks. The only two
I felt I never reached and just had to manage, were a boy that had
watched his grandmother shot his father/grandfather. Think about that
title for a second and you'll figure out why grandma might have been a
bit upset with grandpa.

When asked on the stand why she shot him she said "he wouldn't quit
****in' off the front porch." I got to sit by her whenever she came to
visit the boy in treatment, (she did short time and was out quickly).

He had a great moral gap in him, that boy. Shock or something I guess.
Dangerous lad in a sneaky but attractive way. By 13 he had probably
bedded five or six girls in his neighborhood. He ran from us and did
another one in a local motel room he broke into.

The other boy....brrrr....that was one I hope I never see again. He
was handsome too in a billybob sort of way, but with perversions I
wont't describe her. He was the mother ****er...not I'm not calling
him a name, I'm calling him a 13 or 14 year old rapist of his own
mother.

All spanked kids, Mike. All spanked. All "disciplined" and it failed.

Kane:
Do you KNOW why little children throw things
out of their playpen or off their highchair tray,
again and again and again...ad neauseum?

Give me a break, Kane. I have not spanked my children
for being toddlers and throwing food off their high chairs.
Once again, you miss the point with a straw-man-style
argument.

Did I say you spanked them? You have decided now that I cannot use
examples unless they are strictly limited to an age and an event. Tsk.

I guess you wouldn't mind if I did the same to you then? Naw, I'm not
like you, a manipulative scumbag of a coward who hits children.


[...]

Kane:
Children are compelled to be practical physicists.
They MUST experiment, and it has to be replicated
to be believed. And they must do it for themselves.
Hitting inhibits that learning.

And so on. Look, perhaps we could skip over the
pop psych book and get to the scientific study which
backs up, well, really, anything you say? I mean, it's
cute that you want to write "children are compelled to
be practical physicists" and you are caught up in their
"natural creativity" and this sort of Rousseauian
picture of childhood as innocence

Children are not either in the sense you claim. They are innocent of
knowing good or evil. They just know being.

and the evil
hand of civilization and conservative tradition of
corporal punishment as the thing that crushes the
natural good out of them

That is a pretty good, though hyperbolic, rendition of what I found
treating the ones that couldn't survive their "discipline" with the
good stimulated, yes.

and turns them all into ax
murderers (which begs the question why more of 'em
weren't ax murderers 50 years ago when spanking was
more universally accepted).

Are you kidding me. Lizzie Borden. All kinds of slicers and dicers at
the World's Fair of 1900. England, that paragon of corporal punishment
based "discipline" awash in street and kidnapping killings by sickos
we still speculate about the identities of.

How many more do you need to make a connection with the then highly
popular birchings and switchings and strapping and whoopins' and other
accepted, as you accept now, "disciplines" the day?

But, sooner or later we
need a fact or two (maybe like a cite to a study?) to
bolster the rhetorical expansiveness, don't you think?

I will if you will. I have, come to think of it, you just haven't had
time to read them yet.


I said:
He is probably also at odds with any and
every evolutionary biological explanation
for pain that I've ever run across.
Kane:
No, only with the ones based on ignorance of
learning theory. I'm not against learning from pain.

Oh, I thought you said distraction inhibits learning and
that pain is a distraction.

Yes I did. And I still say so. I also know that things can be learned
from pain. Incidentaly they may be things we want to learn, like an
unbrushed rotting tooth best be taken care of.

Moral principles don't lend themselves well to pain based instruction.
Not be laying it on and not by witnessing thereof. Even the threat of
death, while death itself will stop a behavior, won't teach people not
to do crime. And death is a very poor teacher to the dead.

Must've been my mistake about that.

Not at all. Fundy thinkers tend to see what they want, even when their
noses are rubbed in the truth, like spanking is not hitting. Is that
one of those you believe in?

I'm going to patiently wait for that study where you are going to show
us how spanking and abuse are different and the clear demarcation
between the two. You may include switching, strapping, and any other
of the cowardly avoidance terms you wish.

So, you now think pain doesn't necessarily inhibit learning?

Yes I think it inhibits learning. I said, you silly ass ****in' twit
that it inhibits certain kinds of learning. It works extremely well in
low dosage for warning of problems, like I'm waaaaay to close to this
fire for safety. And this pain in my side is getting more
uncomfortable.

It is a very poor teacher of morality as it uses an essentially
immoral method, the striking of a child to cause pain, to try and
teach the child not to inflict pain on others.

And it's also damned hard to figure out what the stupid giant wants
now when he hurts me for not obeying his command and picking up this
glass doodad. I only wanted to see how the light shown through it at
this angle, and he seems to think I'm evil incarnate and in defiance
of him...who does he think he is, gawd almighty himself then?"

So, what was the point about those scientific brain scan studies
anyway?

That pain inhibits learning disrupting the task usually required to
learn. They came out of a percieved need from people who had trouble
with learning because of cronic pain. One would think, if I understand
you, they would learn more easily, pain focusing the attention and
all.

Or do you now agree with my original point that science does
not and cannot address the question of the goodness of the practice
of spanking?

No, don't agree. You are a pompous twit to claim it can't. I can and
does address pain and spanking involves pain in what should be a
learning situation.

You can word play it to death and that's not going to change.

The fact a supposedly loving parent who used to show concern and
patience and was gentle in all things has suddenly turned into a
hitting monster who barks commands and then hits before I can
understand what he wants is the problem.

Did you know that it's common knowledge among mommies that care to
notice that when you tell a toddler (and sometimes older kids) not to
do something they can't process the "not" in the message well, and
tend to respond by doing. Do not eat the dog food, get turned around
in the kids head (I wonder if they are spanked kids) and they hear, Do
eat the dog food. Don't jump on the bed is jump on the bed.

This isn't pop psi, it's just known by mommies that spend days on end
with chidlren. They learn pretty damn quickly to say things like, jump
only on the trampoline Billy. Eat your cereal and let Fido eat his dog
food Billy.

Kane:
I'm against the deliberate application of pain by
(from his point of view) a child's protector.

I'm sure you are. It probably seems icky to you.

No, the thinking that goes along with justifying it digusts me, if you
wish to label it "icky."

The doing of it is entirely another matter. It's cowardly and sick
when justified by the bogus claims that it protects the child. They
used to tell women they'd just be jostled and mistreated in the
polling places and having the vote would confuse them.

That myth fell, this one will.

I can't help you there. Don't spank your kids, I
guess.

Thanks, I didn't an no one else's either and my methods were copied by
other professionals for treatment modalities that worked extremely
well.

Kane:
Children get more than enough naturally
consequential pain to learn about what
does and doesn't cause pain.

Sometimes they learn, sometimes they are killed in
those kind of lessons. I am willing to spank in order
to better the odds that my kids will learn more quickly
how to keep themselves safe.

Then children that are spanked should be dying from accidental causes
at a far lower rate than unspanked children. Have you a citation we
could examine, from scientific literature or contracted surveys from
the CDC mortality archives.

I'll gamble on Embry. I'll tell Dennis, if you wish, that his work was
just pop psi. He'll probably lose tenure when his school finds out.

Kane:
Why would you want to create an artificial application
of pain that to the child is so often impossible to connect
to the exploritory behavior they were performing?

Connection to what they were doing is absolutely irrelevant.

Spoken in fascist tones if ever I've seen them.

The connection of spanking is to a commandment I gave them and
they then transgressed.

Then the must attend to YOU instead of their environment. That kind of
ties yah down just a bit doesn't it. Or do you and our wife tagteam
them?

That is all that is needed. And the artificial
is simply on a whole different scale to the natural pain,
which might injure them or kill them, that they could
encounter.

My kids lived around livestock, some of which could be very dangerous.
Are hired hands sometime were injured in their work because of the
dangers. They rode on tractors, around bailers, combines on
neighboring places, falling very large timber with myself and crew,
driving dump trucks, tractors, operating silage chopppers (now there's
a finger shortener) and other task and activities too numerous to
mention.

Not a scratch, well except for that little evergreen my daughter ran
down so viciously as she was trying to turn the tractor on her maiden
voyage. Damn thing steered like a, well, like a tractor.

I'm trying to remember if my kids ever got burned on the wood stove. I
don't think so, and at 8 or 9 I taught them the trick of picking up
and arranging burning logs in the stove without getting burnt. It's
kind of a firewalking sort of thing.

My mom taught me when I was a kid.

And I never punished my kids once for anything.

Fancy that.

Kane:
Are you so insistent on them developing a sense of
guilt, shame, fear, about their environment and insistent
on them being challenged with the thought that
they may in fact be evil creatures deserving torture?

You are simply clueless about this. My children
have snorkeled with sharks in the wild (while Martha
and I were scuba diving on the reef 25 feet below them).
Helen got to touch a shark (which the divemaster brought
up to her to do). I am certainly not insistent on developing
guilt, shame, or fear about their environment. Helen also
now does equestrian eventing, which includes the quite
dangerous activities of stadium- and cross-country-jumping.

I taught those to olympic contenders. Dressage as well. If you were
west coast in the 60s' you would know me. Naw, I see it was too long
ago.

She is 11 years old. The issue is certainly not eliminating
danger from their environment, but in teaching them to have
self-discipline, so that they may be as free as is possible
for them to be when they reach the age of adulthood. And
in keeping them as safe as is possible up until the age
of reason when they can start beginning to make
judgments for themselves.

My kids rode, a lot. No injuries.

Oh, I forgot. They had a friend visit one time a little girl whose
parents where pain parenters. The first and only female firesetter
I've ever run into.

Her first adventure with firesetting was in my back pasture. Damn near
killed us fighting that fire until the fire deparement got their. We
were 15 miles away from the firehouse.

My kids were great too. Sacks and shovels, with the women mostly
running sack soaking to us.

I know how "disciplined" kids are.

My diving was in Hawaii, before my kids were born. Sharks never
bothered me I swam and dove for turtle (legal back then) with Kane's
and Wahine's that claimed to have shark gods in their ancestory.


Kane:
A child believes the parenting they get is the
parenting they deserve.

More pop psychology?

Nope.

Peipers. Tenured professors as I recall. Family counseling practices.
Authors. Developers of some interesting new treatment modalities.

And parents of their own children, some natural, some adopted, some
fostered. Very tough crowd those last two. Spanked kids to a man,
every one.

The popular edition of their work and theories of parenting methods is
called "Smart Love." I used to give it to families trying to work with
our kids and those that adopted or were fostering them. Made a huge
difference in their success rate.

I still get calls from then from time to time thanking me for turning
them on to the book.

Did you get that from a book?

Yes and more from my own hands on experience.

From
five or six books?

Mmmmm........I'd guess many more than that.

Is there something inherently wrong or incorrect in information found
in books? How did you get through college?

Do you think it a truism? Do you figure
there is scientific evidence to prove that "a child"
believes this? Do all children believe this? 90% of
them? 20% of them? One child?

It's one hundred percent because it is a truism. Read their book. They
explain it rather well and it fits in with how children can come to
good and poor ends according to how they are parented.


Kane:
The parent is all powerful to the child, even in
defining who the child is.

Says you. Ho hum.

So then. How does a child view and experience the parenting methods
used on them? Or does that not matter, do you think?

Ho hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?


Kane:
Consider: A child treated with respect, even when
they make mistakes, then would believe they
deserve what?

A child treated with respect is a child punished for
disobedience to a parental command.

Sicko.

Punishment
presumes that the child had the power to choose otherwise.

What book did you get that out of, Dobson the dog torturer?

*That* respects the child as a person.

No it doesn't.

Failure to punish
disobedience to a command exactly treats the child without
respect as a person.

Kant.

It teaches the child he cannot be expected
to choose for himself.

Then it trains him for extremist and exploiters to use.

Have you ever followed the story of victims of the cults. It mostly is
a story of parent how declare, "I cannot understand what they could
hae done to lure her...she was an A student, had a scholarship,
popular had a nice part time job and was a devoted and responsible
daughter."

Little did they know what weaknesses they build into her by an over
reliance on obedience to the parent.

It too readily interprets his
willful choice as a "mistake"---as something beyond his
control.

So mistakes are not ever beyond the control of the child? Each is a
will full choice he could have controled had he not willfully
disobeyed the parent.

I think you have mislabeled your philosophical title. You aren't a
liberal. Classic or otherwise.


Kane:
Now substitute "pain" for "respect."

Been there, done that, and I'm already looking back
up at you from the inside.

If I am respectful of the child, mindful of his capacities and
understanding, and that he is an individual that may be different than
others, I will have no trouble teaching him to respond to my requests.
And conducting himself safely.


Kane:
And either is, for the child, what they will
grow to seek for themselves, as it honors the
beloved parent. They will do it until they die
of old age. A life of self induced pain, or one
of self respect. Your choice.

Then punish disobedience swiftly and consistently.

For maximumizing a life based on pain, the escape from it (our
consumer society is a symptom) or to wallow in it, in the more bizzare
or pointless pursuits of it.

Some folks just keep picking people that beat them up. There's likely
a 90% probability they were spanked.

And you will respect your children as human beings,
and not as though they were particles, planets, or
billiard balls, subject to the external forces of
physics.

You fail to see that is exactly what you are doing, but the sophistry
of labeling punishement as respectful.

Your language is replete with references that would better suit
objects than people.

Kane:
The power that parents have awes me, still.

Again, the rhetorical pose right from out of
a pop pysch book. Oh well, why not?

This Be the Verse

They **** you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were ****ed up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can.
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

Just for you, and for that party trick, Kane.

Never read it before. It's not relevant to my experience. There does
seem to be bits of truth in it though.



I wrote:
Also, think about it for a moment: Whence brain
scans "proving" that pain blocks learning?
Kane:
That is not what I said. I said it blocks the learning
of the desired task.

Then we'd have to see those "brain scan" studies in some
detail, wouldn't we? I mean pain is teaches something, just not
the desired task. I don't recall ever talking about a desired task.
Certainly not using spanking to teach mathematics, as in
your example.

Not to the point. You rarely are.

Kane:
One can still learn....it just becomes exceedingly
difficult

You sound like you can put a number on how difficult
learning becomes.

I have a difficult time putting a measure to that assumption of
yours...that I "sound like" something. I write I don't speak to you.

And my writing doesn't indicate I can put a number to something or
not.

No more than you can split out abuse from spanking with any scientific
measure. But you WRITE as though you are perfectly sure they are
different.

You will afford me the same license you demand for yourself, or I'll
kick your butt up and down mainstreet USENET.

And that that number supports
your adverb "exceedingly". I mean the distraction
studies show 99% of what is taught isn't learned in
the presence of distraction? What do you mean by
"exceedingly"? Cites to those studies, please...

I have pointed to them. Read them. Reproducing them wastes my time and
satisfies your desire to "exercise" me rather than debate honestly.

I'm not here to please you.

I'm here, apparently to show you for the arrogant nasty little fool
your are, and seem to be doing quite well, with a great deal of help
from you.


Kane:
and other things,
not intended, are learned as well.

Yeah, the Freudian subconscious, right?

No, just memory tracks laid down. Sometimes recoverable at the most
inopertune moments.

I recall a coworker when I was a young strong lad. ABout 22 as I
recall. We worked on a feed lot.

He was a brute of a guy, even bigger and probably stronger than me. He
had two odd habits. He raised rabbits and every now and then, out of
the blue he would have an urge, so he would go out and wring one or
two necks. Not for eating. He'd hold them for a long time feeling the
life drain away. Then he'd toss them aside. He like to tell me about
it and he would linger on the life draining away part.

I'd just snort at him and tell him to get back to his end of the
board. Which brings me to the other odd thing about him.

Nice looking chap. Big and strong as I said but give him a job to do
that required one to share a load and use his strength and right in
the middle, often at most dangerous point in hoisting or carrying,
he'd start to tremble (never did carrying alone) and abruptly he would
lose hold.

If you were on the other end and didn't catch it that he was about to
cave it could nail you. He took me down that way one day. We had a
whole section of a feed silo segement Have, tapered, awkward. I took
the wider heavy end not trusting him to not crush me as we went up a
scaffolding.

Damn if half way up just as I looked to get better footing, he let go.
Caught me off balance, my end went, took a huge chunk off my inner
calf. Laid me up for almost a week.

Spanked as a kid he was. Very obedient to his father. Still lived in
the same house with him, wife, kids and all. "Discipline" gone awry.

What if those things are in fact intended.
And just what things did you mean, anyway.

See, the issue here is those pop psych books
you've been reading say my way is the
fascist, but I think *their* way is the real
fascism.

I don't recall any such claims in the texts I've studied, or lecturs
I've attended. I think you are a facsist but hey, I have some bigotry
in my. Mind now, it could pop out at any second. I think it's
activated when I think of a full grown man hitting a little child and
conning his cowardly self, and those around him that it's just loving
responsible "discipline" to keep the child safe. Must obey, must obey.

You're just another common control freak. You happend to have an
education but you're not a whit different then Jeff Foxworthy's
neighbors that are a gonna whop some sense into that boy. He'll learn
to sass me....


Kane:
How good are your math skills?

Oh, fair to middlin', I suppose.

Well.


Kane:
Or writing.

Some would say pretty poor.

So.


Kane:
What subjects were hard for you in
school? Were they taught by your favorite
teacher? Did you parent "assist" in
your learning with punishments involved
with your attempts to learn?
Did you feel stupid when they "helped" you?

What utter nonsense you speak. My mother taught me to
read on her lap ay age three or four using some stupid
phonics books bought from the grocery store.

Mine did it with me with James Fenimore Cooper, Doctor Doolittle, and
other childrens classics. Same age. I haunted the school library from
the time I entered first grade. I still have too many books.

By the time
I reached kindergarten, the teacher could hand me a storybook
and have me read aloud to keep the entire class entertained.
I was a straight A student in everything but gym. No punishment
was involved in my mother teaching me to read. Why do you keep
imagining punishment used as pedagogy, like some nightmare
vision out of a Dickens novel?

Because it transfers to the "obeymeorelse" scenario quite nicely.

The whole punishment-to-teach-subjects
thing seems to be your own personal bugbear, brought into
this argument for no relevance or reason I can think.

You are unable to transfer from one premise to another? How do you
earn money at your profession,

You still can't get that the methods used to teach subjects can teach
a child safety and compliance MORE surely than hitting them?

I was
spanked for doing what I had been not to do. Hand in the cookie
jar, running in the house, hitting my kid brother, breaking
his toys, that sort of thing.

Ah, now I get it. Always the pain for something they wanted you to
stop doing. Of course I'm teasing as I've known that all along and
even addressed it. I'll bet you slide right by. It's not a pleasant
place in memory.

So after being spanked you did not take a cookie unbidden, or some
other goodie, did not run in the house when your parents weren't
there, didn't hit your brother out of their knowledge, and never broke
another of his toys.

If not what did you do instead? You see you learned form, not context.

Laws based on form alone are the ban of mankind. Laws based on context
are life savers and savers of resources.

Those that dictate things like drug use and sexual behaviors and
costing us a lot. And they have failed utterly.

Law about traffic though, are notorious for success in lowering
deaths. Coupled with good traffic flow basedengineering and we have a
winnner. All context laws, traffic laws. The only ones that fail are
the ones that can't pass the context test. Either because there isn't
any or because we can't varify them.......yet.


Kane:
One of the toughest teachers I had was extremely
respectful, but still, insisted quietly and respectfully,
that one applied themselves. I had flunked algebra twice
until him. Both prior teachers were insulting martinets.

I aced his class. And he graded hard, very. I learned
about learning from him. I picked my teachers with care
in college. Aced it too, all of it. And I was barely a
C student in highschool. Lousy teachers until the algebra
teacher.

I'm glad you learned to get proactive in your search for good
teachers. Wonderful. What does this have to do with anything
before us?

That not doing a behavior can be taught by teaching the child an
alternative. It's very hard to teach the alternative is the kids butt
is smarting.

You have immediatly stopped the unwanted behavior but not taught the
desired behavior, and not doing something in this context is not a
behavior.

It's a walk don't run kinda thing, not a don't run kind of thing.

We used to have fun at the pool with signs that said Do Not Run in the
Pool Area. We'd skip very fast under the disgusted lifeguard on his or
her tower, screaming, "we are skipping we are skipping".

See what the invitation to follow an out of context command to not do
something results in? And that silly prank is very much what goes on
in larger context in the adult world.

"I didn't steal it. I borrowed it."

"I was was going to replace it after the race and I won....only I
lost."

"She was wearing provocative clothing and asking for it."


My responses instead of "don't break the law:"

Work for your own car.

Use your own money for your gambling.

Use your damned hand or get a girl willing girl friend or pay for it.

But I know whenever I try to commond someone to not do something I'm
going, more especially if they were pain parented, to get one of those
resistent, "I'm hearing 'do it.'" responses.


I said:
I mean, I've read Milgram's summary of his
psychological experiments in _Obedience to Authority_.
Those experiments *simulated* pain in a "victim" in
order to observe a subject's reaction to it.
Kane:
That is something of a departure from my position...

No, the issue is you can't set up an experiment nowadays
which would test your learn-calculus-with-a-paddle,
since it wouldn't pass ethical guidelines. The Milgram
experiment had the "learner" undergoing electroshock
for missed answers to a "rote learning" memorization
test. The learner was a paid actor, who screamed and
pleaded with the "teacher" to stop the lesson. The real
subject of the experiment was the "teacher" and to see
how far the teacher would go in administering what he
believed were electric shocks to the "learner". The
famous/infamous findings of this experiment were that most
people would go all the way to killing the learner in
obedience to the authority of a fellow in a white lab
coat who was only allowed to say "The experiment must go on."

A pointless aside. I am more than casually aware of the experiments
before and after ethical standards and the various work arounds.


I.e., that people are very happy to yield up their
sense of ethical responsibility to anyone in a
position of authority---to anyone who can defraud them
into believing he can relieve them of their ethical
responsibility for what they do.

Actually they are not. There is a small handfull of people that do not
welcome such to others. I've been tested in extreme circumstances, and
refuse the easy way out, more than once.

It's no fun, and no fame either, but I have strong ethical standards
It would take threats to the safety of my loved ones to cause me to
choose to break.

The amazingly small
number of people who resisted either were very well
educated to the point where they felt *themselves* to have
more authority than the guy in the white lab coat, or
the very religious (i.e. who felt themselves to be under
a much higher authority than the guy in the white lab
coat).

Because the religious outnumber the athiest so much it is easy to come
up with this supposition. How many athiests were so tested?

The point is, in aftermath, Milgram himself was
roundly criticized for subjecting his subjects to
emotional stress in their administering of what they
thought were electric shocks. So, we aren't talking about
administering direct pain here, we are talking about even
emotional stress for the sake of the experiment. Every
subject had volunteered to do it.

Yes. You don't have to drone on. I was around for that one.


Kane:
but let's see if it is worthy of the frightened
child that forced that to the surface of your
consciousness to avoid my point.

Would you please cut this kind of amateur
pop-psych diagnostic stuff out?

No. I like your responses too much. I'm weak that way.

I've already long since dealt with your point,
and we are well beyond it. The issue is what science
there might be out there which can tell us outlawing
spanking is a good thing. So far, all that has been
offered by you is uncited "brain scan studies" which
you say show that distraction inhibits learning. But,
so what? That's utterly irrelevant to the question of
the efficacy or wrongness of spanking, though you tried
to claim otherwise. So, the question becomes: What
scientific studies could there be which might address
the real question we want to know? Real studies which
show spanking is bad.

All you have really done is spout and pontificate and allude. You've
not come up with even those things to support your position you demand
I come up with.

You are a pompous windbag.

(By the way, there was a big
study that hit all the newspapers some while ago---
maybe Straus, M. A., Sugarman, D. B., & Giles-Sims, J.
(1997). Spanking by parents and subsequent antisocial behavior
of children. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine,
151, 761-767
http://www.unh.edu/frl/cp24.htm
---which did try to claim something along these
lines. But also see critiques of this paper and of
its methodology at:
http://people.biola.edu/faculty/paulp/

Note these three points of criticism therein:
A Comparison of Two Recent Reviews of Scientific Studies
of Physical Punishment by Parents by Larzelere, June 2002.
In a more comprehensive review of Gershoff's article, Larzelere
shows that "child outcomes associated with ordinary physical
punishment are also associated with alternative disciplinary
tactics when similar research methods are used. Detrimental
child outcomes are associated with the frequency of any
disciplinary tactic, not just physical punishment. Therefore,
it is the excessive misbehavior that is the actual cause of
detrimental outcomes in children."

"Not one of the 17 causally relevant studies found
predominantly detrimental outcomes if they did anything
to rule out parents who used physical punishment too
severely." p. 209 This is Larzelere's conclusion in a
recent review of outcomes associated with nonabusive
physical punishment in Child Outcomes of Nonabusive and
Customary Physical Punishment by Parents: An Updated
Literature Review in Clinical Child and Family
Psychology Review 2000, 3(4):199-221 (the December
2000 issue).

Larzelere/Straus Debate (June, 1999) A summary of
Dr. Larzelere's presentation in a debate with Straus
about spanking. In this summary, Larzelere reports
that the small detrimental child outcomes reported by
Straus, Sugarman & Giles-Sims (1997) for 6- to 9-year-olds
is not unique to spanking. A further analysis of the
Straus, et al. data revealed that identical small
detrimental child outcomes were also found for all four
alternative disciplinary responses for 6- to 9-year-olds
(grounding, sending the child to a room, removing
privileges, and taking away an allowance). The debate
was held at a conference of the National Foundation
for Family Research and Education at Banff in Alberta,
Canada.

Every alternative was a punishment. You've moved outside my claims and
premise.


Notice the second point of criticism would suggest a completely
objective measurement by which one would distinguish between
corporal punishment and the violent abuse of children.)

Noticed that non of these studies separated out non punitive
parenting. In any where non cp and cp were used it is admitted or not
denied that other punitive parenting was used to replace cp.

The studies have very little meaning to me. I've picked them apart
since they came out. They are as useful as toilet paper. I never use
them to try and argue against pain parenting be cause the alternatives
are always pain based, just not physical pain.


I said:
And that kind of experimental procedure has long since
been declared unethical.
Kane:
Okay. Let's see where this goes.

OK.

I said:
So, I'd say it's pretty obvious that no
one in recent history has run experiments
subjecting people to pain
Kane:
Wrong. It's common still. All it takes is consent of
the subject. Go to your nearest college or university
psych department and ask. Or try neurological
departments of medical schools.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, given the Milgram
study, and given the banning of studies like that.
But, my psych colleagues are a little ways down the
hall from my office at Butler University, so I guess
I can go ask one of them and report back about the ethical
restrictions on psych experimental design.

I'll wait.


Kane:
Besides, the question isn't "pain" alone. It's any
distraction up to and including pain.

True, but insofar as distractions which were not painful
were tested and ones which were painful were not tested,
the experiment you spoke of doesn't say anything about learning
inhibition from spanking. As I said, you'd have to extrapolate
(you'd have to assume that what was true of learning inhibition
about a non-painful distraction would then also be true of a
painful one, and, surely, that would be a matter of evolutionary
biological contention, which should be tested directly before
any claim were made about it).

Either you haven't read yet the studies I cited, or you didn't
understand, or I failed to make the point.

In brain scan studies on pain it was shown that reduction of pain
increased the capacity for learning. Nothing mysterious. It as
certainly expected because pain is one of the most common of
experiences on the planet. Very few people suffer from an inability to
feel physical pain, though there are few and experiments with them
have produced interesting results.

It used to be in a text book but that is many years ago.

When I've rested maybe I'll look for it.

In a nutshell, two sets of boys from similar families that used
spanking as a discipline tool.

One of the sets were normal, the other had an genetically originated
incapacity to feel physical pain. Burning, breaking bones, cutting
tearing, nothing go to their brain that we would call pain. They
sensed touch just fine, but all "touch" no matter painful to use would
just be simple touch to them.

These kids had to be trained to stop showing off their their friends
that they could hammer their fingers and toes into powder without any
reaction.

Guess where this is going?

In tracking compliance with the use of spanking discipline, when used,
and remember both used it (and isn't it weird the pain free boy's
parents used it...I liken it to your senseless use of it) the end
result was they could find no statistical differencne in compliance
and non compliance between the groups.

The boys that felt no pain complied as often, and I think it was near
100%, as the other boys.

Conclusion...? Well you'll I'll speculate even if you go off into
another of you disengenuous claims of pop psych, and say that a
variable hadn't been considered.

And my best guess is the love and trust and need for the approval of
their parents, and spanking does seem to express some disapproval.

So tell me, what's our best guess, and innate need to follow
"commmands" for their own sake?


I said:
in order to test whether or not people (and certainly not kids)
can learn under the influence of pain.
Kane:
And I was working, as I pointed out clearly,
backward from pain to any distraction.

Which, as I trust you understand scientifically, you can't do.
It is an assumption, an extrapolation, which is precisely in
contention.

I don't ****ing' care. For practicial purposes of deciding whether I
believe spanking is superior to my methods, it sufficient to influence
me to eschew spanking.


Kane:
Any distraction changes learning from more
easily done to more difficultly done and
has unwanted side effects, such as the learning
of things that might even interfer with performance
of the desired skill.

Well, I doubt that any scientific study is available
which could bolster such a sweeping claim, but,
I think in the case of a child reaching out to touch a
pretty red burner on a stove, a spank to the hand
(assuming the child has been previously instructed
not to touch the stovetop) definitely interferes with
the child's thought processes and curiosity,
let's say with what the pretty red object might feel
like, and focuses the child's attention on something
entirely different---namely that the child should have
been nixing that particular line of investigation
because of the parental command not to put thy hand
on the stovetop.

What's up with not putting up a barrier?


Kane:
Dr. Thomas Gordon, when a young man, was a military
flight instructor. He observed that a lot of young
student pilots were flying their aircraft into the
ground and dying. He noted also that the instructor's,
an a misguided by sincere attempt to save lives, were
screaming at the students more and more and calling them
more names and insults.

Gordon turned that around and developed a supportive approach.
His students lived. The others continued to die.

Later he counseled parents and eventually wrote a book that is a
standard for supportive parenting...that is supportive of the
child learning, not being tortured.

Would _Parent Effectiveness Training_ be the source of
your "brain scan" studies?

Not that I remember. That as too long ago. I don't think they were
underway. Have you read any I googled up for you?

Would that be your cite? And
do you figure spanking occurs in a parental panic of
screaming at the kid?

Sometimes. Do you figure it doesn't?

I figure if a parent is screaming
at the kid, he is out of control himself

I can scream at the top of my lungs and be perfectly in control. I
used it in marial arts many times.

and probably
should have spanked much, much earlier rather than letting
the disobedience get to the point of emotional stress
and panic at near-disaster.

You are mushing the factor all around. Nice ploy. But you haven't
dealt with it being a first time offense. No "earlier" to spank to.


I said:
So, any "brain scan" claims
there could be would have to be just wild
extrapolation,
Kane:
Nice try.

No, in fact wild extrapolation is quite likely the
case here.

Still haven't gone and read them. They are studies on the relieving of
chronic pain.

Maybe there were some distraction
studies. That seems likely. And it seems plausible
something or the other was in measured in them that
could be interpreted as distraction-inhibits-learning.

Do you really believe, science aside, that pain delevered on a child
by their parent to stop a behavior teaches anything? It's simple
Pavlovian conditioning. Nothing more, except some things that are
better not taught. That might makes right, that bigger can hit
smaller, that pain might even get be sought after as an approval
vehicle...etc.

Probably there was not anything remotely like the
learn-calculus-under-the-paddle experment, however.
So, any claim about the latter is quite likely
a wild extrapolation from the former.

Wild extraplolation has sometimes serendipodous outcomes.


Kane:
No cigar. As I said. Consent allows for the use of
distraction up to and including pain.

Then I don't understand why Milgram's experiments
would be now forbidden. They certainly didn't cause any
physical pain to anybody, and all the subjects consented.

Who knows where the politically correct may wander.


Kane:
But distraction alone is sufficient to support my
position.

Or the counterexample I gave of learning by means of
pain is enough to show that not all distractions inhibit
all learnings.

Did I say that? Naughty me, or careless me. I'll retract it if you can
locate it for me, or if I run across it.

There's huge range of what might
constitute learning and one is tempted to recall
"That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger."

Which works if you are Conan the Barbarian. There is a limit.
Children's break point is lower than adults and variable and very hard
to track and respond to until too late. Some child deaths are probably
attributable to that.

Certainly the shocking number of highschool sports, mostly football,
deaths is an example.

I've learned to bench press 200 lbs over the last

two years of effort working out.

Pussy. I bench pressed that at 19, still a spindly lad of 210.

I hit 378 in my 24th year. That topped me out. Yes, I know about
consentual pain. It's why I don't hold with hitting children. They
cannot consent.

I've had to go through
some pain to get there. Etc..

Yes, I remember. I'm too old for that any more, I have to contend with
getting my workouts by cutting down 2 foot diameter trees, sectioning
them up and throwing the rounds in the truck and splitting them
through the fall and winter. Ever see a man split two foot oak rounds,
14 to 16 inches long one handed with a six pound maul?

I got my left shoulder messed up in a wreck...drunk asshole on a cell
phone just drove into my wife's Volvo like we weren't even there.
Never touched his brakes. I was driving alone fortunately. My wife is
nowhere near as stout as I am.


Kane:
Unless you would care to label pain as not being a
distraction.

I would certainly think that a "brain scan" sudy of
the effect of non-painful distraction on academic-style
learning would have zero to say about whether spanking
can be used to teach children anything to the good.

I don't recall mentioning a non-painful distraction study. Are we once
again going to treated to "I get to bring up anything I want in the
arguement but you are constrained thus and so"?

Figgers.

I
would be embarassed in fact intellectually for even
bringing up such brain-scan studies in this context if
that were all they had to say. "Let's outlaw behaviour X
because we have some studies which indicate behaviour Y
has weak correlation with outcome Z, which outcome Z
happens all the time and sometimes might not
be desired, and because in some twists of language
behaviour X is a subset of behaviours Y and besides,
I think X is real icky." I mean, if those studies
really show enough to outlaw spanking, why don't
they also show enough to outlaw distraction?

I said:
making all kinds of assumptions about what
causes what and what activity here or there
in the brain might mean in terms of learning
or not learning something.
Kane:
Well, that usually IS the point of experimenting.

cf. Richard Feynman, "Cargo-Cult Science".

No connection whatsoever to the spanking or brain scan studies. Those
were simply observations of the responses to ignorance and
motivational power of wanting "cargo."

Comparisons to discredit to various studies unrelated to goods and
aquisition are pointless unless that is what one is studying.

The native methodology was not experimental. They were trying to find
out if their behavior would produce "cargo" they simply
superstitiously ( to use ) acted out on the belief in similies.

Hey, what if a plane had lost power and had to land there in their
clearing?


Kane:
Just as children do it. They are trying, no matter
what you think they are doing, to find out about the
world and how it works. They are, by our adult view,
terribly ignorant and clumsy, even doing things we've
come to label as "bad," or "evil," "perverse," and
even "sinful" but to them, in their ignorance and
nature driven compulsion to learn, those actions are not
labeled as yet.

Then it is for us to keep them from doing evil things
until they have been able to learn that those things
are, in point of fact and not label, evil.

Evil here maybe good over there. Shooting someone here is evil,
shooting someone trying to kills us is good.

Labeling shooting as evil is pointless to a child.

One can wait until they are able to understand an action or inaction
in context. It's not dangerous though you seem to be paniced about it.


I said:
Again, all one has to do is talk to an older
teacher who remembers the days in public school
when he had a wooden paddle and the authority
to use it if students misbehaved. Guess what?
Those were days when the shooting at Columbine,
not to mention metal detectors at the
entrances to schools, and armed policemen to
patrol the halls, were unthinkable.
Kane:
My very favorite. I've seen this come up
so many times on the talk.politics.guns website
I grow weary of it.

Right.

Kane:
You do know that children that were spanked
were the ones doing the shooting, did you not?
Check out all the school shootings in recent years.
These weren't "unspanked" children.

You said 90% are spanked. I've seen claims going from
99% in the 1950's down to 50% in the 1990's. But, given
your number, the lack of correlation between spanking and
going postal that that observation immediately
demonstrates (i.e. millions of spanked children do not
go shoot up their classmates, so the effect
of a kid going postal is on the order of few out of millions---
it is easy to do the calculation and to be more precise,
but there is no need here, since the idea is simple:
same cause leading to different effect means there are
other causes), I would assume they probably were spanked. So,
all that means that spanking alone isn't enough. Then again,
I never said it was enough. The rules you lay down for your kids
also have to be good rules---not ones that "we label as good"
but actual rules that coincide with goodness as the
universe dictates goodness to us.

There you go again off on your tangent. And how many unspanked
children were shooting up schools....eh?

Your claim the we none punishers have undiciplined acting out children
fails on lack of proof. The same kind you just offered.

Only thing is I don't believe you can find even ONE unspanked child
that shot up a school. If you can, be my guest.

Kane:
Do you know how far back kids were walking
into classrooms and shooting people? Try the 30's.

Show me the cites to this.

I was aware of newspapers and schools since
the 60's and unless the media were just covering up
school shootings back then, they didn't happen anything
like the way they have happened in the last 10 years.

Ghetto schools have had unreported by the press shootings for decades.
Locale equated with: whitey don't care and don't wanna know, until
white kids started.

Teachers on ghetto schools, where the paddle was king, were routinely
beaten by students, and sometimes by students parents. There is no
lack of violence around paddle happy school houses.

They just create a highly productive violent mileiu.

And you can pretty well count on kids in the ghetto and country
schoools being well "disciplined" in your sense of pain punished.

And what they lacked in firepower they easily made up with blades,
chains, and car antennas, boards with nails and socks full of rocks.

Have a gander, turkey:

http://tinyurl.com/qpr1

Dates clear back to the late 1927's...don't you just love those
traditions though? e e e e e

You of course will go on a hair splitting binge. While a gun was used
to detonate dynamite it was a "shooting" rampage so doesn't qualifty
with you anal retentive perspectives, and the person doing the
shooting surely wouldn't have been disciplined by the school with
paddling (that late in his life but I'll betcha he grew up being
paddled in such places or in fear of it).

He was just a school board member.

And here's a google on "school shooting" paddling.

http://tinyurl.com/qpss

Very sad stuff about how pain parenting can work.

But you of course know how to do it effectively. You won't ever make a
mistake...yah sure, you betcha.

Kane:
The shooting at Columbine was not caused by the
failure to spank.

Yeah, it probably was. The discipline once upon a
time in schools (and reinforced in the homes) meant
that kids did not act up in the ways they do now.

Check the URL above.

Heck, I remember a time back in the 1970's in junior
high school when the Principal interrupted class and
lectured the whole school for an hour over the intercom
about "behaviour your parents wouldn't approve of", and
how the offending students needed to turn themselves
voluntarily in. He was so vague about just what had
happened, I hadn't a clue what it was all about until
the grapevine got to me afterwards. Turns out, someone
had written "****" in the snow outside the school.
Compare that disciplinary line with the one today found
at Northwest High School in Indianapolis---mother gets
call at work to come to the hospital because her son
happened to be wearing glasses in the hallway when
some drug-pusher type came wandering through wanting
to smash some resistance-less victim's head
repeatedly against the floor. Same town, same school
system, historically different standards of discipline.

And that does not prove in any way that pain parenting was a proven
reducer of violence in those days. Only in the schools possibly, but
even there you are wrong wrong wrong.

Male and female teachers alike in those charming old traditional warm
and cozy one room school houses were beaten bloody by the big boys and
sent running.

The kids got beaten when they got home, as usual, but thought it funny
still.

You are a victim of myth.

Kane:
It was caused by the failure to
inculcate a conscience.

And you figure gentle cajoling when Junior hits his
sister is the way to do that?

Kane:
That is the product of pain based parenting,

Nope. What it is the product of is psychological
beliefs like you have been touting. The widespread
infection of Freud in this society, the widespread
idea that we are trapped by society, by our own
subconscious, by our genes and by victimizations of
ourselves as children beyond our control or our choice.
The basic problem is CS Lewis's The Abolition of Man,
the conception of man as incapable of ethical
choice and not responsible for what he does.

Kane:
whether it is physically based, or psychologically
based. My take on the boys that did the shooting
was more of the psychologically based, but I doubt
anyone is going to get out of the families of the
boys how they were parented. I've certainly seen
more than enough mental illness in teens whose
histories I did have access to to tell you that
pain based parenting...even when done with cold
precision....results in less conscience and morals,
not more.

Then consider this pivotal moment from Peter Shaffer's _Equus_:
Dysart: Sit down, Mrs Strang.
Dora [ignoring him: more and more urgently]: Look, Doctor: you
don't have to live with this. Alan is one patient to
you: one out of many. He's my son. I lie awake every
night thinking about it. Frank lies there beside me.
I can here him. Neither of us sleeps all night. You come
to us and say, who forbids television? who does what
behind whose back?---as if we're criminals. Let me tell
you something. We're not criminals. We've done nothing
wrong. We loved Alan. We gave him the best love we
could. All right, we quarrel sometimes---all
parents quarrel---we always make it up. My husband
is a good man. He's an upright man, religion or
no religion. He cares for his home, for the world,
and for his boy. Alan had love and care and treats,
and as much fun as any boy in the world. I know
about loveless homes: I was a teacher.
Our home wasn't loveless. I know about privacy too---
not invading a child's privacy. All right, Frank may be
at fault there---he digs into him too much---but nothing
in excess. He's not a bully...[Gravely.] No, doctor.
Whatever's happened has happened *because of Alan*.
Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added
up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on
earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this
terrible thing---because that's *him*; not just all
of our things added up. Do you understand what
I'm saying? I want you to understand, because I
lie awake thinking it out, and I want you to know
that I deny it absolutely what he's
doing now, staring at me, attacking me for what *he's*
done, for what *he* is! [Pause: calmer.] You've got your
words, and I've got mine. You call it a complex, I
suppose. But if you knew God, Doctor, you would
know about the Devil. You'd know the Devil isn't
made by what mummy says and daddy
says. The Devil's *there*. It's an old-fashioned word,
but a true thing...I'll go. What I did in there was
inexcusable. I only know he was my little Alan and
then the Devil came.
[She leaves...]

Kane:
You are spouting like a Scientologist.

Uh-huh.

[snipped]

Kane:
The lack of the paddle hasn't increased the school shootings.
In fact school shootings are down, and have been for years.

Umm, please back that one up with a cite. I don't believe you.

Kane:
Even the year of the Columbine
shootings school was still the safest
place for children.

An entirely unexceptionable statement,

Oh blow your arrogant head out your ass.

given that
most kids were in school.

More kids were killed by their parents than were killed in school by
anyone.

Obviously
Columbine was a small event, effecting only a very
fraction of the total population of kids in school.

No, the rate for violence against students in schools were down lower
than in previous years. And shootings were at a low against previous
years.


Kane:
And I say that with my teeth gritted as I am a
dedicated homeschooling champion.

Except for the wonder of incongruence, California,
it is consistently the states WITH school house
paddling that has the most child perps of shootings.
I'm damned if can explain California, but then who
can? smile

You don't have your facts Mike. You come up with
speculations you haven't researched adequately to
use them as support for the position you have
staked out. Keep trying.

Well, so far my speculations are looking pretty good to me
in the absence of any supporting data for your position.

Then you haven't been going where I sent you, and I notice I'm not
seeing any sign of a study on the cutoff point between spanking and
abuse, and I'm not seeing a definative piece on just what spanking is
as opposed to abuse.


Kane:
It's been fun Mike.

And no, I'm not a troll. If you haven't figured
that out by now, well, tough ****.

I don't believe I ever called you a troll, Kane.

Why thanks.



(end part 2 of 2)

Mike Morris
)


Kane

In article , LaVonne Carlson
wrote:

Ray Drouillard wrote:


Kids who are raised without proper discipline end up being rotten
adults. One must only look around to see examples.

Yes, children both need and deserve proper discipline. What they do not
need is physical assault in the name of discipline.

Of course, the real answer can be found in the "user's manual" that our
maker gave to us:

Pro 13:24 One who spares the rod hates his son, But one who loves him is
careful to discipline him.

Pro 22:15 Folly is bound up in the heart of a child: The rod of
discipline drives it far from him.

And Deuteronomy recommends stoning children to death for rebellious
behavior. Do you recommend killing children who do not obey, or do you
prefer selective Biblical interpretation and application? By the way,
nothing in the NT suggests that Jesus would recommend hitting and hurting a
little child with rods or anything else.

The words used in Dt. 21:18-20 appear to be terms that refer
to adults and not to minors. Furthermore, the more specific
accusations in that passage are accusations of conduct which
{particularly in the context of tribal village life in the
eastern Mediterranean basin regardless of nationality} would
seem to require that one be an adult.

In the Hebrew of this passage, the word used for stubborn is
*not* a particularly commonly used word in Scripture. I am
only able to find it used three other times in the entire Old
Testament. The root transliterates as _carar_ and means to be
refractory, to turn away, to be in open revolt. In Ps. 78:8,
it refers to the stubbornness of the generation that originally
heard God's Law given at Sinai {and one must remember that God
condemned that generation from age 20 up less than a year later
at Kadesh [Num. 14:26-30]}. Furthermore, the subsequent verse,
Ps. 78:9 begins a military description, suggesting in context
that _carar_ is a term applicable to those of age for military
service so that those termed _carar_ would typically be over
age 18. In Prov. 7:11, _carar_ is used to describe the married
{Prov. 7:19, 20} prostitute {of necessity, this is an adult}.
This word, _carar_, doesn't appear to be applied to other than
adults. To be _carar_, one must be adult enough to engage in
prostitution or in military service. {N.B., The word sometimes
translated "stubborn" in 1 Sam. 15:23 is _petsar_ which means
to peck at, to stun, to dull and is not related to _carar_.}

In Hebrew, different words are used for rebellious in
different places. Here, the root of the Hebrew word for
rebellious transliterates as _marah_. It comes from a
primitive root meaning bitter and means to make bitter, to
contend or fight with. In addition to this passage, _marah_
is only used in Num. 20:10, 24; 27:14; Dt. 1:26, 43; 9:7,
23, 24; 31:27; Josh. 1:18; 1 Sam. 12:14, 15; Ps. 5:10; 78:8;
105:28; 107:11; Is. 1:20; 50:5; 63:10; Jer. 4:17; 5:23;
Lam. 1:18, 20; 3:42; Ezk. 20:8, 13, 21; and Hos. 13:16.
A derivative of _marah_, _meriy_, is used in Samuel's rebuke
of the adult Saul {1 Sam. 15:23} for the rebellion that is
like witchcraft. In Num 20:24, _marah_ is applied to the
aged Aaron just as it was applied to the complaining adults
in Num. 20:10. Likewise, _marah_ is applied to the aged
Moses in Num. 27:14. In Dt. 1:26 and 9:23, _marah_ is cited
as the sin of the people who refused to take the land after
the spies report at Kadesh. In Dt. 1:46, _marah_ is the sin
of these same people when they formed up military ranks in
a vain attack on the land they had just rejected {all of these
so termed must be of military age since they are so described
as they are formed into ranks for military service}. The
accusations of _marah_ in Dt. 9:7 and 24 bracket a summation
of actions of the Israelite adults during the Exodous. In
Josh. 1:18, _marah_ is used in a military context by the
troops from Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh. In
1 Sam. 12:14, 15, _marah_ is used in Samuel's farewell speech
given to "all Israel" which in this context must be the army
Saul had gathered to defeat the Ammonites threatening Jabesh
who went to Gilgal after the victory. Thus, _marah_ is used
in passages contemporaneous to this one {up to 400 years
afterward} with reference to adults. Furthermore, the other
references listed above simply do not give any contextual
indication of any other age than adults.

Glutton, in this passage is not the usual word for overindulgence
in food, but is _zalal_ which means to shake, to blow down, to
be riotous and vile, to be morally loose and prodigal. This
same word is used in Prov. 23:21. At the very least, it
indicates habitual participation in classic 12 squad car, paddy
wagon, and a SWAT team to quell type partying. The specific
accusation here is of riot, an adult action, not mere over
eating.

Finally, drunkard in this passage is not any of the usual 6
Hebrew words for drunkard, but is the unusual word _cobe_
which means carousal and is supposedly derived from _caba_
meaning to quaff to satiety {figuratively, of violence}.

Thus word study indicates that the charges are of violent and
riotous conduct by an adult. Therefore, based on study of the
words *actually* used in the passage, I am forced to the conclusion
that the person accused in Dt. 21:18-21 is accused of riotous
conduct in the company of others {i.e., carousing}, open revolt,
and violence, and that the person is an adult albeit the child
of the adults bringing the accusation.

In view of this, it would appear that there is an interpretation
of Dt. 21:18-20 that does not support your claim about Deuteronomy.

Monday, the 13th of October, 2003

Kane, any response from me will have to wait
something like two weeks. I have every night of
this week through Saturday taken up with choral
rehearsals or performances. And then my daughter
has a Pony Club rating on Sunday.

I am impressed with the quickness of your response
to mine. I am also pleased in my sense that you have
more or less abandoned trying to reduce my arguments
to psychologization. Of course, that tactic has been
replaced by more insult and bluster, but I do consider
it progress, in any event.

Mike Morris
)

Ray Drouillard wrote:

"LaVonne Carlson" wrote in message
...


What you have done is pick and choose portions of the Old Testament to
justify your behavior, and ignore those portions that you do not like
or
agree with.

Actually, it looks like that is what you have done. You are trying to
justify your practice of not disciplining your children,

I disciplined my children without resorting to hitting them.
Unfortunately, it appears that you have few other resources available, thus
you need to attempt to Biblically justify your behavior. So many
individuals who post to alt.parenting.spanking seem to believe that without
spanking there is no discipline. It's sad

Proverbs 19:18 Discipline your son, for there is hope; Don't be a
willing party to his death.

Discipline doesn't equal hitting. can apply either to city limits or citiy
government

Still, that law is for a specific people at a specific time.

As was stoning children, as was killing women who were not virgins, as was
death for all adulters. This is old Testament Law.

So why did Jesus so openly defy the Old Testament?

He is God. He can do what he considers to be best.

Exactly. And Jesus gave a new set of guidelines to live under, and that is
what is called the New Testament. He did what he considered best. And
since he is "God" I prefer to live by his example.

Watch the remainder of this post, and look for examples of Jesus'
recommendations and behavior.

LaVonne



I see nothing in His
words that recommend hitting children with rods as a parenting
strategy.

Correct. Unlike the laws for divorce, he did not change the counsel
regarding child rearing.

In fact, he recommends a millstone around the neck and being cast into
the
depths of the sea for anyone who offends a child.

Right. And raising a child without discipline is pretty offensive.

And when his disciplines
want to stone a woman for wanton behavior )as the OT recommends), he
stops
them, forgives the woman, and tells her to "go and sin no more."

Right again. What does stoning have to do with spanking?


I think Jesus had a bit more understanding of the Bible than you do,
and a
lot more respect for little children.

Of course he is understanding. I'm certain that he understands that
disciplining children is crucial to their development.

Ray Drouillard

Mike wrote:

Of course, that tactic has been
replaced by more insult and bluster, but I do consider
it progress, in any event.

Kane is known for his "insults and bluster" on ascps.

Gosh, can you imagine his verbalizations to a child?

I think I'd take his spankings, were I a child. He's an emotional abuser.


Mike sent in fwd from another NG:

Subject: | U.N. rules Canada should ban spanking
From: (Michael S. Morris)
Date: 10/13/2003 2:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Message-id:

Monday, the 13th of October, 2003

Kane, any response from me will have to wait
something like two weeks. I have every night of
this week through Saturday taken up with choral
rehearsals or performances. And then my daughter
has a Pony Club rating on Sunday.

I am impressed with the quickness of your response
to mine. I am also pleased in my sense that you have
more or less abandoned trying to reduce my arguments
to psychologization. Of course, that tactic has been
replaced by more insult and bluster, but I do consider
it progress, in any event.

Mike Morris
)

You are mistaken.

I have lots of tools. Spanking is just one of them. It is prescribed
by the Bible.

I don't use the Bible to 'justify' my actions. I use the Bible as a
source of wisdom and instruction.

I often discipline my children without spanking them. I don't limit
myself to a subset of the tools available, however. I use the best tool
available for a particular application.

What is truly sad is that there are so many people out there that are so
blind that they can't see the difference between loving discipline and
child abuse. As such, they probably are lacking in other areas, and
have left big holes in their children's upbringing.

Because people have changed, God has changed some of the guidelines in
the New Testament. Divorce laws, for instance, have changed. There is
no mention of spanking.

If you think that the lack of mention about spanking indicates that it
is now proscribed, you have a difficult task ahead of you if you plan on
proving that assertion.

By the way, I am top-posting because this is my final rebuttal. You can
reply if you like, but it is unlikely that I will see it. You are
unlikely to change your mind, so I am therefore wasting my time even
writing this. I can't force you to use proper discipline on your
children. Even if I could., I wouldn't. Chew on that one for a while.



Ray Drouillard



"LaVonne Carlson" wrote in message
...


Ray Drouillard wrote:

"LaVonne Carlson" wrote in message
...


What you have done is pick and choose portions of the Old
Testament to
justify your behavior, and ignore those portions that you do not
like
or
agree with.

Actually, it looks like that is what you have done. You are trying
to
justify your practice of not disciplining your children,

I disciplined my children without resorting to hitting them.
Unfortunately, it appears that you have few other resources available,
thus
you need to attempt to Biblically justify your behavior. So many
individuals who post to alt.parenting.spanking seem to believe that
without
spanking there is no discipline. It's sad

Proverbs 19:18 Discipline your son, for there is hope; Don't be a
willing party to his death.

Discipline doesn't equal hitting. can apply either to city limits or
citiy
government

Still, that law is for a specific people at a specific time.

As was stoning children, as was killing women who were not virgins, as
was
death for all adulters. This is old Testament Law.

So why did Jesus so openly defy the Old Testament?

He is God. He can do what he considers to be best.

Exactly. And Jesus gave a new set of guidelines to live under, and
that is
what is called the New Testament. He did what he considered best.
And
since he is "God" I prefer to live by his example.

Watch the remainder of this post, and look for examples of Jesus'
recommendations and behavior.

LaVonne



I see nothing in His
words that recommend hitting children with rods as a parenting
strategy.

Correct. Unlike the laws for divorce, he did not change the counsel
regarding child rearing.

In fact, he recommends a millstone around the neck and being cast
into
the
depths of the sea for anyone who offends a child.

Right. And raising a child without discipline is pretty offensive.

And when his disciplines
want to stone a woman for wanton behavior )as the OT recommends),
he
stops
them, forgives the woman, and tells her to "go and sin no more."

Right again. What does stoning have to do with spanking?


I think Jesus had a bit more understanding of the Bible than you
do,
and a
lot more respect for little children.

Of course he is understanding. I'm certain that he understands that
disciplining children is crucial to their development.

Ray Drouillard

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, LaVonne Carlson wrote:



Ray Drouillard wrote:

"LaVonne Carlson" wrote in message
...


What you have done is pick and choose portions of the Old Testament to
justify your behavior, and ignore those portions that you do not like
or
agree with.

Actually, it looks like that is what you have done. You are trying to
justify your practice of not disciplining your children,

I disciplined my children without resorting to hitting them.

Good for you. But that is not the issue. The issue here is how
is it better? I have been challenging you for years to show me
one "peer-reviewed" study in which, under the same condition, your
non-cp alternatives are any better. So far, all you could do is
avoid the issue, launch personal attacks against me. How about
it, Dr. LaVonne?

Doan

"Doan" wrote in message
...

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, LaVonne Carlson wrote:



Ray Drouillard wrote:

"LaVonne Carlson" wrote in message
...


What you have done is pick and choose portions of the Old Testament
to
justify your behavior, and ignore those portions that you do not
like
or
agree with.

Actually, it looks like that is what you have done. You are trying to
justify your practice of not disciplining your children,

I disciplined my children without resorting to hitting them.

Good for you. But that is not the issue. The issue here is how
is it better? I have been challenging you for years to show me
one "peer-reviewed" study in which, under the same condition, your
non-cp alternatives are any better. So far, all you could do is
avoid the issue, launch personal attacks against me. How about
it, Dr. LaVonne?

Doan

The burden of proof is on you, Doan, to prove that committing acts of
physical violence on other people accomplishes the ostensible goal when it
is already apparent to so many that it is not necessary and is so obviously
harmful..


--
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary numbers and those who don't."
-----------------------------
Byron "Barn" Canfield

LaVonne said
I disciplined my children without resorting to hitting them.

That's VERY interesting, LaVonne.
The former Child Protection caseworker who killed Logan Marr
by duct taping her to a high chair in her basement and taping
over her mouth?

She said almost the identical thing when asked about spanking.
She was quite an ""expert"".