Do midgets spank their little people? was.... How Children REALLY React To Control

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 12:07:16 -0500, "Nathan A. Barclay"
wrote:


Your respect for religious freedom is completely underwhelming. From
my
perspective, it is your belief that God does not exist that is the
"lie."

Introduce us. I'm available from 3 to 5pm this coming Monday. A drink
and a cigar at my club?

In practical terms, you will never convince me that you are right if
the
validity of your reasoning hinges on the belief that God does not
exist,

Nor will yours convince on the belief in a spirit deity.

nor
will I convince you of anything if I use reasoning that hinges on the
existence of God for its validity.

You could if you and he agreed that you have entirely different
definitions of the same thing.

Could your "God" be his "existence in all its unknowable mystery?"

He speaks of things that appear to be laws of nature, the universe, if
you will. As do you. What makes yours more valid than his?

'Course I can't speak for Steve, so I could be wrong. He might believe
that "God" is an old black lady with a wart on her chin. What's your
take?

I do, however, find your attempts to
invoke your own atheistic beliefs in your efforts to psychoanalyze me
HIGHLY
offensive.

Oh! Then you go it? Good for you. Steve has to try to hard something.
R R R R R

Most pompous asses need a swift kick in the butt now and then. Oddly
when that works, they mostly become athiests. Though I have heard tell
of a Buddhist here and there now and then when an "God"ian got a swift
one to the nether regions.

By the way, most folks totally misunderstand athiests. I find an
inordinate amount of highly moral and ethical people among athiests,
and what might be termed, loosely, universalists.

They, unlike you folks, have no hope of "forgiveness" so they are
obligated to either face that they are evil, selfish, stupid, ignorant
twits, or they get over themselves and become highly moral.

You counting on forgiveness if you are WRONG about children and are
preaching a false doctrine about what should be their raising?

Your circular reasoning capacity to continue in the compulsions taught
to you as a child by being raised with fear is amazing.

Basically you advocate the assualt of another human being "for their
own good" as being in service to your old age. Brilliant. Just forkin'
brilliant.

The Ice Flow Test is garbage. It assumes that children are evil (that
an ice flow exists) The are not only not evil, there is an inbred,
genetically, evolutionary cooperativeness...we are pack creatures and
our survival depends on cooperation...hence our young have that
inherently.

We are not cats. Though some of them even run in packs...lions and
cheetahs.

We are as dependent on cooperation as our relative, the great apes.

The habit of raising children by threat and pain is an aberration, an
evolutionary sport, that will die out or will kill us all. Many a
spiecies has died out because of just such a sport, that proliferated
and overbred it's characteristic weakness.

What you sad souls constitute is either the end of humanity, or a
portion that needs to be isolated and put on reservations to observe
you kill and destroy yourselves, and only a small portion of the
planetary environment.

Your bones will be good fertilizer and the rest of us cooperative
humans will reclaim the environment when you are gone. We'll plant
flowers in memorium of a failed, dangerous cousin, just as scientists
note that neanderthal died out and some cousins in the great ape
lineage are gone gone gone.

You are so inbred with each other now you are likely to not have more
than another millenium or two before you are in the zoo, if that.

I'd prefer in my own lifetime, but what are yah gonna do. Nature will
out.

Bless you, you cute little pompous ass you.

Kane


"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message
...
Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

Keep in mind that any system of logic is based on axioms, things
that
people believe are true but cannot objectively prove are true.
When
people start with different axioms, they can reach different
conclusions
even though both are following perfectly valid logic based on the
axioms
that they believe are true. If people recognize that they are
operating
from different axioms, they can identify which axioms cause them
to
reach different conclusions, understand the root causes of their
disagreement, and disuss why each holds the axioms he does. If
not,
they are likely to keep talking past each other indefinitely.
Each will
be
convinced that he is right and, in fact, each will be able to
"prove"
that
he is right, but they will never really understand each other.
------------------------
That would be true of one simple stllogistic logic, but not of ALL
logical tools employed at once as humans can do. And that greater
logic is NOT axiomatic, but intuitive. Logicians have numerous
examples of this meta-tool logic.

Would you care to give a few?

Inductive reasoning is a form of reasoning that is independent of
axioms.
However, it is also seriously vulnerable to error. For example, the
Pythagoreans once believed that all numbers could be expressed as
ratios of
integers because every number they could come up with could be
expressed as
a ratio of integers (hence the term "rational numbers"). But in
time,
people started running into numbers that couldn't be expressed that
way
("irrational numbers") and the belief based on inductive reasoning
was
proved wrong. Even so, inductive reasoning can be a useful source of
axioms
at times, especially when all that is important is that something be
generally true.

You JUST described how the belief in pain parenting shoots itself in
the foot.

What concerns me about your claims of relying on "meta-tool logic" is
that
it may, in practice, merely be a smokescreen by which to claim a
mantle of
logic for whatever you happen to want to believe.

Yes, belief in fairies and spirits will do that.


If a method of so-called
logic has no rigor to it, there is no way of testing a person's claim
that
what he says is logical to determine whether it is in fact logical.
So if
you want me to accept this so-called "meta-tool logic" as logic,
you'll have
to explain how it functions and how claims that something is logical
under
it can be tested. (By the way, I could find no trace of the term
"meta-tool
logic" or "metatool logic" in a Google web search.)

A large part of your problem of trying to tell me how I felt as a
child
has
to do with the fact that your axioms are so different from those
that I
held
as a child.
--------------
No problem, for someone perceptive they are eminently discussable.
That is called psychology.

It is called malpractice, if you were a psychologist and I were your
patient.

snip

That's not to say that I never resented times when I was
punished,
and certainly not to say that I never resented being told what to
do or
what not to do. But the level of resentment was mostly at the
level of
"I'm not getting my way" rather than at the level of "There is
something
fundamentally wrong with this" - except for the times when my
analysis
of a punishment found no legitimate basis for viewing it as fair.
------------------
That is abuse. That causes future progressive revenge formation and
distrust. That is why the older child evades parental wishes with
little concern, and it may cause danger to him. The line of
communication has come down because his end has decided that his
parents are not worth trusting.

If parents adopt a "because I said so" parenting style and refuse to
listen
to their children, the lines of communication go down. In my family,
the
lines of communication stayed generally strong because my parents
explained
the reasons for the rules they made and were willing to listen - and,
at
times, to change their minds. Even when I didn't agree with my
parents, I
trusted that they were doing what they believed was best for me in
the long
term. Why? Because my parents acted in a way that earned that
trust.

That doesn't mean there weren't conflicts. Nor does it mean that my
general
trust in them invariably outweighed my desire to do something I
enjoyed.
But it was a major reason why I maintained a generally strong
relationship
with my parents both through my childhood and ever since, and why I
take
their opinions seriously today.

Trust must still be evalauated by
one indulging in it, it still cannot be blind trust. Parental
assertion
that they "know better" than he does when there is no logical
reason
to believe that registers as a deception in the child's mind, and
poisons the adult-child relationship.

No logical reason? How about the fact that the parents have lived so
much
longer and have so much more experience?

Certainly, parents can throw away their status as people who "know
better"
in a number of different ways. They can behave hypocritically,
thereby
undermining their moral authority. They can refuse to provide
explanations,
so their children have no way of establishing that yes, what the
parents
suggest or decide generally does make sense. They can use their
power in
ways that appear selfish. And so on.

But if parents develop a track record of making decisions that have
good
reasons behind them (even if the children are not always happy with
the
decisions), and of not using their power selfishly (and most children
can
recognize that expecting them to do a fair share of the household
chores is
not selfish in any unreasonable sense of the term, even if they might
be
reluctant to admit it), then they can retain their status as people
who at
least generally know better. And the trust in such situations is
most
definitely not blind.

After such betrayal these people
can now never live together as equal adults, just like you would
have
trouble trusting a housemate who has stolen from you.

Except that looking back, what looked like stealing often turns out
not to
have been. It's more like a roommate who takes money that would have
been
spent on beer an holds onto it to make sure it will be available to
pay the
rent, or like taking someone's keys so he won't drive while
intoxicated.
The initial action, in and of itself, appears negative and might be
resented
at the time. But looking back, a smart person will recognize that it
was
for the best after all.

That is why a lot of us who were spanked and otherwise punished do
have
strong relationships with our parents. Even though we sometimes
disagreed
with our parents' decisions at the time, and still do disagree with
some of
them, we feel like they did a generally good job of looking after our
interests.

another big snip

It is NOT a matter of "legitimate" as in meaning
authority-originated,
for there IS NO SUCH authority! If your kid gets ****ed off at you
even for a WRONG reason you can STILL wind up just as frozen to
death
on an ice floe, or the emotional equivalent. If you're so ****ing
smart
it is ALSO your duty to your species to NOT **** OFF YOUR KIDS! You
CANNOT SUCCESSFULLY STOP THEM, so you need to stop pretending you
are
owed ANY "authority" if that offends them!!

In other words, act sensibly, think pragmatically!

You are forgetting a critical element of the "ice floe" test: time.
When a
child decides whether or not to let a parent freeze to death, he will
be
doing so with the maturity of an adult, and will be able to judge in
hindsight how good the parent's decisions were. For example,
suppose, as a
young boy, a child is spanked for wandering off from camp (to follow
your
primitive tribal analogy) and the spanking causes him to stop doing
so, or
at least to wander off a lot less often. A few years later, another
child
wanders off from camp and is killed. The boy, now a young man,
reevaluates
how dangerous wandering off was and realizes that the spanking might
have
saved his life. So even though the child originally resented the
punishment, it later becomes a reason to view the parent as wise and
someone
who looked after his best interests.

What you refuse to acknowledge is that many parents who spank
ultimately
pass the "ice floe" test. Whatever resentment the spankings
generated
originally, the children ultimately decide that their parents loved
them,
were trying to look after their best interests, and generally did a
pretty
good job. Further, they often recognize times when what their
parents
forced them to do or not to do were, in hindsight, better choices
than they
would have made for themselves.

I would also point out that parents can fail the "ice floe" test
through
inaction. If a parent allows a child to do something that results in
the
child's being killed or crippled, the child will not be able to help
the
parent when the parent is old.