Parent-Child Negotiations

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

If I
understand the positions you've been taking correctly, an agreement for
a
parent to offer to buy a child a video game in exchange for the child's
mowing the lawn each of the next two weekends would be considered
legitimate.
---------------------------------
Yes, if that were all there was to it, but so often the parent makes
it more complex.

Which raises the question of how breaches of contract on the part of the
child would be dealt with if they occur.

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Doan wrote:

On 12 Jun 2004, Chris wrote:

In alt.parenting.spanking R. Steve Walz wrote:

: You need to be professionally tortured till you shut your ****ing
: vicious little ********.

Note that verbally abusive Steven is a product of the child discipline
technique which you claim "by and large works well."

Chris

LOL!

Doan
----------
You incompetent spoofing moron, you left your addy in the post you
falsely attributed to Chris!!
Steve

LOL! You lying, stupid, pity excuse of a **** spewing mouth full of
obxious verbal garbage, ask Chris and he will tell you that is an
exact quote!

Doan
------------
There were no "quotes"!! You ****ed up, you old liar!
Steve

Run out of "****"? Shall I put more in my MOUHT? :-)
Doan
---------
Sure, go for it. Eat **** and die.
Steve

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Not when you kill enough of them.

Even the Nazi can't kill that many! ;-)
---------------------------
You're human ****, unfit to respond on this thread.
Steve

Doan wrote:

According to toto, Steve is not a "troll". ;-)
Doan
-------------------
She's right, in no way do I meet the net-definition.
Steve


On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Nathan A. Barclay wrote:


I've about decided to seriously cut back our resident troll's diet. I'm
willing to respond to stuff that's reasonably new and interesting, or where
I think of new angles, but there's no point repeating the same arguments in
message after message.

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

On the other hand, I'm less convinced that expecting all parents to live
up to the standard of alertness, creativity, and energy you set would be
reasonable or realistic.
------------------
If you teach it in school with role-playing, and make any other
approach to children ILLEGAL and a TORTURABLE offense against the
State, they will pay attention. First day: Show movie of parent
being publically tortured, then explain what he did and why they
may wish to avoid that for their future!!!!

So much for your credibility in claiming that coercive techniques can't work
in shaping people's behavior. :-)

But you missed my point. For non-coercive parenting techniques to be
expected to match your results when used by others, it is not sufficient
that parents stop coercing their children. They would also have to match
your positive efforts.

The asymmetric nature of the
situation makes it a good bit harder for parents to come up with the
time and energy to do things for their children than it would be if the
children could give the parents a comparable amount of help in return.
-----------------------
You sound like you're still quite immature, needy, and greedy.
Such people as you should NOT have kids yet!

Believe it or not, there are more people in the world than just you and me.
Some of them are single parents who have to work long hours, and who come
home tired.

Further, there is nothing in your description of what a parent owes a child
that includes making a trip to the thrift store to buy a child dishes or
teaching the chid how to make GI Joe hang gliders. By YOUR OWN definition,
at least as stated thus far, you went above and beyond the call of duty.

This all sounds like blabber. Why not give an example and I'll tell
you how a sensible parent SHOULD behave?

Suppose a four-year-old needs to go to daycare so his parents can go
to work, but the child refuses to go?
-----------------------------
Then you find other work or get a co-parent to stay home like you're
supposed to till they LIKE the idea. They will usually like the idea
next week, so if you wait, you'll find they become ready on their own.

That's not what I call being pragmatic. Nor is piling that burden on top of
the requirement for the parents to provide food, clothing, and shelter for
the child anything resembling my concept of fair. But of course your
concept of fairness is so focused on the children that it completely ignores
the parents. (Except, of course, when it's threatening to kill or torture
them.)

If the Geneva Convention allows a prison guard to punish a prisoner for
refusing to cooperate in a particular situation, or for refusing to stop
an
impermissible action,
--------------------
It does indeed.


I don't see how it could possibly violate the
Convention for a guard to count to three to give the prisoner a chance
to
reconsider instead of punishing the prisoner immediately.
-------------------------------
Threat or pain is illegal under Geneva.
Physical force without punishment to move a prisoner is acceptible.

In which case as long as the thing that's done after the guard counts to
three is a legitimate form of punishment under the convention, counting to
three would be allowed under the convention, right?

So is doing one's share of the chores, in whatever manner they are
divided.
---------------
Doesn't relate to children, they are owed support. They ONLY have an
obligation to learn the skill before they leave home, not to do your
work for you. Once they come to their near-adulthood, they can be
given responsibility equal to an adults ONLY IF they are given the
absolute freedom of an adult, and ONLY then. At this age they move
elsewhere in other cultures, about age 12 or 13.

What freedom does your model give an adult that it doesn't give a child?

A roommate that does not do his part to make the relationship work
can be thrown out, or can have his roommate leave him to pay the rent
and
bills himself.
-----------------
Except that you incurred the debt for their support by bringing them
into the world without their informed consent or express permission.

Aww, the poor little babies, forced to be born instead of being killed in
their mothers' wombs the way their parents would have done if the parents
were good, humane, decent people.

But your philosophy tells children that they should be able to expect
something in return for even those kinds of basics. That creates an
asymmetric relationship, not a symmetric one.
-----------------------------
No, beyond the debt their parents incurred to them for their support,
it is equal, you just don't like paying your debts I believe!! You
seem to believe that when you owe someone else money, that you somehow
get to order them around in return for that inconvenience!!!!

I don't believe that saving a person's life without his "informed consent or
express permission" causes me to owe him a debt, and neither do I believe
that giving a child life creates a unilateral debt in which the parents owe
the child something but the child owes nothing to the parents.

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Not when you kill enough of them.

Even the Nazi can't kill that many! ;-)
---------------------------
You're human ****, unfit to respond on this thread.
Steve

Hah, hah! More "****" coming out of your mouth, "never-spanked" boy!

Doan

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Doan wrote:

On 12 Jun 2004, Chris wrote:

In alt.parenting.spanking R. Steve Walz wrote:

: You need to be professionally tortured till you shut your ****ing
: vicious little ********.

Note that verbally abusive Steven is a product of the child discipline
technique which you claim "by and large works well."

Chris

LOL!

Doan
----------
You incompetent spoofing moron, you left your addy in the post you
falsely attributed to Chris!!
Steve

LOL! You lying, stupid, pity excuse of a **** spewing mouth full of
obxious verbal garbage, ask Chris and he will tell you that is an
exact quote!

Doan
------------
There were no "quotes"!! You ****ed up, you old liar!
Steve

Run out of "****"? Shall I put more in your MOUTH? :-)
Doan
---------
Sure, go for it. I Eat **** and die.
Steve

I know, "never-spanked" boy. :-)

Doan

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

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

There's nothing wrong with threatening dire consequences for CRIME,
or doing damage to enemies of the People you have NO reason to care
about. We care about our children, however, and we want to preevent
them from committing crimes that will see them become enemies of the
People and having their human value ignored thereafter.

You haven't ever read David Weber's Honor Harrington science fiction books
by any chance, have you? Your use of the words, "Enemies of the People"
bring to mind the bad guys in those books, the People's Republic of Haven.
Their State Security during the time the Committee for Public Safety was in
charge was always on the lookout for "enemies of the People."

The comparison is certainly not flattering. The only problem is, I'm having
a hard time deciding which it's more "not flattering" to, you or the Peep
leedership.
---------------
Fiction is irrelevant, precisely because it's not real, and definitely
because it in propaganda unhindered by the real world's REAL cause and
effect that would prove it to be agenda-ridden and wrong.


The funny thing about the words, "enemies of the People," is that they seem
to almost invariably really refer to enemies of whatever totalitarian regime
happens to be in charge pretending to represent "the People."
----------------
That is the allegation by the terrified rich who run the media and
movies in this society. They clearly have motives to LIE to avoid
having their wealth removed. The Rich REALLY do NOT like the idea
of "The People" deciding things, for the same reason that muggers
dislike the police!


Which is
fitting, given your pretensions to a kind of omniscience that would make you
a suitable candidate for dictator.
------------------------------------
Nonsense. Stating Truth has no relation to omniscience or pollitical
ambition. I merely want to live in such a world as a citizen, and
an anonymous one.


But you missed my point. For non-coercive parenting techniques to be
expected to match your results when used by others, it is not sufficient
that parents stop coercing their children. They would also have to
match
your positive efforts.
--------------------------
Do no harm, even if you can do better as well. Nothing positive will
ever mitigate concurrent abuse.

Spoken on high from Mount Olympus yet again.
---------------------------------------
Now you're posturing ad hominem because you know you can't actually
make any sense or argue from reason against me.


Then you find other work or get a co-parent to stay home like you're
supposed to till they LIKE the idea. They will usually like the idea
next week, so if you wait, you'll find they become ready on their own.

That's not what I call being pragmatic.
--------------
When the ultimate pragmatism is with respect to the child it is.

Proof by definition rears its ugly head again. "Be pragmatic." "What's
pragmatic?" "Doing things the way I say."
-------------------------------
Pragmatic is doing what works, abuse of children is widely promoted
despite it failing to do anything promised by its promoters, in fact
it does the extreme opposite.

You can always pretend the opposite here, and no one can stop you
from lying over and over. But you won't look bright to those who
really do know better in any case.


Threat or pain is illegal under Geneva.
Physical force without punishment to move a prisoner is acceptible.

In which case as long as the thing that's done after the guard counts to
three is a legitimate form of punishment under the convention, counting
to
three would be allowed under the convention, right?
----------------------------
No. That constitutes threat of harm.

I checked the wording of the Convention on the Internet: "No physical or
mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on
prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.
Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or
exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
---------------
Bingo.


So while threatening to punish a prisoner for refusing to divulge
information is prohibited, threatening to punish a prisoner for violating a
legitimate rule is not prohibited.
---------------------------
You misread it. Read it again for comprehension. Nothing I saw said
anything like that.


What freedom does your model give an adult that it doesn't give a child?
----------------------------
A very young child can be moved by the parent to protect them, or
because the child must accompany the parents where they must go.
This changes as the child develops their own clear desires for where
they wish to be. However, they deserve an apology for any move they
don't like even when very young. The parent always has the right to
rescue them, and anyone has the right to rescue anyone anyway, but
heaven help you if you start pretending someone needs rescue if you
just don't like their life choices.

So a child of 12 or 13 would in fact have the same freedom as an adult.
Right?
-----------
Yes.
Or even much younger, depending on their desires and the degree of
perfection of the society. In a society where there is sufficiently
stringent enforcement of public safety, and psychopaths are filtered
out from the population early and submitted to controlled living
environemnts, it can be quite safe for even 8 year olds to live free
in dormitory creches with their age-group, or among other ages as
well.


I don't believe that saving a person's life without his "informed
consent or
express permission" causes me to owe him a debt, and neither do I
believe
that giving a child life creates a unilateral debt in which the parents
owe
the child something but the child owes nothing to the parents.
----------------------------------
Tough ****. The State does, even now.
You would seem to be antisocial.

Under current law, the debt is not entirely unilateral, at least where
custodial parents are concerned.
---------------------------
Sure it is.


For example, children can be required to
do reasonable chores around the house,
---------------------
No, confabulated.


and can be required to stop doing
things that their parents find annoying
----------------
No, you're confabulating again.


such as making a lot of noise when a
parent isn't in a mood to listen.
---------------------------------
So can adult housemates. They are arrested for noise or sued for
violating a resident's right of quiet enjoyment of the premises
as is their right of tenancy.
Steve

Nathan A. Barclay wrote:

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

If I
understand the positions you've been taking correctly, an agreement for
a
parent to offer to buy a child a video game in exchange for the child's
mowing the lawn each of the next two weekends would be considered
legitimate.
---------------------------------
Yes, if that were all there was to it, but so often the parent makes
it more complex.

Which raises the question of how breaches of contract on the part of the
child would be dealt with if they occur.
----------------------------------
Contract law specifies compensation or detainer of privilege for
goods or services uncompensated. My societal design has no such
things as contracts between individuals, however, and contracts
with the People's State are straightforward, tit for tat. If you
do your part you get thus and such, if not, you don't. In an
advance society pre-pubescent kids of 8 can work 20 hours a week
as well as their schooling if they want to begin adult living on
their own instead of supervised dormitories.
Steve

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Doan wrote:

On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, R. Steve Walz wrote:

Not when you kill enough of them.

Even the Nazi can't kill that many! ;-)
---------------------------
You're human ****, unfit to respond on this thread.
Steve

Hah, hah! More "****" coming out of my mouth, "never-spanked" boy!
Doan
-----------
Yup.
Steve

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

I'm snipping a fair number of redundant rants that don't add anything
new to
the discussion.

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

Regarding the (admittedly off-topic) issue of schools, a system in which
all parents pay taxes and all children's education is funded without
regard
to what schools their parents choose (at least as long as the schools'
quality is acceptable) is fair and symmetric.
------------
Except NO non-State school IS acceptable!!
Children are owed an education BY THE STATE,
and less thanthat or any different is wrong!!

Steve, I'd like for you to consider something very carefully. A few days
ago, you mentioned a school that gave children the freedom to do pretty much
what they want to. Was that a state school, or was it a privately operated
school? Who is more likely to experiment with schools in that direction,
the state or the private sector? If they work as well as you think they do,
who is more likely to figure that out, the state or the private sector?
Even short of that, which is more likely to let children go to a kind of
school they like resonably well, a system where the state controls all the
schools or one in which families can choose their children's schools and can
thus involve their children in that choice?

Believe it or not, I actually regard the idea of schools that give children
more freedom to choose what they want to do a fascinating one. I don't
think it makes sense just to let children play when they're supposed to be
learning, any more than it makes sense to let adults choose to spend all
their time playing instead of working. If children's "job" is to go to
school and learn things that will help them be productive in the future, I
think it is reasonable to expect them to do useful work in their job. But
adults can do useful work without having others dictate to them where they
will work and what kind of work they will do. Similarly, it seems logical
that children can learn things that will be useful to them and to society
later without having to be told exactly what they must learn when.

A well-funded voucher system would be a huge step in that direction because
it would take us out of the box that says government knows what children
"need" better than families do. From there, it will be very interesting to
see what the private sector can come up with.

As for Steve's words, "publically decided Truth," the concept that
government can decide Truth is exactly what freedom of religion, speech,
the press, and assembly were written into our Constitution to oppose.
----------------
We have and need publically sanctioned Truth for a number of things,
to decide how to vote in legislation we need psychological fact
determined by the State,

Psychological "fact" determined by the state is the last thing we need.
Every new idea starts off in the minority. With a free market of ideas,
those new ideas can compete to gain broader support, with the ideas that
succeed spreading wider and those that fail dying out. The state, in
contrast, is quite capable of keeping stupid ideas alive almost
indefinitely - ideas like the idea that essentially every child of a certain
age should be learning the same things no matter what the differences in
their learning ability and (at least for younger children) their interests.

Your problem is that you view state authority as a short cut to create the
kind of world you want, a way to get it without doing the work necessary to
convince your fellow citizens that you are right. In case you didn't
notice, that is essentially the same laziness and tyrannical mindset that
was responsible for state churches. And I might remind you that a state
with the power to impose your will onto others has the power to instead
impose others' will onto you.

we need psychological principles and criteria
to judge the treatment of children, who are always under the protection
of the State.

I would put it, "We need for the state to judge the treatment of children in
light of psychological principles as currently understood." That leaves the
process of determining truth outside the state's control, but allows the
state to intervene when society's current understanding of truth indicates
that an unacceptable level of harm is being caused.

We have to decide matters of fact in the courts as juries,
and we have to understand technical publically approved facts to know
how to vote for appropriations so we don't try to fund nonsense,

What in the world makes you think that giving government authority to decide
what is "fact" and what isn't would make it EASIER to tell when government
is trying to fund nonsense? That's like having the fox guard the chicken
coop. The whole reason for free speech and a free press is to ensure that
people can learn about facts that the state would find inconvenient.

and
we need publically determined truth to judge the value of educational
curricula and matters of fact in the classrooms at all levels,

Why? Government has been judging "the value of educational curricula and
matters of fact in the classrooms" for more than a century. Do public
schools as they now exist look even halfway close to how you think they
ought to look? Government control has SUPPRESSED movement toward the kind
of schools you favor, not promoted it.

In a free market, schools could try all sorts of different things. Ideas
that work would spread, and those that don't would die out. If the kind of
schools you support, or something close to them, turns out to be the most
effective, that is what will take over eventually.

and to
decide what deserves State funding, and what scams should be oppressed
to stop fraud. We need publically established Truth for almosy every
decision that the voters as their government makes!!

Nonsense. If voters vote based on "truth" decided by government, the
democratic process becomes irrelevant.

The idea
of allowing the majority to take everyone's money and use it to push the
majority's concept of "Truth" onto as many children as possible ought to
be considered anathema to freedom.
--------------
That *IS* what public education is for, to protect children from being
raised to be their parents slaves and servants and to be so stupid,
isolated and afraid that they mistakenly assent to a life of slavery to
their parents on farms and petty fiefdoms their parents would try to
set up.

I've read a fair amount about the history of public education, and I see no
evidence that that motive played a major role in its creation.

What you really want is a chance to place children whose families disagree
with your beliefs and values in an environment where they will be subjected
to peer pressure whether they like it or not, and where religion will be
largely blocked out to ensure that the peer pressure will be in primarily
secularizing directions.

A German Duke did that with a bunch of his serfs and relatives
in Illinois one time in the middle 19th century, he imported them as
his slaves and tried to have them build him a castle on the illinois
River as if built on the Rhine in Germany, and it was halfway done
when some german-speaking frei-denkeren (free-thinkers) came through
and mentioned to his serfs that they were free because they were now
in America!! They were shocked, they had never even HEARD of America
or any such advancement in human freedom, and they immediately left
and started their own farms and villages. The ruins of the castle are
a monument to that twisted episode in the new America there in the
woods, he died after his slaves left because he had know one and knew
little of the skills needed to support himself.

So instead, we put children in the hands of petty fiefdoms set up by
government bureaucrats?

As the example you presented points out, tyranny through ignorance is doomed
to fail in the long term. It falls apart the moment people learn that they
have been deceived. And if that was true in the nineteenth century, think
how much more true it is today with our vastly better communications and
transportation.

Worse, Steve is trying to claim the mantle
of majority approval for what is in reality a parody of the Truth as
the majority sees it, a parody with God reduced to irrelevancy.
---------------------
The Majority has to decide what makes sense and what does not, and

In a free society, EACH PERSON is free to decide what he thinks makes sense
and what he thinks does not. It is only in a tyrannical society that
government, even government controlled by the majority, gets to make that
decision for everyone.

your vicious little antihumane antisexual"Gawd" is irrelevant because
there is no evidence of any such thing exists and your religion looks
like nothing more than one more economic control scam and a fraud on
the public for which all of you fly-by-hight assholes should be
imprisoned.

The evidence is in the form of testimony by people who claim to have been
eyewitnesses and of reports by people who say they interviewed people who
claimed to have been eyewitnesses. Such evidence is used by historians on a
routine basis in other contexts. You can argue why you believe that the
purported evidence should be rejected, but your claims that no evidence even
exists are disingenuous.

Further, past experience with allowing government to decide what is "true"
and what is not in regard to religious matters has consistently resulted in
problems if not outright disaster. That is why we have religious freedom in
this country, which in turn is why you are free to say what you are saying
now without fear of being tortured or imprisoned on charges of blasphemy.
It is interesting how you seek to use the freedom that you were given as an
opportunity to use government power to suppress the freedom of others.

I might also remind Steve that it is flagrantly unconstitutional under
the
First Amendment for government to decide what is Truth and what is not
in regard to religious matters. His desire to suppress Christianity as
"lies"
so far as children's education is concerned would thus be a gross
violation
of the Constitution.
---------------------------
If you don't try to defraud anyone, and you want to get together and
pretend to believe the unbelievable, fine, but don't defraud children
of their right to an effective education by screwing them up with it,

That sounds good in theory, but it creates serious long-term problems in
practice. What if the majority would decide that telling children that God
does not exist constitutes defrauding children, or if the majority would
decide that teaching them any religion other than Christianity constitutes
defrauding them?

You are right that in the short term, freedom of religion does cause some
problems. But in the long term, over a period of generations, freedom of
religion allows systems of beliefs and values to grow or die based on
whether they attract more people than they lose or lose more people than
they attract. Short-term attempts at tyranny based on what the majority at
a particular time believes is true distorts that process, and history has
shown beyond any possible doubt how dangerous such distortions can be.

or violate their rights because of your superstitions, and don't try
to hijack our free society with your blabber, because if you do we'll

YOU are the one trying to hijack a free society and reshape it into
something that follows his own beliefs and values, not me.

Groups are only wrong when they set out to be, and to call it right.

And YOU dare to accuse ME of blind faith?
---------------
Sure, if you believe fraudulent **** you KNOW you have no basis for!
People believe **** other than something reasonable because they KNOW
it's unreasonable, but still have a sick need to believe that! Thus
they seek the fraud of "revealed" religious "truth' to tell them its
right EVEN THOUGH it makes no reasonable sense!

The alternative to Christianity's being true is that its advocates managed
to perpetrate a "religious fraud" on a scale that has never, to my
knowledge, been seen in human history either before or since. Either
miraculous claims were made on a huge scale during the lifetimes of the
people who were alleged to have been involved, or claims of large numbers of
miracles were somehow added after the fact even though people who had
already been Christians knew that the miracles weren't in what they were
originally taught. Further, all of this would have to have been done in a
time when government was actively hostile to the religion. Show me another
religion (aside from Judaeism, the success of which would support rather
than undermine Christianity) that would have required fraud on a similar
scale to have succeeded, and that achieved more than local or very temporary
success. in the face of government opposition.

So you see, I do have a reason to believe beyond just blind faith. It is
possible that there are things I don't know about that could cause me to
reevaluate my reason. But for the present, I find it easier to believe that
Christianity is true than to believe that it could have come about as a
result of a scam.

Hogwash. Scientists are human beings, and therefore vulnerable to
human biases. The use of multiple peer reviewers reduces the risk
of such biases, but cannot eliminte it - especially when the peer
reviewers themselves often have biases in common.
---------------------------
Science itself eliminates the risks of anti-science religion.
That it fails honestly often is irrelevant, it is still better
than anything else, and we are fored to decide.

In a free society, that decision is in the hands of individuals, not in the
hands of government. Further, in a free society, scientists do not have the
power to set themselves up as an oligarchy and impose their findings onto
laymen against their wills. Instead, scientists are required to persuade
people that they are right if they want to be believed.

Which means that any peer review system will inevitably be biased. Deal
with it.
--------------------
We HAVE such such processes because we are FORCED t0 decide or die
in so many situatiions. Logical need only be that MOST LIKELY to be
right!!

If government decides, we put all our eggs in one basket and have no basis
for comparing the success of that basket with the success of other baskets
(at least without cultural differences between our nation and other nations
contamnating the comparison). With individual freedom, our eggs are divided
among many baskets, reducing the risk of having all the eggs be damaged if
one basket turns out to be seriously flawed and improving our odds of
identifying what kinds of baskets are best over the long term.

Nonsense, your very self-esteem relies on believing that what your
parents did was correct, or else you'd have to accept that you were
not as loved, and consequently, that your parents did not find you
lovable.

LOL. You keep reaching new heights in absurdity. Parents are fallible
human beings, and are quite capable of loving their children yet making
mistakes with them. I have ample reason to believe that my parents
loved
me whether or not I view their parenting choices as correct.
---------------------------
So you SAY. I don't believe it.

And your refusal to believe, or seemingly even to consider the possibility,
is a completely unscientific, and in fact anti-scientific, reaction.

And in what way do I have a bigger "self-esteem" stake in whether my
parents
made the correct choices than you do in whether yours made the correct
choices?
----------------------------
Mine didn't hurt me.

LOL. What does that have to do with how much our self-esteem is bound up in
whether our parents made the correct choices?

Why could your parents make mistakes yet still love you, but it be
impossible for my parents to make mistakes and still love me?
-------------------------------
Mistakes that have a pattern denote different motives.

Usually true, although sometimes mistakes are a result of character flaws
that people are trying, without complete success, to overcome. In those
cases, attributing motives as if the mistakes were deliberately planned
would be misleading.

More importantly, people can act with good motives and still produce bad
results. One of the easiest types of such occurrences to recognize is when
children try to help their parents with something but end up doing more harm
than good. Is the important thing for the parents' self-esteem what the
result of the children's action was, or is it the fact that the children
cared enough about the parents to do something they thought would help even
though it ended up making things worse instead?

Further, people can act in ways that they believe will do more good than
harm on average even though they know there will be cases in which they do
harm. For example, doctors prescribe medications that do more good than
harm for most patients but that occasionally do more harm than good instead.
And if a patient is unconscious, they sometimes even do so without the
patient's consent.

I would also note that different patterns of HOW parents use their authority
indicate different motives. Some patterns indicate love: "We're going to
make you do what we believe is best for you whether you like it or not."
(That, in turn, can be subdivided into the kind of blind, stupid arroganze
that produced the same 55-mph speed limit on Interstates as on twisty West
Virginia two-lane highways, and the kind of informed use of superior
knowledge that causes parents to make a child take a medicine that the child
doesn't like and cannot be persuaded to take voluntarily. Of course there
are also all sorts of shades in between.) Other patterns indicate a motive
of protecting the parents' legitimate interests: "We won't let you make a
lot of noise when we're trying to sleep" or "We require you to do your share
of work around the house." And some patterns imply purely selfish motives:
"I want another beer, but I'm too lazy to get it myself so you have to get
it for me."

Unfortunately, you deliberately blind yourself to the reality that different
ways parents use their authority can send different messages reflecting
different motives. As a result, you cannot possibly conduct a legitimate
scientific analysis of how children are likely to react in various cases.

No, you are the one who is in denial. Denial that your theoretical
model
of how children are "supposed" to react to the use of parental authority
does not stand up to the ultimte test: the experiences of real people in
the real world. In legitimate science, the validity of hypotheses is
tested
based on whether or not they stand up in the real world. You are trying
to circumvent that by arbitrarily assuming that any real-world report
that
contradicts your hypothesis must be in error.
----------------------------------
Nice, huh? It just happens to be so as well. Sure love has meta-levels,
but it also becomes confounded in that complexity. The questions I
pose are reasonably well born out in the extreme cases, and well
enough supported by people who WILL admit that this is so in both
major and in less extreme cases.

So? Suppose you found out that people who are forced to eat practically
nothing but onions for a year usually hate onions, and that there are people
who haven't been overdosed on onions who hate onions. Would that make
everyone who claims not to hate onions either a liar or deluded?

Even when conditions are exactly the same, human beings can react to them in
radically different ways. Further, the differences between parenting styels
in "less extreme cases" can be enormous. Your efforts to generalize
completely ignore both of those important facts. Your approach would be
laughed out of any peer reviewed journal as thoroughly unscientific.

For you to try to deny that is just being argumentative, and you
"doth protext too much!"

I suppose flat-earthers could claim that people who believe the Earth is
round are protesting too much too. That wouldn't make the flat-earthers any
more right, though.

As I said before, if people hold different axioms, they can prove
different
and contradictory things through supposedly "unassailable" logic.
----------------------
People who have ulterior agendas that require them oppose me can
change axioms like shoes, it only points out the power of cognitive
dissonance.

You love throwing the words "cognitive dissonance" around. Yet you never
provide any evidence to support your accusations beyond your own beliefs.
The fact that MY actions are inconsistent with YOUR beliefs does not
constitute evidence of cognitive dissonance. Yet you seem unable to grasp
that fact.

but children do not owe their parents a debt in return.
-------------------------------
They do not. Since when do victims owe debts to assailants!?

So bringing a child into the world is now regarded as a form of assault,
huh?

If one
believes instead that a certain amount of obedience to parental
authority
is at least part of what children owe their parents in exchange for the
food, clothing, shelter, time, and attention the parents provide for
them,
your house of cards collapses.
--------------------------
If one believes that they have to oppose me or have their house of
cards self-esteem knocked down, then they will pretend, as you do,
that what I say is some "house of cards", when it is no such thing.

LOL. To make your argument work, you have to assume that my self-esteem is
somehow irrevocably tied up with the belief that my parents' disciplinary
choices were correct. Therefore, you make that assumption, and make
whatever other asumptions you have to make in order to defend that
assumption. The resulting chain of errors is so silly it makes me laugh.
(And yes, when I say LOL, it's because I literally do end up laughing at how
arrogant, stupid, and blind to reality your arguments are in those
particular cases.)

My beliefs are built largely on two fundamental principles. One is that
privileges and responsibilties should go together in a balanced way. Since
parents have vastly more responsibility toward children than they do toward
adult roommates, they need correspondingly greater power in the relationship
to counterbalance that responsibility. Otherwise, parents' legitimate
interests are not protected if their children choose not to respect them.
The other is the that children, and especially young children, have only a
limited capacity to understand the consequences of their actions, and that
there are times when what is best for children should supercede what the
children want.

When parents use their authority in ways compatible with those principles,
giving due consideration to their children's needs and desires, I view their
use of authority as legitimate. When parents use their authorty selfishly
in ways that go beyond protecting their legitimate interests, or they use it
in an arbitrary way that largely ignores their children's needs and desires,
I do not.

There is no "house of cards" involved in that. Yes, there is a foundation
without which my position cannot stand. But I don't have to keep piling one
unsupported claim on top of another, on top of another, on top of another
the way you do.

So either we both have the right not to be treated in
an offensive and insulting manner, or neither does.
------------------------
Those who deserve insult have no such right, only children do because
they are not perps.

So if parents view their children as "perps" of something that they believe
is wrong, whether or not the children's actions violate the law, their
parents are justified in treating them in an offensive and insutling manner?

Keep in mind that you are defining me as a "perp" not because of any law I
am violating, but rather because you believe that a view I hold is wrong and
harmful to others. By that standard, any parent who believes that a view
his child advocates is wrong and harmful to others would be justified in
labeling his child as a "perp," at which time, under your reasoning, the
child's right not to be treated in an offensive and insulting manner would
disappear.

It extends to the benefit side of every choice and preference the child
makes, but sometimes extends only to part of the cost/risk side. Some
costs and risks involve almost purely subjective value, for example, "If
I play Nintendo, I can't play chess at the same time." But others have
costs or risks that are far more objective in nature, for example, if a
child doesn't do enough homework to keep up, he'll have to be held
back a year in school (at least in most places), or if a child jumps
from
a high place, he might break a leg. The parents are generally in a
better
position than the child to weigh the objective implications of such
cost/risk elements. (And I might add that in both of these examples,
the child's choice could have a significant impact on the parents'
wallet.
------------
Yeah, he might not be as rich in his old age. Any such wealth is
NOT his "right".

Such wealth is far more the parent's right than it is the child's. The
parent worked for it. All the chld did was be born.

Nor does it matter if parents are better at something
than a child is, we don't have them come to school and take tests for
the child, nor do we have them learn to walk instead of the child
because the child might not do it as well. The POINT of the process
is that the CHILD learn BY SUFFERING CONSEQUENCES, and MUCh better NOW
than LATER when the consequences are REAL and NOT some trial run!!!

You don't think a broken leg, or a year's delay in a child's being able to
start living independently, is REAL? You view those things as nothing more
than a trial run? If so, you have a very odd idea of reality.

Further, people can learn not only by making mistakes themselves but also by
learning from mistakes made by others. Those others can even be fictional
in the form of fables with roots in what can happen in the real world, as in
"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" or my parent's story of when "Guy-goo-goo, the baby
giant" locked his door and got hurt and his parents couldn't get in to help
him. But there are times when children can get so caught up in their desire
to do something that it overrides their willingness to believe their parents
about a possible danger. In those cases, parental authority can buy time
for the child to reconsider.

(And by the way, parental authority used in that manner works best if it is
used in conjunction with other outlets for the child's desires. To take an
example from my childhood, instead of prohibiting my brother and me from
playing with fire entirely, our parents allowed us to do so only with
parental supervision. That kind of approach shows the child that the
parents do care about and respect the child's desires, but limits the amount
of danger.)

In regard to the examples you cited, the reason we don't have parents take
tests for their children is that tests ARE a trial run. The only real-world
consequence of a child's failing a test is that it reflects a deficiency in
the child's knowledge that needs to be corrected, and possibly a deficiency
in the child's study habits or in the methods being used to teach the child.
We do not, however, entrust important real-world calculations to students
who are still studying the material needed to make those calculations. As
for parents' learning to walk for their children, the example is just plain
silly since there is no known way that they COULD do so.

The child has the right to fail early and often ON HIS OWN, because it
is then that it will do him the MOST good and the LEAST harm, precisely
BECAUSE his parents provide support to him ANYWAY! The CHILD has the
right to learn in the way the CHILD must learn, on his OWN, for his OWN
reasons, and at his OWN rate!! Anything else the parents try to
interfere in merely delays the child's motivational development!!

I agree that there are times when letting children do something and suffer
the consequences is the best course for parents to take. But I don't
blindly assume that such is always the case.

Whether you get an A or B in 2nd grade is intentionally NOT regarded
as important, and by the time grades ARE held as somewhat important,
the child is an older teen and it is not even your ****ing business!

Whether the child gets an A or a B isn't all that important. Whether the
child learns the underlying material well enough to provide a good
foundation for future learning is. In Mathematics, new concepts are built
on top of old ones, and if a child falls too far behind, higher-level
concepts become harder and harder to learn because the child does not have a
strong enough foundation with lower-level concepts. Reading is even more
important because it provides a foundation for children's learning of all
subjects.

But those consequences are by nature long-term, not something a child will
feel right away. One would hope that parents can convey the importance of
not falling behind to their children through means such as describing how
falling behind has affected others. But if they can't, the child may not
pay much attention to the consequences until they become pretty serious.

With school, the parents could
have to support the child through an extra year of school. With
jumping,
the parents could have to pay medical bills for a broken leg. That
gives
the parents even more of a stake in those particular issues.)
--------------------------
And so do they prevent children from jumping? Not if they have good
sense they do not! With jumping comes the building of muscle and
bone, it IS a process frought with some danger, and that is simply
UNAVOIDABLE!! That is LIFE!

And if parents set limits on how high the children can jump from, they can
allow the children to develop their bones and muscles - and to have fun
jumping in the process - without nearly the same danger that jumping from
greater heights would involve.

The fact that there is "no excuse for the least abuse of power" does
not mean that a small abuse is the same as a large one. If a police
officer hits someone with a club once at the beginning of an
interrogation and once at the end, it is a lie to claim that the police
officer beat the person continually throughout the entire interrogation.
Similarly, if parents try to take over a few decisions in a child's
life, it
is deceptive to portray the matter as if the parents were trying to live
the child's entire life for him.
------------------------------
Irrelevant, Evil is evil, it is called evil for a reason unrelated
to its severity.

In the case of abuse of police power, I agree that evil is evil. But even
then, the degree of harm caused by the evil varies widely, and misstating
that degree is disingenuous.

When there is disagrement about whether something is fundamentally,
inherently evil, or evil only when taken to excess, accuracy is even more
important. The city I live in has laws that limit my actions. I'm not
allowed to let my lawn grow to a point where it becomes a serious eyesore,
or let bushes grow to a point where they become a traffic hazard. There are
limits to how fast I am allowed to drive. And so forth.

But I would be dishonest if I tried to claim that the city is trying to live
my life for me, because there are far more choices that I am allowed to make
for myself. Similarly, it is intellectually dishonest for you to make it
sound like parents who make and enforce rules regarding a few aspects of
their children's lives are trying to live their children's lives for them.

So? You made the claim, "everything you're saying could be used to
defend ANY petty venal tyranny!!" If so, you should be able to find
a way to use what I was saying to defend the mother I described. I
don't think you can; at least not without stretching credibility to the
breaking point.
-----------------------------------
Her status is irrelevant to any abuse on her part. If she abuses,
it is abuse. I have no interest in defending some barely hypothetical
mother you wanted to posit without a complete description. If you
wanted a response you needed to include in your quoted text all
material related to my statement.

I don't see how my lack of a complete description interfered with your
ability to do what you said you could. Whatever gaps I left, you could have
filled them with reasoable assumptions and tried to meet my challenge on
that basis.

Actually, though, there is a very good reason why I view the mother's
status as relevant. If a single mother is working sixty hours a week to
support her kids, she is working more than the kids are (counting school
as part of the children's work) even if she makes the children do all of
the household chores. Under those conditions, requiring the children
to do all of the housework in exchange for the benefit they receive from
their mother's working such long hours can be defended as fair under
"everything I'm saying." (Indeed, a variant would presumably even be
legitimate under your model: what if the children agree to accept
responsibility for the household chores so the mother can work longer
hours in part to buy more and nicer things for the kids?)
----------------------------
Positing some person's untenable choice as to a life is not arguable,
it it's contrived and ridiculous, as if saying, "what if she was..."
where any non-existent extreme case is then shoved forward. It isn't
reasonable.

Are you saying there aren't single mothers who work sixty hours a week? My
brother often works longer hours than that without the added incentive of
having children whose quality of food, clothing, and shelter (among other
things) depends on his doing so. Overtime laws cut into companies' ability
to force a worker to work more than 40 hours a week. But there are people
facing economic hardship who circumvent that by working one full-time job
and another part-time job. Further, the laws that require companies to pay
people at a higher rate for time they work overtime do not apply to salaried
professionals (as in my brother's case). So I don't think my example is as
outlandish as you want to believe it is.

In contrast, a mother who stays home all day doing nothing productive
faces
a much lower work burden than what school places on her children. Given
that reality, how would one defend a claim that expecting the children
to do
all the housework while their mother sits back and does nothing would
constitute nothing more than requiring the children to do their fair
share?
--------------------
There is no "share", and again, the nature of the mother's relationship
with her children has gone curiously unspecified. Unreasonable.

What, exactly, do you need to know that is not specified and that you cannot
fill in with reasonable assumptions?

In both cases my guidelines regarding what constitutes abuse are
entirely applicable, but specifics would have to be specific.

What you said was, "everything you're saying could be used to defend ANY
petty venal tyranny!!" If that is true, you can use "everything" I'm saying
to justify the tyranny of the mother who stays home not working yet makes
her children do all the work around the house. If you cannot use what I'm
saying to justify that mother's tyranny, then your claim was in fact wrong.

keys were taken might, looking back, agree that taking his keys
was the right thing to do.
------------
He well might, but I am not discussing that situation. You're
pretending that situation is all situations, when it isn't.

False accusation. The reason I explicitly called out all three basic
possibilities is that all three are, in fact, possible.
-----------------------------------
I dealt with this sufficiently already.
Re-read my answer.

LOL. I explicitly say that I regard all three situations as possible and
you STILL keep insisting that I am pretending that only one is possible.

Just to make it crystal clear, I fully recognize that there are kids who
look back on their parents as cruel, bullying control freaks, and, moreover,
who I believe are fully, one hundred percent justified in doing so. So I
certainly do not believe that the first reaction is the only one possible.

Those same basic possibilities also exist with the use of parental
authority to control certain aspects of children's lives.
-------------------
No such illicit violations of the child's rights accomplish good
results.

So you keep claiming. The problem is, to do so, you have to call me
and millions of other people liars or deluded.
--------------
The number of people who do wrong cannot be used as justification.

I'm talking about the reactions that I and many others have toward our
parents looking back as adults, not about what we do (or would do) with our
children.

In fact, you're almost like a Pythagorean who would rather kill a person
who showed you an irrational number than believe that such a thing
could actually exist. (I heard a presentation in college speculating
that the Pythagoreans did in fact kill a person for making such a
discovery.)
---------------------------
Since that doesn't relate to what I'm doing, it doesn't matter.
You're merely asserting that it does, without evidence.

My evidence is the way you keep saying that any child who was punished and
believes, in retrospect, that the punishment had a beneficial effect must be
either lying or deluded without acknowledging even the possibility that our
existence might constitute evidence that you are wrong.

Q.E.D. As I said, you refuse to acknowledge that the result could be
anything other than the third possibility, except maybe as a result of
Stockholm Syndrome.
-------------------------
Again you deleted massively to confuse what we're discussing. As I
recall it was already sufficiently dealt with. If you wanted to
divide the thread you should have done so. You are doing that in
each case, deleting my answers to see if you get the same answers.

I close fragments of threads by deleting them when I no longer view them as
contributing something useful to the discussion. If we'd just be repeating
ourselves, there is no point keeping a thread fragment open. If your
response says nothing particularly meaningful, I may point that out, or I
may simply let the thread fragment drop. But I try not to cut out things
that could add value to the discussion. (Unlike you, I might add; I noticed
a couple cases farther down where you cut out the main point I was trying to
make and responded as if I'd never made it.)

Since you obviously believe in people's speaking their mind in regard to how
they feel about others' behavior, I regard much of your behavior as
troll-like, seeking to inflame rather than to enlighten. The proper
response to a troll, according to mainstream Usenet thinking as I understand
it, is to try to starve the troll by not reacting to his provocations. I'm
willing to keep up the debate only as long as, and only in areas where, I
view further discussion as having some realistic chance of being productive.

If I delete something where you think, if I had responded, the debate would
not have immediately degenerated to your saying things you've already said
before, please call it to my attention and explain the basis for your
belief. That way I can try to be more careful in the future.

To make that claim stick, you would have to define "Stockholm
Syndrome"
------------------------------
No. SS is an extreme example of cognitive dissonance, an abused
person denies their abuse at the hands of another by siding with
them to save face.

From my interpretation based on reading a few articles on Google, fear,
not desire to save face, is the primary factor.
----------------------------
No, or they would retrench from it immediately when released.

It's not that simple. When a person is afraid of being killed if he lets
his true feelings show, denial of those feelings becomes a survival tool.
Further, when any flaw in the act is dangerous, the person has a motivation
not to even THINK things that might lead to a dangerous lapse. If a child's
thought process (quite possibly at a subconscious level) is, "No, I'd better
not even think Daddy is beating me unfairly, because if I think it, I might
say it, and if I say it, he'll get even angrier and beat me even worse," the
child has an incentive to deny the possibility that Daddy is beating him
unfairly even in the privacy of his own mind. And if the child avoids
unsafe thoughts, he has to build a world view out of only safe ones, such
as, "I only get beat because I deserve it." The child can even come up with
some times when he was behaving and Daddy acted nice to him to support the
world view in which he only gets beaten because he deserves it. Once the
new world view is firmly entrenched, just removing the child from the
abusive environment will not alter that world view because the child's
thought patterns are too attuned to thinking things that support it and
resisting ideas that are incompatible. This explanation and example are my
own, but they are based on what I've read of how the syndrome works.

And yes, as you can see, I do believe that there are types of child abuse
that can produce Stockholm Syndrome. But they involve situations in which
it is dangerous for the child to let his true feelings show, so dangerous
that the child starts hiding the dangerous feelings even from himself.

But that is in stark contrast to a childhood in which a child routinely
evaluates whether the way he is being treated seems fair or unfair,
sometimes reaching one conclusion and sometimes the other. When a child
keeps questioning and complaining, the fact that he feels free to do so
provides a clear indication that the child has NOT been pushed into so much
fear that he suppresses the idea that he might be being mistreated.
Instead, the child is going through a normal and healthy process of
questioning, considering, drawing conclusions, gathering new data, and
reevaluating the conclusons in light of the new data as it comes in.

This is rich. First you claim I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome,
and now you're trying to redefine the syndrome to fit your purposes.
------------------
You need to research the issue, it sounds like you read some limited
presentations that missed the point. Go take a course or two.

Your readiness to assume that if fear played a major role, people would
change back the moment the danger was over has already proven beyond all
doubt that you understand the issue less well than the sources I've read on
the Internet do. That leaves me with no reason to believe that any courses
that you've taken and I haven't might have given you a special insight that
I lack.

I don't do dueling citations. Do your own homework.

I've done my homework, and it says you are wrong. If you want me to do more
homework, you need to provide a solid reason for me to believe that the
homework I've already done is insufficient.

There is cause to identify with another's struggle in their own life.
There is absolutely NO reason to identify with their struggle to
interefere with YOUR life. At most children of such parents pity them
for being such an asshole.

You're trying to pretend that the two have nothing to do with each
other.

Adding back the part you snipped
In reality, the choices parents make regarding how to rear their
children are one of the most difficult, important, and sometimes
painful aspects of the parents' struggle in their own lives.

---------------
You're trying to pretend that Stockholm is some version of "empathy",
when it is not.

No, I am arguing that you are seeking to misinterpret empathy as Stockholm
Syndrome.

The child's interest is primarily survival, so there is an "anthropic
principle" element to this. You have to say, "well they kept me alive,
they must have domne something right, so do I owe them?", and you
have to deal with that in rejecting their abuse. It is a hurdle, but
one
that causes EVEN MORE resentment at being played that way.

Yet again you make up thoughts and pretend that they are mine.
------------
When you won't admit to them SOMEBODY has to!

LOL

Note what you didn't respond to, and, in fact, snipped: "My concept of 'a
generally good job of looking after our interests' involves a lot more than
just reaching adulthood alive." You could give ostriches lessons in
sticking one's head in the sand.