![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIsn’t it amazing how many supposed adults do not seem to have ever been children? It is particularly sad when these same persons pretend to legislate for those of us who have been, are, or will be.
California is apparently set to join the already overlarge number of countries that make spanking children a crime. This is clearly a law designed by people who never have been children, and who see the bizarre little dwarfish creatures through two sets of deforming glasses – that of ignorance, and that of ideology. Absurdly treating children as miniature adults (and absurdly forgetting that even adults sometimes deserve a good sound trashing), they pretend to apply the law of common assault, intended to regulate the relationships of adults, to the wholly peculiar circumstances of a human being in formation. The word stupid is not enough to cover such complete nonsense; I have to call on my native language, and invoke the ultimate Italian expression for insensate, infatuate, delirious unreason - cose che non stanno ne’ in cielo ne’ in terra. Things that have no place anywhere in earth or heaven.
Of course I do not defend violence against children. I loathe it more than any other crime – I swear, I would really rather be in the presence of a murderer or a rapist than a child-beater. The man who beats a child for no reason, or who uses punishment as an excuse to go berserk, is not a man at all, not a real human being; he (or she) is a vilely undergrown object who has failed ever to become human enough to feel the most basic of all human emotions, protecting the weak. He or she is a contemptible thing the wreckage of whose diseased ego can only assert itself by competing with and crushing things weaker than itself – things that a properly strong, properly adult human being would instinctively want to protect. And it is not the least of the condemnations due on this object, that it is so small as to assert itself by beating on a creature ten times smaller than itself. That goes beyond even the matter of physical violence: nothing could be more ridiculous than an adult quarrelling with a child, as though their wills or their status were equal. The child rightly experiences this as bullying, and the adult shows that s/he has no notion of correct and responsible authority.
But anyone who confuses a slap delivered as due punishment on a child who has really done something wrong with the kind of vicious beating that restores the ego of an undergrown subhuman really is living on the Moon. Anyone who has actually been a child, or knows one, knows that children want nothing more than structures and directions. To a considerable extent, they impose them by themselves; hence the infantile taste for repetition, for hearing the same tale or playing the same game over and over again. They instinctively recoil from anarchy. What is more, they invest adults, especially their parents, with more or less absolute authority. Not only do they not protest at the moderate use of punishment; they expect it. Children who feel they have suffered an injustice immediately go to the nearest available adult to ask for redress; and a child who has been punished in any way will protest, not at the punishment, but if s/he feels it was unfair, or that the person who delivered it had no right to do so (in general, children accept correction from their parents or from people who have clearly been set in their places – teachers, scoutmasters, even baby-sitters).
This is not something that takes a lot of explaining. To anyone who has been a child, it is ABC; hence, I have to assume that the individuals who propose and vote for laws forbidding moderate spanking must have been lab-grown and released upon the world at a physical age of 14. They usually remain at that age all their lives, too.
Seriously, the consequences of these moronic laws do not stop at denaturating the relationship of adult and child; like all bad laws, like all laws that reverse the rule of natural law, they extend far beyond their supposed remit and work for anarchy and tyranny. To begin with, this kind of law falls under Spinoza’s peculiar but thought-provoking definition of tyranny, that is, pushing power beyond the point at which it can either legitimately or physically reach. Nobody can patrol every household in any country to make sure that an exasperated parent may not, at a given time, hand their obstreperous issue a well-deserved and long-delayed slap; ten thousand secret policemen with bugs and CCTV in every home could not do it. So what is the purpose of such a law? It is to lie there like a mousetrap, waiting for some aggrieved or malevolent person to denounce someone else for breaking it. It is a direct incentive for snitches, personal enemies or fanatics to assault family units they dislike. Think how easy it would be to stick an unpopular politician or preacher with a false charge, take their children into care, and process them through the jail system – after which, not only is their life ruined, but their reputation is destroyed, and any potential for opposition they may have had is gone. It is just as well for the world that such criminal laws did not exist, for instance, at the time when Winston Churchill was the bête noire of all right-thinking people in England, and his own party was engaged in serious efforts to drive him out of Parliament. But they may just as well be used to destroy insignificant people against whom someone has a grudge, or even people who stand in someone’s way or whose destruction would make some bureaucrat or lawyer somewhere look good.
And this leads us to an even more poisonous and more immediate effect of this so-called law. In the divorce courts. Divorce is one of the great unspokens of our time. Whatever may be said in its favour, it certainly works as the core of an immense amount of unhappiness, bitterness, misery, and hatred. The friendly divorce is the biggest lie in the universe; at best, it means that some decent lawyers and a decent judge have arranged things in the least painful way possible. More often, the struggle is bitter, and leaves behind the most hideous scars; because it is a struggle to divide, or rather to claim for oneself alone, what is by its own nature joint – a life, a house and household, children. Anyone who thinks that this can be done without agony lives outside the human race.
The results are dreadful. For one thing, it is becoming (at least in England) harder and harder to get a jury that will convict in cases of rape. This process is inexplicable to feminists and PC police, but clear enough to members of the male sex – who will, however, not discuss it with anyone except close friends. It has become normal for aggrieved women to use false rape charges to settle matters with a male former friend, colleague, lover or husband; so common that, in the eyes of most of the male sex, any rape charge is automatically dubious. I have been falsely so charged; so has my father (not by my mother); so have at least a couple of friends. There are very few males around these days who have not heard such a story at first hand from someone they trusted. And what is the result? That real rapists go free. Unless the case is cut and dried, you cannot empanel a jury with so much as a single male in it that will not look on any rape charge with a very jaundiced eye.
Now, the beauty of the criminalization of spanking is that it takes a lot less proving than rape; that it can be used against either sex; and that it strikes far more directly at the most central issue of most divorces – custody. One charge that had been becoming quite popular in such circumstances was child abuse; but it is clear that only the most embittered and unscrupulous of parents – one who will really stop at nothing to ruin a former partner – could bring such a charge and make it stick. Even so, divorce judges and lawyers have some funny stories to tell. To charge a former partner with spanking is infinitely easier, and therefore attractive even to ordinarily decent women -–under the temptation of the agony of divorce.
Who could be in favour of this poison? In this case, not even feminists – if they think straight (which is not necessarily a feature of all feminists). Unlike child abuse or rape, spanking is a charge that can be brought impartially against both sexes. And it is really very easy to manipulate children during divorce proceedings – I say this with authority. The only people who can want this sort of filth are unscrupulous lawyers, and those strange people who have it in against the family for its own sake and would love nothing more than to see children separated from their physical parents at birth. Or better still, not have any physical parents at all, but be grown in a lab and released upon the world at the physical and emotional age of 14.
California is apparently set to join the already overlarge number of countries that make spanking children a crime. This is clearly a law designed by people who never have been children, and who see the bizarre little dwarfish creatures through two sets of deforming glasses – that of ignorance, and that of ideology. Absurdly treating children as miniature adults (and absurdly forgetting that even adults sometimes deserve a good sound trashing), they pretend to apply the law of common assault, intended to regulate the relationships of adults, to the wholly peculiar circumstances of a human being in formation. The word stupid is not enough to cover such complete nonsense; I have to call on my native language, and invoke the ultimate Italian expression for insensate, infatuate, delirious unreason - cose che non stanno ne’ in cielo ne’ in terra. Things that have no place anywhere in earth or heaven.
Of course I do not defend violence against children. I loathe it more than any other crime – I swear, I would really rather be in the presence of a murderer or a rapist than a child-beater. The man who beats a child for no reason, or who uses punishment as an excuse to go berserk, is not a man at all, not a real human being; he (or she) is a vilely undergrown object who has failed ever to become human enough to feel the most basic of all human emotions, protecting the weak. He or she is a contemptible thing the wreckage of whose diseased ego can only assert itself by competing with and crushing things weaker than itself – things that a properly strong, properly adult human being would instinctively want to protect. And it is not the least of the condemnations due on this object, that it is so small as to assert itself by beating on a creature ten times smaller than itself. That goes beyond even the matter of physical violence: nothing could be more ridiculous than an adult quarrelling with a child, as though their wills or their status were equal. The child rightly experiences this as bullying, and the adult shows that s/he has no notion of correct and responsible authority.
But anyone who confuses a slap delivered as due punishment on a child who has really done something wrong with the kind of vicious beating that restores the ego of an undergrown subhuman really is living on the Moon. Anyone who has actually been a child, or knows one, knows that children want nothing more than structures and directions. To a considerable extent, they impose them by themselves; hence the infantile taste for repetition, for hearing the same tale or playing the same game over and over again. They instinctively recoil from anarchy. What is more, they invest adults, especially their parents, with more or less absolute authority. Not only do they not protest at the moderate use of punishment; they expect it. Children who feel they have suffered an injustice immediately go to the nearest available adult to ask for redress; and a child who has been punished in any way will protest, not at the punishment, but if s/he feels it was unfair, or that the person who delivered it had no right to do so (in general, children accept correction from their parents or from people who have clearly been set in their places – teachers, scoutmasters, even baby-sitters).
This is not something that takes a lot of explaining. To anyone who has been a child, it is ABC; hence, I have to assume that the individuals who propose and vote for laws forbidding moderate spanking must have been lab-grown and released upon the world at a physical age of 14. They usually remain at that age all their lives, too.
Seriously, the consequences of these moronic laws do not stop at denaturating the relationship of adult and child; like all bad laws, like all laws that reverse the rule of natural law, they extend far beyond their supposed remit and work for anarchy and tyranny. To begin with, this kind of law falls under Spinoza’s peculiar but thought-provoking definition of tyranny, that is, pushing power beyond the point at which it can either legitimately or physically reach. Nobody can patrol every household in any country to make sure that an exasperated parent may not, at a given time, hand their obstreperous issue a well-deserved and long-delayed slap; ten thousand secret policemen with bugs and CCTV in every home could not do it. So what is the purpose of such a law? It is to lie there like a mousetrap, waiting for some aggrieved or malevolent person to denounce someone else for breaking it. It is a direct incentive for snitches, personal enemies or fanatics to assault family units they dislike. Think how easy it would be to stick an unpopular politician or preacher with a false charge, take their children into care, and process them through the jail system – after which, not only is their life ruined, but their reputation is destroyed, and any potential for opposition they may have had is gone. It is just as well for the world that such criminal laws did not exist, for instance, at the time when Winston Churchill was the bête noire of all right-thinking people in England, and his own party was engaged in serious efforts to drive him out of Parliament. But they may just as well be used to destroy insignificant people against whom someone has a grudge, or even people who stand in someone’s way or whose destruction would make some bureaucrat or lawyer somewhere look good.
And this leads us to an even more poisonous and more immediate effect of this so-called law. In the divorce courts. Divorce is one of the great unspokens of our time. Whatever may be said in its favour, it certainly works as the core of an immense amount of unhappiness, bitterness, misery, and hatred. The friendly divorce is the biggest lie in the universe; at best, it means that some decent lawyers and a decent judge have arranged things in the least painful way possible. More often, the struggle is bitter, and leaves behind the most hideous scars; because it is a struggle to divide, or rather to claim for oneself alone, what is by its own nature joint – a life, a house and household, children. Anyone who thinks that this can be done without agony lives outside the human race.
The results are dreadful. For one thing, it is becoming (at least in England) harder and harder to get a jury that will convict in cases of rape. This process is inexplicable to feminists and PC police, but clear enough to members of the male sex – who will, however, not discuss it with anyone except close friends. It has become normal for aggrieved women to use false rape charges to settle matters with a male former friend, colleague, lover or husband; so common that, in the eyes of most of the male sex, any rape charge is automatically dubious. I have been falsely so charged; so has my father (not by my mother); so have at least a couple of friends. There are very few males around these days who have not heard such a story at first hand from someone they trusted. And what is the result? That real rapists go free. Unless the case is cut and dried, you cannot empanel a jury with so much as a single male in it that will not look on any rape charge with a very jaundiced eye.
Now, the beauty of the criminalization of spanking is that it takes a lot less proving than rape; that it can be used against either sex; and that it strikes far more directly at the most central issue of most divorces – custody. One charge that had been becoming quite popular in such circumstances was child abuse; but it is clear that only the most embittered and unscrupulous of parents – one who will really stop at nothing to ruin a former partner – could bring such a charge and make it stick. Even so, divorce judges and lawyers have some funny stories to tell. To charge a former partner with spanking is infinitely easier, and therefore attractive even to ordinarily decent women -–under the temptation of the agony of divorce.
Who could be in favour of this poison? In this case, not even feminists – if they think straight (which is not necessarily a feature of all feminists). Unlike child abuse or rape, spanking is a charge that can be brought impartially against both sexes. And it is really very easy to manipulate children during divorce proceedings – I say this with authority. The only people who can want this sort of filth are unscrupulous lawyers, and those strange people who have it in against the family for its own sake and would love nothing more than to see children separated from their physical parents at birth. Or better still, not have any physical parents at all, but be grown in a lab and released upon the world at the physical and emotional age of 14.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:08 pm (UTC)Otoh, I have to take exception to calling children "bizarre little dwarfish creatures"...they're not angels, nor are they adult yet, but they are in fact as much a mix of good and ill instincts as we adults are. And I do vividly recall my childhood; hard not to, when it was played out for me again by each sibling younger than I. :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 07:07 pm (UTC)I'm another homeschool kiddo, the oldest of five, and have also experienced the dizzying chaos of divorce and the painful struggle to maintain structure afterward. This is all absolutely true. In addition, one of the worst things about the divorce was that, living in a small town, my siblings and mother and I were immediately under constant public scrutiny (especially in light of the divorce battle itself and the manipulation of the children involved). Discipline was near-impossible to maintain, since 'friendly' neighbors felt it their duty to lean over our fence and report even a hand-thumping to the Child Protective Services.
I first heard about this movement when I was, oh, eight or nine. I remember the initial thrill of rebellion-- children could do whatever they wanted!-- and then the horrible rush of instability when I realized that such a law would mean that I effectively had no parents.
I was terrified. The idea still makes me wince: within eight years, God willing, I'll be a mother, and I want for them the same safety and stability-- and the same external and internal controls, individual teaching, and physical reprimand that I had.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:15 pm (UTC)You got me. I laughed aloud, and very loudly, here in the library on that one. I got a very stern "SSSSSHHHH!" from the bizarre little dwarfish reference librarian.
That being said, I generally agree with your statement. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:35 pm (UTC)My parents were almost precisely the opposite of Farrington or whomever; apparently whenever I used to cry in the middle of the night they would dig out that enormous tome by Benjamin Spock. Funny, since I thought his watchword was "common sense."
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:11 pm (UTC)I admit to swatting my son's behind before he turned three, and I've continued to swat it even now that he's 4, but I see the reasoning behind this law. It's designed to protect the smallest of children, the ones for whom spanking is mostly useless and not always called for.
There are entirely too many wacko's in this world that would confuse spanking with beating, and can seriously injure a child under 3. The anterior fontanel, the "soft spot" at the top of a baby's head can take up to 3 years to close, though it's closed by 24 months in 96% of children. This law is designed to protect children from those parents who take spanking entirely too far.
That being said, I don't agree with the law. I don't believe that it's the government's job to parent the child, and it is most definitely a breach of authority on the part of the state. It is not the state's job to set legal precedent for when and how a parent may discipline their child. So I guess the point of this long winded comment is that I agree with you.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 02:19 am (UTC)That said, it is worth noting that children on the autism spectrum can often be brought out of a total meltdown by the "short, sharp shock" of a swat, even at ages well past 6. It appears that for them, a sudden sharp pain can "reboot" their atypical nervous systems and allow them to break the cycle so they can regain control over their emotions and reactions.
But even there, we're still talking about one or two blows, delivered with an open hand to the clothed bottom. A lot of the people who are so adamantly against any form of corporal punishment are people whose ideas are shaped by ugly personal experience of paddlings and beatings that continued into the teen years, that were often delivered by an exasperated adult, and that was often delivered in public in a way that was humiliating to the point of causing festering resentment of authority rather than penitence. (Mild embarassment can be useful in punishment, but when it goes beyond "gee, was my face red" and becomes a matter of being publicly stripped of face, it can often do more harm than good). Intellectual presentation of the facts about the long-term positive outcomes of an open-hand swat on a child's bottom simply can't compete with the emotional power of the muscle-memory of being savaged with boards, belts, coathangers, etc., often for the same thing that a day before might get a chuckle, or a mild reproof.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 03:05 pm (UTC)You are utterly right about another matter: the horror of punishment that is not only unfair but violent, public, and worst of all changeable in its reasons. Children, as I said, want borders and limitations. To subject them to violence for the same reason that one day earlier or later would barely bring notice is not only cruel, it is bewildering and infuriating. It certainly does leave the impression that there is nothing to punishment except the vicious moods of the adult - and indeed there rarely is. Punishment, if given at all, must be fair, deliberate, without malice, and clearly explained. And if necessary, it must be repeated, if - and only if - the same misbehaviour is repeated; just so that its fairness is understood.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 08:38 pm (UTC)I recall an incident from my own childhood in which a situation spiraled out of control and turned into a nightmare. It started so trivially -- I had made some innocent observation on some topic (I don't even remember what it was now) and my father didn't like my level of eye contact. Suddenly he was screaming, "You look at me when you talk to me" in this horrible scary voice, over and over again. And the angrier he got, the more impossible it became for me to look him in the eye. It was simply too overwhelming, like his eyes were enormous pools that would simply swallow me up. But there was no use trying to explain to him, because as far as he was concerned, my not making satisfactory eye contact was 1. cowardice, 2. dishonesty, or 3. outright defiance. By the time it was over I was reduced to tears and he'd slapped some monster punishment on me, all over what had started as an innocent attemt to make an intelligent observation on what should've been a neutral subject.
(Eye contact was always a huge issue in my childhood -- either too little or too much. Not only was it impossible for me to make eye contact when someone was upset, but when I was having a conversation I really cared about, I'd often get so involved that I'd forget to break eye contact, to the point that people complained to my parents about my being creepy or acting like I was trying to stare them down.).
And even with adults, consistency in the enforcement of rules can be even more important than how harsh or lenient those punishments are. People will resent inconsistent or arbitrary punishment far more than one that is harsh but administered fairly.
continued, about the bad results of capricious punishment...
Date: 2007-01-25 03:07 pm (UTC)Hitler’s sense of timing was bad in another way. His view was that pressure on an enemy should increase in time, since people who have given up once in one matter will be the more willing to give up again. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the truth, and shows Hitler’s lack of understanding of human nature. To give one example, the British accepted the infamous naval treaty of 1935, which betrayed France and Italy and was clearly to Britain’s own disadvantage; so, by Hitler’s logic, they should have been the more willing to accept the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936. As a matter of fact, they were decidedly unhappy, but they were not, at the time, willing to risk a war with Germany at the same time as relations with Italy were already at breaking point over the matter of Ethiopia. Again by Hitler’s hypothesis, they should have been progressively more willing to surrender Austria, the Sudetenland, and Bohemia-Moravia. In point of fact, the reverse was true. Britain was very unhappy about the loss of Austria; seriously considered going to war over the Sudetenland, before deciding to go to Munich; and finally lost patience with the invasion of Bohemia and Moravia, which represented the end of the policy of appeasement. The next German demand led to war. And Hitler was puzzled by the British attitude, could actually not be led to understand that Britain would never again grant him another Munich, that – in simple and ordinary human terms – British patience had ran out.
In real human life, a strategy of constantly increasing pressure, of constantly multiplied demands and threats, is the best possibly way to multiply your enemies and stiffen their resolve. It was what killed Robespierre, when his own allies realized that he was still hankering for yet more executions. Conversely, those tyrants who die peacefully in their beds are those who, like Octavian Augustus and Francisco Franco, have tended to concentrate their crimes and their murders in their early days. Octavian and Franco came to power on the wave of hideous civil wars attended by every refinement of illegality and cruelty; but as they consolidated their power, they also committed themselves to a strategy of limited reconciliation. Augustus welcomed in his circle the poet Horace, well knowing that he had fought against him, and tolerating a strong streak of independence in him; an episode comparable, in Spain, with the return home of the great liberal philosopher Ortega Y Gasset in 1948. Lenin, with his move from war communism to the NEP, looked as though he might be willing to take a similar direction, but he died too early.
and continued
Date: 2007-01-25 03:11 pm (UTC)What I am saying is that with Hitler, one crime is always going to be the prelude to another. It is only a matter of the opponent once giving way. And Hitler insures, in all sorts of ways, that the opponent will give way. Guderian says, with his usual simplicity, that when Hitler was faced with a united front, he gave way; and regrets that Keitel and Jodl, especially Keitel, could not see their way to co-operate with other Army commanders and resist his orders. Yes. The only time in his whole career when he faced clear, determined, armed resistance – by Mussolini, in 1934, at the time of Dollfuss’ murder – he could not withdraw fast enough. The unarmed Bishop von Galen, by the power of his word alone, put a stop to the murder of the unfit – which was official state policy, and which must have humiliated Hitler horrendously. But that is exactly why Hitler promoted a man like Keitel, who could be trusted not to join forces with anyone who opposed Hitler; that is why he took care to break up all the powers of the State between several different competing agencies.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 09:19 am (UTC)