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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.
