notes from the culture wars, chapter the millionth: in which the League of Women Voters throws some shade

by russell

From the League of Women Voters notes on a recent City Council Meeting in Salem, MA:

The motion to pass an ordinance to change the language in existing and future ordinances to remove gender bias was distracted by a long debate over the suitability of changing "manhole" to "maintenance hole." Though this linguistic change has no bearing on what anyone else calls the hole leading to sewage, six male councilors, Councilors Dibble, Dominguez, Flynn, McCarthy, Prosniewski, and Sargent, determined that “manhole” must indeed remain masculine. Those men were the majority vote, and they do get to keep their hole.

ouch.

Open thread, y'all.

Comments

[JanieM]

I am laughing so hard....

[JanieM]

they do get to keep their hole

And may they continue to have the utmost satisfaction therefrom.

You gotta hang onto whatever shreds of predominance you can, I guess.

[Hartmut]

At least in German it's neutral (das Loch).
But its cover is male (der Deckel) as is the shaft below (der Schacht). And the sewers themselves are female (die Kanalisation).
[Insert bad pun about sewing].

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

Trump Republican manhole representing the League of Dead Women Voters reminds us it is important to cast your ballot(s), no matter life's distractions.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/5/14/2030458/-Man-charged-with-wife-s-murder-admits-he-also-voted-for-Trump-with-her-absentee-ballot

I find the example of bouncing manholes from bars a highly useful metaphor, and a practical truncheon, for protecting every venue, every institution in America, especially government, from the conservative movement, and not just its fascist, vote-stealing Trumpian vanguard.

https://people.com/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-says-marjorie-taylor-greene-the-type-of-person-shed-throw-out-of-bars-all-the-time/

At least in the old days, gunholes wore masks to hold up and terrorize bartenders and their patrons with their guns.

[russell]

Ocasio-Cortez is a Bronx homegirl. With all due respect to the people of Milledgeville, GA, I don't think Taylor Greene has the size for this particular match.

Go home, Marjorie, you're drunk.

[wj]

What Janie said (9:58).

It's astounding the things that people, on both sides, pick to make symbolic stands over. Personally, I'd say that "manhole" has the virtue of brevity. And I think there are far, far more important examples of gender discrimination that should be addressed. Just for openers, consider the relative (to other municipal employees) wages of elementary school teachers. Seems like a better focus for the LoWV efforts.

[wj]

Go home, Marjorie, you're drunk.

I think you give her too much credit. Alcohol would provide a better excuse. In fact, she's just delusional.

[Russell]

Seems like a better focus for the LoWV efforts.

To be fair to the League, they do tons more than throw shade at comical local pols. The spokesperson for the League in Salem just happens to be good at that, as well.

Politics in Salem MA is famously fractious. Old school townies bump up against gentrifying ‘people from away’ who are invading the city with their swanky big city white collar job money. A small but still active coterie of old money families bump up against the blue collar rabble. There’s a big (and very very good) museum in the city that owns a ton of historical properties in town, which some folks would like to see put to uses other than garden tours. Developers looking to build in a very hot housing market bump up against people who don’t want the historical character of the city changed. Plus a significant Hispanic community and more pagans per capita (pagans of all stripes, of which there are many) than probably anyplace else on earth.

It’s a tempest in a teapot. A little slice of America.

The councilors in question make up part of a more or less reactionary wing of local governance. One was recently called out for referring to mentally disabled folks as ‘retards’ in a cable access interview, which didn’t go over particularly well.

Moderation is in fact a virtue, and it’s true, we don’t need to completely re-invent the language every generation to suit the issues du jour. We don’t need to retain usages that exclude people, either, but I suspect retaining ‘manhole’ won’t deprive anyone of their civil rights to any significant degree.

The gentlemen do, in fact, get to keep their hole.

I just thought the comment was funny.

[nous]

I'll throw an article on the talkfire:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

Ostrom's work is informing a shift in conservation and environmental work, and the growing opinion amongst environmental activists that environmental and socia justice must work hand in hand.

[bobbyp]

...and the growing opinion amongst environmental activists that environmental and social justice must work hand in hand.

reminded me of this Kristoff opinion piece.

[nous]

The Kristoff piece does get to an important part of the engagement with rural white working communities, but also stuff like this from Patagonia Action Works:

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/red-lake-green-future/story-89564.html

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/district-15/video-79223.html

We can't fix our environmental practices until we get a handle on the way that our most damaging industries externalize the harms of their practices onto disadvantaged and marginalized communities. The polluting and plundering industries need to have these harms calculated back into the cost of doing business by expanding out the notion of stakeholders.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"Politics in Salem MA is famously fractious."

It's because of all the massholes, isn't it?

[JanieM]

and more pagans per capita (pagans of all stripes, of which there are many) than probably anyplace else on earth.

Here I am cackling again.

we don’t need to completely re-invent the language every generation to suit the issues du jour.

The language will reinvent itself, or be reinvented (the causality is murky to me but that's lj's bailiwick in any case), for better and for worse, whether we will or nill.

[liberal japonicus]

I didn't realize that Tragedy of the Commons pointed to an all or nothing solution. I just thought that if you didn't realize the framework, you were likely to screw it up.

we don’t need to completely re-invent the language every generation to suit the issues du jour.
For better or worse, I feel like we do re-invent the language every generation. It might not be a total overhaul, but a lot of the moving parts get changed out so it is easy to wander into problems. And when they come into contact with people talking about The Law, funny shit will happen.

An example: I'm doing an online discussion group on Task Based Learning and the leader mentioned that one example was an 'uber task' and shared it to get our opinions. I pointed out the ways that it fell short for me, with me taking uber as excellent example, but the leader said he was thinking of uber as less excellent and more like big ole', not to be taken as a model. But uber is word that has that valency (uber=best of all possibilities or the thing so widespread you can't get away from it) To go overboard on a metaphor, all those terms and phrases are like a field of varied tuning forks and when a note hits, some of them will bounce back and forth while others will look as if they aren't ever going to move.

I better stop here...

[wj]

For better or worse, I feel like we do re-invent the language every generation. It might not be a total overhaul, but a lot of the moving parts get changed out so it is easy to wander into problems

Especially when the change is not new words/expressions, but old ones repurposed. Sometimes to the point of completely inverting the meaning. Usually, the vast majority of users have no clue anything has changed -- cheerfully attributing to past writers the current meanings of their words.

[Hartmut]

That can make old texts hilariously funny, in particular when 'harmless' words get a specific connotation and lose the neutral ones. What do you think for example when you read 'she had intercourse with him' without context?
Works in German too with the additional factor that 'Verkehr' also means traffic (plus 'verkehrt' means 'wrong' or 'the wrong way around').

[Pro Bono]

The meaning of "make love" changed somewhere around 1950, but not by so much as to obviate confusion.

[Girl from the North Country]

Whereas, on the other hand, I have read books from maybe late 19th or early 20th centuries, only to be brought up short when told that in the the middle of a conversation or formalish scene, someone "ejaculated". Apparently, it used to mean something like "forcefully interjected".

[Girl from the North Country]

And "criminal conversation" used to be the legalese for adultery, if I remember correctly, at least by a wife.

[Girl from the North Country]

Ha! Since I am no longer on my phone, and can look stuff up easily, I have just discovered that "criminal conversation" still exists as a tort in certain states of the US!

[cleek]

"Criminal Conversation" sounds like it should be the name of a minor hit for Hall And Oats from 1981.

[Marty]

Oates

[cleek]

Alert! Alert! Someone call Donald Trump! Voter fraud found!

[russell]

Hall And Oats from 1981.

Oates

Yes.

"Hall and Oats" was a breakfast cereal in 1981, IIRC.

[cleek]

1972, i think.

[cleek]

NC has dropped its mask and distancing mandates. with barely 30% vaccinated. many stores are still requiring them, thankfully.

what a ridiculous species we are.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"Someone call Donald Trump! Voter fraud found!"

While I think that "felon disenfranchisement" is, in general, a bad thing, I also think it is absolutely the correct penalty for "messing with elections".

[wj]

Someone call Donald Trump! Voter fraud found!

One of Trump's characteristic behaviors has been to (baselessly) accuse others of things he has done himself. Why would anyone be surprised that his cult followers have been emulating their Dear Leader?

[nous]

This blog entry may be the source for some of that aeon article, and it goes into more detail about what many current environmentalists find objectionable about Hardin’s paper and subsequent work on the topic:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

The original paper is pretty noxious in its eugenic glee.

[cleek]

Hardin sounds like a Republican ahead of his time.

not sure anyone needs to stop using the phrase “tragedy of the commons”, though - as the article pleads. nobody who uses it as a metaphor for what happens to unmanaged resources is invoking anything about Hardin's deplorable facsism.

[nous]

My reading of this is that it's basically arguing that the "tragedy of the commons" takes up too much space in ecological thinking, and that more space should be taken up with Ostrom's work and in looking for collaboratively managed solutions to public goods.

As an educator I can sympathize with wanting to culture jam the concept and force a more nuanced conversation. "The tragedy of the commons" is just the sort of pithy formulation that seems deep and intuitive enough to explain whole swaths of complex topics and thus relieve the need to examine the topic in any real depth.

This is especially true in environmental debates.

[Russell]

It’s actually possible for people to co-operate in their use of finite resources, such that everyone has fair access. That appears to be beyond the imagination of the Hardins of the world, but managing resources as a commons is a practice with a very long and generally successful history.

I’d be glad to see Hardin’s essay thrown on the trash heap. It’s ahistorical garbage, and asserts the worst of human nature as fact.

[wj]

That appears to be beyond the imagination of the Hardins of the world, but managing resources as a commons is a practice with a very long and generally successful history.

If someone is, personally, selfish -- well he is naturally going to have difficulty envisioning people behaving otherwise. At least, absent coercion of some kind.

To be fair, those who are more community-minded can have equal difficulty grasping that there are some who simply are selfish. Not necessarily from training/upbringing, just the way they are wired. Preaching virtue (as they see it) to the selfish is simply not going to work. Like preaching floating to someone with a body density well above 1; even if they grasp the theory, it just won't happen for them.

[nooneithinkisinmytree]

Hardin believed the rich should throw the poor from the life rafts.

You’d think there would at least be room on the dinghy towed by the support yacht shadowing the mother ship, but no, chum are never chums.

[bobbbyp]

"Hall and Oats" was a breakfast cereal in 1981, IIRC.

Sure you are not confusing them with Quaker Oates?

[hairshirthedonist]

Haul en Eowts in the native tongue.

[cleek]

Hardin is more "Tragedy Of The Commoner", amirite?

[liberal japonicus]

A tragedy is when the main character has a downfall. Reading the eye opening Atlantic article (thanks nous!) suggests that Hardin never thought of the lower class as main characters...

[Russell]

If someone is, personally, selfish -- well he is naturally going to have difficulty envisioning people behaving otherwise.

I hear what you’re saying, wj, I really do.

But here’s the thing - I’m selfish. Most people are. At least to some degree, and/or about some things. But I’ve sort of been socialized enough that I generally don’t act on it.

The Hardins of the world talk as if it’s inevitable for people to behave selfishly, as if no-one had any choice in the matter. Worse, as if it’s some kind of categorical imperative.

It’s not. People can choose to not behave selfishly, and if some folks insist on behaving selfishly, the rest of us can require them not to.

This is kindergarten level ethics. Don’t take all the cookies, leave some for others.

It’s time to kick the whole “greed is good” thing to the curb. Or even the whole “greed is unfortunately a fact of life” thing. It’s not inevitable, it’s a choice, and it’s not an acceptable one.

[nous]

Preaching virtue (as they see it) to the selfish is simply not going to work.

The good thing is that most of the work being talked about by the environmental types who are taking on the Tragedy of the Commons thinking are mostly not about preaching. What they talk about mostly are management plans that have enforceable standards and palpable costs for violating those standards, which ties right back into our earlier discussion of Gimbutas and the hunter gatherers.

[wj]

It’s time to kick the whole “greed is good” thing to the curb. Or even the whole “greed is unfortunately a fact of life” thing.

Absolutely agree we should junk the "selfishness is a virtue" idiocy. But, while that will let us get a substantial number of folks socialized, we shouldn't lose track of the fact that some just can't be. That's all I'm saying.

[Nigel]

"Hall and Oats" was a breakfast cereal in 1981, IIRC.

Sure you are not confusing them with Quaker Oates?

No, that would be Cap'n Oates.

[russell]

some just can't be.

no cookies for them. they get a time-out.

:)

[bobbyp]

we shouldn't lose track of the fact that some just can't be. That's all I'm saying.

"Losing track" is one thing, but developing and adopting social policies and institutional arrangements that blunt that drive is not, ipso facto, some kind of runaway totalitarianism. Let's not "lose track" of that, too.

That's all I'm saying. :)

[russell]

to follow on bobbyp with a less snarky comment:

traditionally greed has been seen as a negative and anti-social tendency. everybody's got it to some degree, and one of the requirements of living in society with other people is that we restrain our negative impulses, no matter how natural. so that we can basically all get along, more or less.

over the last 40 years at least, and probably for a lot longer than that, greed has more or less been valorized. Keynes' 'animal spirits' have been re-construed to be a necessary and desirable urge to get as filthy stinking rich as possible and damn the consequences.

Hardin's essay, and the hay that has been made of it ever since it was published, is garbage. It ignores the history of how common resources have been managed for as long as people have lived in settled communities. It assumes that people are incapable of co-operating to hold resources in common and manage their use in a fair way.

For Hardin specifically it's a justification for pathological behavior.

I'm glad to see it being challenged.

If we can't acquire the simple kindergarten-level discipline to consider the world's resources as common property and manage them as such, we are going to make life a living hell for a very large number of people. And not just people. We're going to create - we are creating - imbalances that are going to come back to bite us, for a long time.

[wj]

Well, at least "greed is good" isn't one of the many negative legacies of us Baby Boomers. Being a product of Milton Friedman, back when we were college kids.

[Hartmut]

kindergarten discipline aka enforced communist indoctrination of still malleable innocents ;-)

[wj]

Riiiiight. And parents applying discipline of any kind to their children is child abuse. Which would sound just incredibly silly if there weren't (a few, I think and hope) morons out there arguing exactly that.

[cleek]

i suspect there are far more of those parents in fiction and myth than in reality. they make for such a great plot device.

[Hartmut]

Depends on the kind of 'discipline'*.
And for Kristians (TM) it depends on the tool used (ye know, sparing the rod...).
Maybe just an urban legend but I have heard that some Kristian(TM) preachers recommend using the Good Book itself (probably not a paperback edition).
There ARE tips for parents on how to 'discipline' without leaving suspicious marks.

*i.e. including BDSM

[Nigel]

My experience has taught me that Breyer is being economical with the actualité...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/us/justice-breyer-retirement.html
...Justice Breyer has been particularly adamant that politics plays no role in judges’ work, and he recently suggested that it should also not figure into their decisions about when to retire.

“My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.”...

[JanieM]

This is why I love and hate the internet. The time sink aspect is maddening...but the topics, and the competencies of the people who write here and elsewhere, are a treasure.

The mention of Garrett Hardin rang a bell in the deep back cupboards of my brain, with dim memories of something in CoEvolution Quarterly or the Whole Earth Review. I thought they had done a take-down of Hardin at some point, quite a long time ago, which didn't quite square with my impression from this comment thread that the pushback against him has been fairly recent. (In fairness, I've been reading very quickly because I'm too busy to immerse.)

So I Googled and found that CQ had actually published a piece by Hardin in issue #40, winter 1983. And Google showed me the cover, so I knew the volume was somewhere in my collection, and off to the attic I trudged.

Found #40, but there was no pushback in that issue, just the article, identifying it as having been written for the "conservative Cato Journal.

I looked through the box for the following issues, but didn't find anything right away. Then came WER, fall 1998), where George Monbiot does the takedown of Hardin that I remembered, in an issue with the theme, "Commerce and the Common Good."

Will read them some of it later if I have time. A walk down memory lane. Sadly, I've never found much from CQ or WER available online.

[JanieM]

Haste and multi-tasking make typos! My proofreader obviously had more important things to do today. ;-)

[Pro Bono]

I'd be interested to know whether Breyer professes to believe that the 5-4 vote in Bush v Gore was an example of judges' loyalty to the rule of law not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.

[CharlesWT]

(ye know, sparing the rod...)

I've read that this is based on a misinterpretation of the Bible. The rod in the Bible is the one a shepherd uses to guide sheep, not for beating.

[CharlesWT]

(ye know, sparing the rod...)

I've read that this is based on a misinterpretation of the Bible. The rod in the Bible is the one a shepherd uses to guide sheep, not for beating.

[CharlesWT]

Two for the price of one click...

[Pro Bono]

The phrase "Spare the rod and spoil the child" first appeared in Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras (Butler the 17th-century poet, not the 19th-century novelist).

The meaning is unambiguously sexual: the "child" is a couple's love:

If matrimony and hanging go
By dest'ny, why not whipping too?
What med'cine else can cure the fits
Of lovers when they lose their wits?
Love is a boy by poets stil'd;
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

[Girl from the North Country]

I'd be interested to know whether Breyer professes to believe that the 5-4 vote in Bush v Gore was an example of judges' loyalty to the rule of law not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment.

An excellent question, and there are other good examples too, such as Citizens United, although the Bush v Gore one is more nakedly partisan to casual observers who aren't prepared to get into the weeds.

[wj]

i suspect there are far more of those parents in fiction and myth than in reality. they make for such a great plot device.

*I* suspect that most of those saying such things are not, themselves, parents. A dose of reality (trying to reason logically with a 2-year-old, for example) tends to take such nonsense out of people's heads.

[Pro Bono]

I've lost track of exactly what we're talking about, but I'd point out that there is a lot of space between reasoning logically with a 2-year-old and assaulting them.

Young children want to please their parents. Any expression of parental displeasure will get their attention, but in inverse proportion to how often it happens. According to my observations at least.

[bobbyp]

Judge selection:

If loyalty to the "rule of law" were an overly common trait of judges, then could we not just pick them by lot? Wouldn't that save a lot of time and political heartburn?

Or if their record were "overtly political" would that make them ineligible to appeals level courts and above?

You can stop laughing any time now.

[wj]

Young children want to please their parents. Any expression of parental displeasure will get their attention, but in inverse proportion to how often it happens. According to my observations at least.

Anecdotal evidence: a 2-year-old (now in college; it was a while ago) who had acquired the habit of kicking parents and guests in the shins. Repeatedly. The parents tried repeated verbal admonishments -- the "parental disapproval", something which was quite rare for them. Efficacy: zero.

A couple light swats on the backside with a open palm, accompanied by a calm "don't kick people." Problem gone. Permanently.

Does that fit your definition of "asault"? I definitely know people who would see it that way. But I just don't buy it.

[novakant]

I confess to buying a Hall and Oates album when I was 13 or something, the one with Maneater, which I loved, and sweat dripping off their faces on the cover - in my defense I was also a big Bowie fan and probably the only one in my school who listened to Los Lobos.

[cleek]

my wife has Sonos set to play a song as her wake up alarm ... and for the past 12 months it's been Hall And Ohtz' "Wait For Me".

[novakant]

wj, I find corporeal punishment abhorrent, it's also been illegal in many countries for a long time and has been proven to lead to behavioral disorders and relationship issues in later life

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Has the Isle of Man abolished "caning" for misdemeanor offences yet? I know that (back in the day) the UK got into some hot water with the UN/EU about that.

Seems less cruel than long-term repeated cycles of probation-violation/re-jailing.

[Pro Bono]

It was birching, not caning. Yes, it's long since been abolished.

[wj]

I find corporeal punishment abhorrent, it's also been illegal in many countries for a long time and has been proven to lead to behavioral disorders and relationship issues in later life

novakant, I certainly agree that it can, all too easily, lead to excess. Which is where those disorders generally come from. On the other hand, I think a blanket ban is misguided, at minimum.

Especially with very young (basically non-verbal) children, you need to have some way to communicate: No! As noted, trying to explain something, at that age, is not viable. And the alternative can be serious injury from the kid doing something dangerous, which your high-minded refusal to communicate effectively meant that you didn't prevent.

[wj]

Just to be clear, what I'm talking about is a couple of not particularly hard swats, open palm, on the butt. A sting, at most. The intention is to get a message across, not to hurt or punish or something.

[Marty]

"but in inverse proportion to how often it happens. According to my observations at least."

This is the key. Every escalation of punishment should be in response to an identifiable(to the child)even of mis behavior. I struck my kids in anger once. No damage done. Every other interaction was a calculation vs their behavior. The highest even of pu ishment was for thi gs that truly endangered them or others.

(I'm not sure what the definition of corporeal punishment is.)

[Marty]

Somehow my phone made level into even twice.

[Nigel]

The intention is to get a message across, not to hurt or punish or something....

Is not part of that message that if you fail to communicate, then physical means, rather than patience, are to be encouraged ?
Seems like a poor lesson for a child to learn.

And where does one draw the line ? Every patent will answer that differently; the simplest answer would seem to be no corporal punishment.

[Nigel]

...Justice Breyer has been particularly adamant that politics plays no role in judges’ work, and he recently suggested that it should also not figure into their decisions about when to retire.

I actually agree with Breyer.
The case for term limits is inescapable.

[Hartmut]

I have no children (and have no wish to have any) and am grateful that I do not have to make such decisions. As an uninformed lay-person my feelings are more in the direction of wj and Marty here. Using any form of violence (physical or psychological) on a child should be the absolute exception but an 100% exclusion law is too blunt an instrument to deal with that. Plus, abusive parents will always find a 'legal' way around that or ways to avoid leaving visible telltale signs (as I noted above there are actual guidebooks for that). In other words, the laws as they currently exist criminalize behaviour that should still be within the range of the tolerable but let people get away with behaviour that clearly is outside.
I have admittedly no alternative solution to propose.
Add to all of that that the laws get applied very selectively (e.g. single moms that have to work several jobs to keep themselves and their kids from starving get charged with neglect and abuse for that while any attempt to curb the sophisticated psychological torture used by certain religious people as a matter of principle is answered with public (and successful) outcries of persecution).

[Pro Bono]

I never did it myself, but the sort of smack envisaged by wj and Marty is not a problem I would focus on.

However, a 2-year-old is perfectly capable of understanding that kicking people is wrong.

[Marty]

So, there are millions of parents who believe and try to practice zero corporal punishment, depending on the child some are successful. While I never was against a swat to get a child's attention, my kids in their thirties remarked they didn't remember ever getting hit at all.

A 2 year old is capable of understanding consequences or the lack thereof also.

Every child is different. All of mine were. Some were quite eager to please from a very young age, some were defiantly independent at the same age.

My take is that parenting is responding appropriately to the individual child and how they learn and respond. Trying to follow a specific playbook just didn't work.

[novakant]

Funny how everybody completely ignores science when it comes to parenting:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking

https://time.com/the-discipline-wars-2/

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/12/the-fourth-r/547583/

There are also legal, human rights (UN Convention on the Rights of The Child)and ethical issues.

“When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.”

[Girl from the North Country]

any attempt to curb the sophisticated psychological torture used by certain religious people as a matter of principle is answered with public (and successful) outcries of persecution

Excellent point.

Plus, FWIW, I was enjoying the concept of "corporeal punishment", as opposed to "incorporeal", until I thought again and realised that what Hartmut was talking about actually qualified as the latter.

[cleek]

“When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.”

the 'hit' in all of these is quite different.

ex. adults hit each other on the ass constantly, in certain contexts, (sports). but that's not assault.

[Hartmut]

Funny how everybody completely ignores science when it comes to parenting

a) normal parents don't consult scientific studies on proper parenting.
b) many available education manuals for laypeople claim to be based on scientific insights but are rubbish (independent of the veracity of the claims)
c) my own experience with education science (as mandatory part of my university training on becoming a teacher) is a rather negative one. One often gets the impression that the authors never dealt with real (individual) children but only with statistic data derived from a large number of children by others*.
d) we do not usually require formal qualifications from people before they are allowed to bring up children (and most attempts in that direction had ulterior motives).
e) humans are by nature idiotic assholes and their offspring adds (hopefully temporary) wickedness into the mixture**. ;-)

*and I often doubt the quality of said data in the first place.
**I think I have already mentioned around here that I believe that St.Augustine's odious idea of original sin was born out of his own incompetence to deal with his own baby son (projecting his own inadequacies into him and interpreting it as evil).

[Girl from the North Country]

novakant, I haven't finished reading your links yet, but I wonder if you aren't conflating two ideas: "punishment" and "deterrence". It seems to me that what wj is talking about is (quite gentle) deterrence, like if a kid happened to touch something that gave them a mild electrical shock, they would be very reluctant to touch that thing again. I don't in any way advocate giving children electric shocks, but I do think with pre-verbal children you can make a reasonable case for deterrence from dangerous activities.

[Girl from the North Country]

Sorry, meant to add: I am definitely against spanking, however, and physical violence as punishment.

[Girl from the North Country]

humans are by nature idiotic assholes and their offspring adds (hopefully temporary) wickedness into the mixture

You can disagree with this, while still finding it extremely funny.

[JanieM]

“When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.”

I haven't finished reading this thread yet, much less the links, but this is more clever than useful. There are any number of things adults do to children that would be crimes if adults did them to each other. The first example that pops to mind is that it's time to go home from Grandma's house, and the two-year-old doesn't want to go. You don't sit around for hours doing diplomacy with the kid. You pick her up, put her jacket on her, carry her to the car, and get going.

I didn't spank my kids, whether for punishment or persuasion. I did give my son a swat a couple of times when he was almost in his teens and his mouthiness overcame my prudence and principles. His dad spanked him on the butt one day when he was about three, for riding his Big Wheels gleefully toward the busy road in defiance of about eight adults yelling at him to stop.

Other than that -- we didn't hit the kids. But...well, more later. Like Marty's kids, mine were very, very different from each other, and their two parents were also very difference from each other. Lots of complicated dynamics and variations.

[Pro Bono]

Since this is an open thread, and recalling this previous discussion, here's an article putting the case that arguments against a laboratory origin for Covid-19 are much less strong than has been claimed.

[novakant]

Well, the quote is from Haim Ginott, who knew a thing or two about child psychology, trying to make point that should be pretty obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Ginott

Again, I urge everybody to read the links or google this stuff yourself - it's not rocket science really. Though I maintain that there is a strong ethical component in all this - children have rights just like everybody else - it's not about shaming people, it's about understanding human behaviour and acting accordingly.

[Hartmut]

Sounds all very reasonable.
I doubt that the range of opinions on the topic around here is very wide though. Afaict no one here is arguing for infliction of (physical or psychological) pain as a general method of education or adheres to the traditional view that the primary purpose of education is to break the will of the child.

[Cleek]

Best evidence that C19 wasn’t an escapee: Trump and his party think it was, and they are never right about anything.

Until someone proves it did escape, I’m sticking with the ‘natural source’ idea.

[wj]

Trump and his party think it was, and they are never right about anything.

I believe the traditional comment runs, approximately, "Even a blind pig gets an acorn now and then."

I'd want to see evidence for a lab origin. But even if it turns out to be the case, I can't see giving Trump and Co credit for accidently guessing right on zero evidence (at the time).

[nous]

There are also legal, human rights (UN Convention on the Rights of The Child)and ethical issues.

“When a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.”

Just so everyone here is aware of this lovely fact...

The US is the only UN member state who has signed, but not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Opponents to ratification argue against it because they do not want the UN to be able to rule against sentencing laws that allow children to be tried as adults, or to support a child's right to demand that they be allowed to practice a different religion, or any international law that would deprive a parent of custody because they employ corporal punishment.

Feel free to argue over the wording of the UNCRC, but the US clearly acts as if it's afraid that the UN will start taking custody of evangelical's children if the child rebels against parental sovereignty.

[JanieM]

"If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others."

-- From the Wikipedia page on Haim Ginott.

Overhearing the nice things my mother said about me to others was one of the reasons I ran as far away as I could as soon as I could.

Boiling child-raising down to formulas, failure to acknowledge distinctions like the one between a childhood that includes one or two swats on the butt inflicted in frustration, and systematic mistreatment...

I think I will leave this conversation now. No good will come of my sticking around.

[cleek]

the US clearly acts as if it's afraid that the UN will start taking custody of evangelical's children if the child rebels against parental sovereignty.

don't blame the the US for the fact that Republican white trashionalists live in a fantasy world, but thanks to clever manipulation of elections they still get a seat at the table.

[nous]

I do blame all of us in the US for allowing the sham of our UNCRC non-ratification to continue. It's never, that I have seen, been something important enough to the Democratic Party that it's made it into the party platform as an issue. It's very much a bipartisan non-issue.

I've taught classes about the UNCRC for a decade. Nothing changes and nothing ever even comes up as an issue. The US just can't be bothered.

[wj]

It's very much a bipartisan non-issue.

I just don't see how you can say that.

It's true that the Democrats don't appear to consider it a priority. But the only reason it isn't a big deal for the GOP base is that there is no sign of anything happening. It instant, the very instant, that it got a visible push, it would abruptly become a major culture war issue.

So, not really a symmetrical situation.

[Marty]

I don't want to cede any, ANY, authority to the UN in any way over peoes personal actions. So certainly not in this area. So the wording doesn't matter to me at all.

The concept that an international organization would have a say in how I raise my children is ludicrous.

[cleek]

the very instant, that it got a visible push, it would abruptly become a major culture war issue

and everybody knows this. basically we've all already gamed-out what will happen if it comes up and the result is that the Deranged Paranoiac Party will kill any effort to push it, so why bother with the actual argument?

a law to tell people what they can't do to their kids, based on something from the UN? lol. that's dead before you can even start explaining what those words actually refer to.

[wj]

I don't want to cede any, ANY, authority to the UN in any way over peoes personal actions.

See, this is why Marty isn't part of today's GOP base. For the base, any treaty, of any kind, with anybody (international organization of individual foreign country) which restricts the US in any way, is anathema.

It's just like any public health order to wear a mask is an unconscionable infringement of their freedom license to do anything they damn well please. (Decisions on abortions excepted.)

[Girl from the North Country]

I'm slightly drunk, so please forgive any sloppy grammar or fact checking, but:

I just assumed this was another of those issues where the US, by virtue of being Top Nation (TM 1066 and All That) had removed itself, by virtue of American Exceptionalism, from being considered part of the world of civilised nations (e.g. International Criminal Court etc).

[cleek]

yep.

nobody gonna tell 'Merca what to do! we're #1! we're #1!