mahiwaga

What being hit by the belt or smacked in the ass for misbehaving taught me was that the best way to deal with frustration is with violence. This lesson is now something I constantly struggle with to suppress.

A grown person smacking around a child seems like the very definition of cowardice to me, the epitome of bullying. Pick on someone your own size, for God’s sake. I’ve always gotten the impression that people who hit kids would deal with adults this way too, if they had the balls to do it.

The one time I cold-cocked another kid for accidentally elbowing me in the face, I got in trouble at school, but I didn’t get punished by my parents. What I remember is my mom being disappointed and my dad laughing his ass off at the incident, and it made me feel really bad. Since then, I have never punched someone in the face while in the throes of white hot rage.

During residency, I was involved in some rather egregious child abuse cases. There’s obviously a point where it’s indefensibly wrong. That said, there’s no way Child Protective Services could respond to every single case of a parent smacking their child. This a purely utilitarian argument. Funds are tight, CPS is only going to be able to handle so many cases, and taking kids away from their parents may do more harm than good in some cases, and not everyone who whacks their kid is going to bust their kids liver open or knock their kid into a coma. I feel uneasy about this, but reality is always ugly.

I’m not sure how to take someone’s argument when they are so against public schooling, and yet have no problem recommending that public schools should whack their students with paddles for bad behavior. This strikes me as kind of self-negating, on par with the argument “(1) God does not exist (2) And anyhow, he’s stupid”

I’m not sure how to take someone’s argument that society would be a better place if more people whacked their kids, when this person has no faith at all in society in general, or with any form of collectivization.