Violence as Deterrent by AnthonyT

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Violence as Deterrent

POSTED BY: ANTHONYT
UPDATED: Sunday, March 29, 2009 17:24
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Saturday, March 28, 2009 4:29 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by RIPWash:
I know that most of you probably are aware of these things and I may be reading some of these posts wrong, but we can't expect to follow a set "blueprint" for every child because each child is born very, very different.

But isn't that the gist of what Frem and SignyM were saying? To treat a child like an individual person? I don't think anyone was speaking about blueprint-parenting.

And putting a child first, parent second isn't necessarily a financial thing like you desribe, but perhaps a patience and attention thing. Child's nerves first, parent's nerves second? Not saying that's not what you're doing, but you gave only financial examples, which struck me as funny.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 4:47 AM

AGENTROUKA

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:

We've not come a very long way since the Roman arena, you ask me.

It's preposterous to assume we have, in the first place.

I think it has to do with that whole "cathartic violence" myth thing that has been going around here.

Public executions, corporal punishment, slavery and serfdom, gender inequality... our modern culture grew straight from cultures where the individual's body was not sacred in any way, and that's not even mentioning the physicality of war or "illegal" violence. That people would be attracted to images of what surrounds them doesn't surprise me. So now we supposedly don't support violence anymore, but the simplistic impulse to revert to it is alive and well, because we never really stopped accepting it or expecting it. This change in values has been a superficial one. And intellectial change, not an emotional one. I think.

It sucks.

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 4:58 AM

FREMDFIRMA

RIPWash, the time, patience and care invested to discover what works for each individual child is a true credit to you as a person.

That from someone who knows just how deep that investment must have been, and as well how valuable it is.

For a fact, once you HAVE done that, it sure makes the job of parenting a hell of a lot easier, doesn't it ?
Well, comparitively.

Thing is, most folk never really understand the concept your expressing at it's most basic level because our society is all about knee-jerk, band-aid, one size fits all solutions, and when it comes to kids, that just ain't possible.

Don't seem to stop em from tryin though, sadly.

-F

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 5:05 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Quote:
This change in values has been a superficial one. And intellectial change, not an emotional one. I think.

Bingo.

And I WANT, very much, to make it an emotional change.

Consider, go back a hundred and some years and try to tell folk to treat their wives like people, not lay hands on them in violent fashion, and have enough respect to listen to what they have to say...

And yet, despite all our flaws, here we are, where for the most part even the IDEA of beating your wife is repulsive, isn't it ?

One of my end goals is to class harming or exploiting your fellow humans for profit, gain or amusement, in the same level of personal disgust as infanticide or cannibalism, to where it's an INTERNAL value shared by most if not all folk in sufficient quantity to erase it from existence.

We can DO this, we have only but to try.

Women back then had the advantage of a voice, some organisation, and a lotta will - and I have worked for many years to give children that voice and organisation, as have many others.

Will, that they got in plenty, just as any parent who's teen disagrees with em!

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 5:10 AM

CHRISISALL

My kid came with an instruction manual.
It's in audio form.
And it changes month by month as my son explains it to me.

The laughing Chrisisall

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 5:12 AM

RIPWASH

Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
Quote:
Originally posted by RIPWash:
I know that most of you probably are aware of these things and I may be reading some of these posts wrong, but we can't expect to follow a set "blueprint" for every child because each child is born very, very different.

But isn't that the gist of what Frem and SignyM were saying? To treat a child like an individual person? I don't think anyone was speaking about blueprint-parenting.

And putting a child first, parent second isn't necessarily a financial thing like you desribe, but perhaps a patience and attention thing. Child's nerves first, parent's nerves second? Not saying that's not what you're doing, but you gave only financial examples, which struck me as funny.

To be honest, I skimmed . . .

but wanted to add my two cents anyway.

Yes, I suppose the examples I gave were financial, but in a way that shows that I'm thinking of my self second in a way that some people really take for granted. When we're on our own, with no children, we can go where we want, do what we want, buy what we want. For some people, having kids doesn't change that, unfortunately. My sister is a very selfish person. She talked my Mom into coming to live with them for the sole reason (in my opinion) of having a live-in babysitter. She and her husband went on a cruise shortly after my oldest nephew was born because my Mom was there. They lock themselves away in their room even when we're there visiting, so we can watch THEIR kids while they play video games. They take my Mom with them to Disney so SHE can watch after the kids while THEY go off on their own. That is simply outrageous to me. I wouldn't DREAM of doing that kind of thing. My kids mean the world to me. Letting them get things when I want something else is, for lack of a better word, painful. But what they want is more important than what I want. Being able to give them stuff I never had as a kid (to a certain extent) is important to me. Heck, I can wait a while for the stuff I really want. But some parents would rather get STUFF to make themselves feel more important and put their kids things on the backburner until it's convenient.

Zoe: "Get it running again."
Mal: "Yeah"
Zoe: "So not running now"
Mal: "Not so much"
- Out of Gas

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 5:37 AM

FREMDFIRMA

All too bloody true.

And it's not just things, it's time too - cause as is obvious, they're not spending time with their kids, and when they are it's obviously not by choice.

That has a powerful effect on a kid, that kind of rejection, even if the child themselves is unaware of it, it hits them at a pretty deep level and tends to jump them pyschologically from various directions later in life.

With my nieces and nephews I have a bit of an edge in that our entire family is serious videogamers, a tradition started by our paternal grandmother with her Telstar, Channel F, and later Atari 2600.
(to her dyin day, she could STILL kick my ass at Combat!)

Enter the more recent popularity of Guitar Hero, and you got a two-fer-one special goin on there cause most of that music is stuff I grew up on - it's almost unnatural for two generations to like the same music, innit ?

The nephew loved it initially, and after he got his hands crushed and mangled in a wood splitter and we were mortified he'd lose function, we positively encouraged him to go for broke on the game as a form of physical therapy he'd never shirk which would do wonders for him, and it did - as well as encouraging an actual interest in music in school as well.

And while I cannot for the life of me use that flippin guitar-thingie, hand me a regular dual-shock controller and I can rock you out just as well if not better.

The power of games + the power of rock, in combination with an elder family member participating, and well, in one of THEIR interests, has created a bond so strong that the thought of my disapproval is a more effective discipline than any other threat.

And yes, the girls play too, watching them duo heart's barracuda is pretty awesome.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Saturday, March 28, 2009 6:41 AM

CITIZEN

Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
It's preposterous to assume we have, in the first place.

I think it's a prevalent presumption. We do look at Roman society as exceptionally brutal, in part because of the Arena.

"How can people watch people being violently killed for entertainment" one might say, "Ohh Die Hard is on TV tonight!"

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Sunday, March 29, 2009 4:44 PM

FREMDFIRMA

I've been actually doing some research on the concept of where our society screws up - and key things we could do to turn it around, as of late.

To be honest, I been crammin it like college finals since we're making the jump to pushing the second domino of our strategy down and I never expected to get the first one knocked over in my lifetime.

And something I have been researching lately connected with a lot of expressed thoughts in this thread concerning how and why our society is so screwed up in comparison to others - and when I went back and read through it, the wires crossed and the light came on, so to speak.

American Society does not have the concept of skinship*(see link) - in fact, as I have been pointing out lately, we've begun to isolate ourselves even from each other to some pretty insane degrees to the point where most people suffer an appalling lack of interpersonal skills, which contributes significantly to violence in any disagreement, and we've taken the us-n-them dynamic to such extremes that many people in our society see it as me-n-them, which is any way you slice it, an unhealthy psychology.

And in light of this, obviously, we are a very non-touch society, often to the point where the only time we DO so is by absolute necessity.

I think there's harm in that, a great deal of it, and the lack of any concept resembling skinship in american society is a direct contributing factor to our lack of personal empathy for each other.

It limits our non-verbal communication, and in scorning touch, often considering it with the same studied disapproval we ladle upon emotional attachments with those of no immediate value to you - I think they is a key breakpoint in where we have gone wrong, because down that road it's lead us to scorn nearly all visible affection, and begun us on a path to scorn even emotional attachment which has no visible payoff.

Which is how gramma winds up in a nursing home far enough away to excuse not visiting, while you slave away at the project with might save your department from being outsourced.

From my experience with sorting out messed up people, I can also tell you that there's a very real hidden danger in making fathers fear showing fatherly affection to their daughters, because it's the first and most critical time in their lives to recieve affection and approval from someone who is both of the opposite sex, and an authority figure, WITHOUT there being a sexual component to it - and to lack this experience leads to them later in life seeking approval and affection with sex, as opposed to having a firm concept of them as different things.

I'm all for dropping the bomb on predator parents, but one of the things I hate most about the fanatics and zealots whom I refuse to work with, is how they've made any form of fatherly affection so risky that fathers shun their daughters just when they need the goddamn example.

That has a serious boomerang effect later on, and sadly is common enough that I feel it deserved a mention - cause almost *every* one of the girls we wind up trying to sort out has this problem, either due to the above, or due to lack of a father or father-figure in the first place.

Anyhows, I think one of the key points at which we could start turning things around in a couple generations is by re-introducting touch as something positive, rather than something to be viewed with scorn and disapproval, especially in infancy or very young childhood.

Since we americans looted our entire culture from everyone else in the first place, I say we loot the concept of Skinship and apply it immediately.
* http://www.movingandlearning.com/Resources/Articles24.htm

What say you ?

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Sunday, March 29, 2009 5:14 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:

Hello,

I think a lot of the reason that the Wild West is romanticized so much is because in some cases it really was a more polite society. Wild West movies always depict bloody violence, because they are action films after all. But the shooting violence of the real Wild West could be neatly catalogued in a tome or two. Barring warfare or revolution, this same thing could probably be said of Victorian England, or most western countries at the time. It was an age when people seemed to hold life in higher regard, and when people seemed to have more manners. (Though this is debatable depending on what sorts of things offend you.) There were probably great and horrible miscairrages of justice back then, too, but this doesn't stick in the popular memory (unless you are of Mexican, Chinese, or African American descent, in which case the stories of injustice are probably carried on in family tellings.)

That would be the romanticised view. In reality there were more Gun murders in Victorian London than there are now. There was more violence through out the west. Life was cheap, and politeness was often a shallow facade over the real uglyness of squalor and gang warfare. None of our respective social problems are new by any stretch.

Yeah, agreed, you meat eating *****. Sorry, wrong board.

It's incorrect to say that in the past people held human life in more regard. The past is filled with terrible examples, of slave ownership, of wiping out native populations,of terrible, terrible punishments handed out to people (hung drawn quartered/burnt at the stake), of forcing children into hard labour,etc etc etc

There is actually evidence that we are, by and large, more compassionate about one another.

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Sunday, March 29, 2009 5:24 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
"Even Australia, that famous nation of rugged individualists bred from prison-stock- has nationalized health care and no death penalty!"

And when they outlawed gun ownership, crime skyrocketed. They allowed themselves to be taken in by the semingly innocuous socialism.

Yes, we are nation of individuals. And damn proud of it.
Quote:

Firstly, gun ownership wasn't banned. There were some heavy restrictions introduced after a massacre in the late 90's. The fact is we have never had gun ownership laws like the US, gun ownership is rare in this country, we just don't have the same gun culture, never had. I've never met anyone who owned a gun who wasn't a farmer.

The homicide rate has been declining overall for the past 30 or so years. It has its good and bad years, some hiccups, but looking at it overall, gun laws have made no difference and given the lack of gun ownership in the first place, I wouldn't expect them too.

You shouldn't believe everything the NRA says. They are the gun lobby group after all.

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