08 dec 06
Spanking Children aka physical punishment. What is happening today, What should be the ideal situation, and what is going to happen in the future?
today, children are being spanked. the ideal situation is that children wouldn't do anything to deserve getting spanked. in the future, additional children will be spanked.
animals do it (give their cubs little undamaging swats or nips to let them know they're behaving badly). it seems sort of primitive, but it's possible that there's nothing wrong with it. i was spanked, and it didn't bother me -- it was just something to wait through, until it was done, sort of like sunday church service. imagine if a punishment were painting the child's toenails. that might have been worse, actually, but it's in the same ballpark: just some uninteresting form of capture that must be waited out, until one is released and can perform additional mischief.
punishment/reward is such a fundamental, universal thing that i don't see it being drastically revamped in some future evolved civilization. i could research something in child psychology for you, but child psychology is notorious for changing its mind every few years. that whole "dr. spock" (not "mr. spock") fad in the 70s was later attacked for being responsible for generations of hoodlums and ne'er do wells, being made so by the overly-permissive parenting the green-blooded alien advocated. so, it's all a matter of who's writing the books these days.
should you spank your child? sure, as long as you don't hurt him. it's like when you give your dog a gentle swat on the behind to let it know it's done something wrong -- you don't do it hard -- in fact, you do it with about the same force as you migth give a pat. the difference is that the dog knows from the tone of your voice, your body language, and god-knows whatever other pheromones you're producing that you mean business, and aren't happy with it. so, the precious little tap seems a lot graver to the doggie than it really is, because the doggie's mind is wired on wanting to please its owners. now, i don't know if children are quite set up in the same way (fantatical eagerness to please). and it's possible it varies enough from child to child that no set rules are useful.
in fact, i observed a parent friend of mine disciplining one of his kids for eating, breaking, etc, somethinghe wasn't supposed to. "no! bad! don't ever do that!" accompanied by a little slap on the wrist. the kid totally ignored it, and continued to do the bad thing. the parent turned to me and said "this kid is amazing...his sister would have been in tears by now". so, i guess it varies from human child to human child, and part of parenting is to get to know how your kid's devious little mind works and then manipulate it to your twisted ends, rather than going by some instruction book that only has one set of applications for some archetypal child-template.
i think there is no "right" way to raise a child, and all of the sugar and spice and everything nice, as well as the snipes and snails and puppy dog tails, is in there to begin with. annals are stocked full of examples of kids who were beaten, abused, ill-fed, abandoned, etc, and went on to head this or that company, as well as with tales of the rich kid with ever advantage who wound up a welfare bum/crackhead/squatter/car thief.
i read an interview with noam chomsky in which he told us, in one of the rare times of his sneaking the determinism of his lingustics into the real world, that it didn't matter if we punished our kids or not -- they will be what they will be, just like language is an organic construct rather than a behavioral one. apparently, this weltangschauung applies to lots more than linguistics, but gnome is hush-hush about it. i think this is why noam sort of bristles at the notion of drawing parallels between his linguistics and his politics -- if we did, free will would go totally out the window. this might be his point altogether -- we must help those who cannot help themselves -- but he's not going to come right out and say that some people are genetically unable to yank themselves up by their bootstraps, because this would generate yelling on every conceivable side.
no, if little johnny puts his mind to it, he can't do anything he wants; some kids "have what it takes", and some don't. society needs more of "i love you just the way you are", and fewer flashcards.
parenting, of all things, is someting that i am absolutely not qualified to write about, less so than anything else, probably. so, i will close with an aside about all of the spam i've been getting.
i got my most recent one at 11:52am on the 8th, which is right now.
the oldest spam in my folder was received on november 27th at 2:51pm.
the total number of spams in my spambox is 347.
that's 8 days 21 hours of spams, or 8*24+21 = 192 hours of spams.
347 spams in 192 hours amounts to 347/192 spams per hour. calculator time. 1.8 spams per hour. horrible. 43 spams a day. i bet you don't get that many. or maybe you do.
i read that bill gates gets four million spams every day. thankfully, google's spam filters are top-notch. not surprising, since AI is more or less the center of their R&D. i'm impressed with them. they had a little lapse with the relatively new species of spam, "stock spam", where some crappy little company tells you to buy their stock at $.25 a share and then "ride it all the way to the top". right around the time i started reporting these as spam without even opening them, google started to filter them out.
they almost always come as a gif attached to a gibberish email.
i don't care how how much spam gets mailed to my email address, just so long as it all get coralled to its spam dungeon. once they're there, i sometimes creak open the gate and walk along the corridor, peering at the inmates, like jody foster in "silence of the lambs" on her way to sit with hannibal the cannibal.
ok, but get this -- you know what was weird? once, for fun, i tried to send out a spam that would get me filtered into the spambox by google. i typed up an "enlarge your penis" mail, used no obfuscated words, provided a link to a known supplier of bogus penis pills, sent it out via bcc:, and even forged my To: header. it didn't work! google knew i was sending out a fake spam, and let it slip gracefully into my inbox. i will never understand this. maybe one of you computer geniuses can explain it to me in the "submit" box below. maybe i didn't have enough bcc: recipients, or wasn't a known spammer, or wasn't sending from a known spammer source, or blah blah.
one spammer (telling me to buy their imitation watches) uses an effective javascript function for identifying people who want their email addresses removed from mailing lists (i went to their site to look at them):
function ContainsRemoveWord(SubjectAndMessage){
SubjectAndMessage = RemoveNonAlphanumeric(SubjectAndMessage.toLowerCase());
RemoveWords = "fuck|whore|stop sending|unsubscribe|take me off|delete me|
stop email|opt out|spam|no more|assholes|die|unsolicted|abuse|remov";
RemoveWords = RemoveNonAlphanumeric(RemoveWords.toLowerCase());
return SubjectAndMessage.match(RemoveWords+"+")!=null;
}
it's doubtful that they actually do remove any of these people who type "die fucking whore remove me asshole" in the textfield; maybe instead they punish them with especially more spam.