Well that sounds interesting. And fairly terrifying too, given that I’m somewhat shy.
Only two standard deviations above the human average… sounds like you’re talking about IQ?
Well that sounds interesting. And fairly terrifying too, given that I’m somewhat shy.
Only two standard deviations above the human average… sounds like you’re talking about IQ?
Meaning?
They say that everybody in the world who knows about “The Game” is playing The Game. This means that, right now, you are playing The Game. The objective of The Game is to forget about its existence and the fact that you are playing for as long as possible. Also, if you should remember, you must forget again as quickly as possible.
It’s very likely that your parents were abusive while you were growing up.
Also, there is no scientific method.
some generous interpretation of “very likely”, or something else?
What I mean, roughly, is that if you raised in Western or Eastern Europe, any of the Americas, the Middle East, Asia or Africa, then you probably grew up under some abusive mode of childrearing (childrearing is much more advanced in the Nordic countries). The socializing mode is the most popular these days, although intrusive parenting can also be fairly common too depending on the region.
Try The History of Child Abuse if you’re interested.
Does your support for the first hinge on a strict definition of abuse,
Read up on the basic archetypal childrearing modes (infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping) for a better idea of what I mean by abuse. You can find information about them in the above link, and even the wikipedia article isn’t too bad.
I don’t see why they’re being voted down.
I’m blaming it having successfully triggered the “absolute denial macro” in at least a few people :D.
The second, however, is much better than the first.
Why’s that?
I’m not sure I understand what kind of comparison you’re suggesting. I’ve heard numerous attempts to rationalize child abuse by analogy to hazing, I’ve even heard arguments by abusers to the effect that children are “weak” today because kids don’t undergo the same “hazing” that their parents put them through. “It’s nothing my parents didn’t do to me,” etc...
Or were you getting at something else?
although I think it is demonstrably untrue, I expect it will draw much reflexive denial.
I’m having trouble reconciling those two statements. I’m even having trouble trying to express just why they seem… inconsistent, or inharmonious? Could you elaborate a bit?
Yes, as a vestige from instrusive and early infanticidal childrearing modes.
the background common to most visitors to this site marks most of us as recipients of a “socializing” parenting style, and it’s not obvious to me that that includes unambiguous abuse by the parents
What would you consider the minimum threshold for ‘unambiguous abuse’?
I still don’t understand, but alright… I’m thinking either you’re somewhat deranged, or that I’ve been the victim of a gag of some sort.
I think only the last item (regular emotional abuse) should really count. But to some extent even that, and certainly everything else (battery of the child, molestation/rape, and neglecting to feed/protect/raise the child) goes way beyond the minimum threshold for abuse and into the territory of strictly evil and even savage parenting.
Injurious corporal punishment
Corporal punishment is legal in all states. It’s illegal to hit an adult, but it’s legal to strike a child. Spanking, in particular is prevalent and has been linked to anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders. And, basically, inducing that in a child is evil and abusive. The prevalence of spanking has been absurdly high throughout the 20th century—it obviously varies by region, but in the U.S. it was as high as 80-90% at times.
So the prevalence of spanking was certainly above 50% throughout the 20th century. And that’s just spanking—it’s fairly easy to find the other saddening statistics concerning the other forms of corporal punishment and physical abuse and their prevalence. Same goes for the disturbing frequency of sexual abuse.
As for emotional abuse, if your parents were socializing it’s likely that you received it. The socializing parent will often withhold love and support for their child if he or she does not conform to their wants/wishes. The love is conditional upon their children reaching prescribed goals (e.g. grades, college, homosexuality, performance in sports, etc.) and that counts as abuse in my book because it diminishes free will, integrity and self esteem.
Most children are abused. And you don’t have to think or know that you’ve been abused to actually have been abused, so just because most people who suffer this kind of abuse won’t come out and admit it doesn’t mean it wasn’t really abuse.
You’re right, it’s very hard to raise a child completely abuse free. I’m not calling all parents evil (or didn’t intend to anyway). What I’m saying is that we should recognize these practices as abusive maltreatment of children. A crucial part of that is coming to terms with the fact that they were abusive when they were done to you too.
Inevitably an argument over something like this will come to “my parents spanked me” or “my father hit me, and...” It’s already happened in this thread. These people can’t accept the fact that when their parents hit them, it was abuse (talk about absolute denial macro).
The point is to turn it off. It’s not a contradiction to love your parents while also acknowledging the bad things they did, even calling it abuse. If they wielded their power as caregivers in anything less than a helpful way, then it was basically an instance of abusive parenting. That doesn’t imply that in every case they were horrible people or that you can’t love them. It just means you acknowledge it as an abusive practice, harmful to the development of the child.
Spanking is typically not injurious by the definition I gave.
Studies show a linear correlation between the frequency with which a child is spanked and the occurrence of several psychiatric disorders. Also, one in three parents who begin with legal corporal punishment (e.g. spanking) end up crossing the line into criminal abuse (e.g. battery).
The evidence shows that spanking is injurious. You can’t just redefine the word.
Would you consider that an act of abuse?
No.
Wouldn’t letting me attack my sister be an act of abuse towards her?
Yes. It is also a very common form of abuse.
I was hit exactly once by each parent as I grew up.
Does that include spanking? Note that it is usually applied to toddlers and you might not remember.
Clothing, haircut, diet and aerobics apply equally to men as well, and waxing has shaving as a counterpart.
Also, do you have figures on what percentage of women undergo liposuction? Or tan regularly?
Seems to me that all you’ve done is generalized from a couple cliches.
The amount of rationalization in this thread is disturbing me.
What do you think I’m rationalizing?
How many dresses do you have? How many shampoos? Skin care products? Do you regularly shave your arms and legs? Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels? Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that?
You’ve displayed a severe lack of synthesis here. What you should have been thinking about were analogous items that a male would possess for sex appeal. You’re seriously trying to make a point by asking me how many dresses I own? Obviously I own none, and obviously that does not speak at all to the amount of effort I exert trying to impress women. I also own precisely zero skirts, zero bras, and zero tampons!
To my knowledge, a male’s sex appeal is not significantly improved by most of the items you’ve gone to the trouble of listing. I’ve never felt that I would be more sexy if my legs, armpits, etc. were waxed (although I have plucked my unibrow a few times). Nor, with the exception of acne control, do I think skin care products would increase the average man’s sex appeal.
You’ve apparently failed to accurately conceptualize the idea of sex appeal. When I brought this up, rather than ask for apparently relevant or informative information (how much money will I spend on a date? how nice is my watch, jacket, car, apartment, etc? how much effort will I actually go to in order to seduce a woman or get laid? do i wear deodorant/cologne? do i use contact lenses? how often do i shave? how much do i care about hygiene? what kinds of clothes do i wear? what is my job?), you came asking about how many dresses I own and whether I regularly shave my legs, etc.
Seriously… apply equally?
Male sex appeal is quite different than female sex appeal, but there is a common ground. Clothing, hair (dye, rogaine, plugs, transplant, cutting and grooming), diet and exercise fall inside that common ground.
If you are responding to a hypothetical that tests a mathematical model, and your response doesn’t use math, and doesn’t hinge on a consciousness, infinity, or impossibility from the original problem domain, your response is likely irrelevant.
Right.. I’ll give a few more examples from math. Say you’re arguing that calculus is a lie because deriving dy/dx clearly involves division by zero. In this case, you’re getting ‘emotionally involved’. You’re focusing on the notation dy/dx and all sorts of things about the existence of infinitesimals and division by zero. But that impossibility doesn’t exist in the original theory, because (standard) calculus is founded on limits and not division by zero or infinitesimals. The infinities and infinitesimals aren’t part of the original model which you’re arguing against
Likewise, if you’re arguing that ZFC is inconsistent by Russell’s paradox, because you can construct peculiar but plausible sounding sets which imply contradictions, you’re making the same mistake. You’re being emotionally involved with your naive/primitive concept of a ‘set’, whereas the theory in question (ZFC) doesn’t even allow you to construct such sets.
The above arguments are less common, but I have heard them. A more common argument concerns the Axiom of Choice, and goes a little something like this:
To me, the strongest argument in favor of AC is one if the many equivalent statements: if A_i is a family of non-empty sets then the cartesian product of the A_i is non-empty.
I pulled that from the math subreddit where it was posted a few days ago, and it’s a fairly common argument. But the commenter has become emotionally involved with day-to-day sets and Cartesian products. What would the product of an uncountable collection of uncountable sets even look like? Once one refers to the formal, very abstract definition, it should be clear that we have absolutely no right to expect anything about it’s emptiness or nonemptiness, because the intuition and emotional involvement are replaced by formal abstraction. The things which one assumes exist aren’t actually there in the original theory (ZF).
It’s possible to accidentally construct a hypothetical that makes an assumption that isn’t valid in our universe. (I think these paradoxes were unknown before the 20th century, but there may be a math example.
The paradoxes falling out of the geocentric model, maybe?
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
Never been to one of the meetups before, but I’m thinking of showing up to this one. What can I expect?