The trouble with getting a law degree from UPS is that they make promises, but then fail to deliver.
@anon50609448 I’d not heard of Yakov Smirnov, so I went to Wikipedia and read the following, “Smirnoff recently earned his doctorate in psychology and global leadership at Pepperdine University.” You can do a course in “global leadership”? What a country!
Watching alt right videos without getting slammed by alt right ads and video recommendations, obviously.
I mean, no other reason, no other reason at all…
As a relatively new parent and member of many online parenting advice groups. I am constantly reminded of the generational throughline from authoritarian parenting to the overt cruelty that has largely taken over modern conservatism. Once you buy into the twin junk-science notions that “helping people hurts them/hurting people helps them”, with regards to raising a child, all bets are off as to how you will treat a complete stranger. Many of them are seemingly committed to the concept that cruelty is not just a useful tool for influencing societal change, but an essential one. The sickest part, they will tell you with a straight face that they are intentionally inflicting pain and trauma on their innocent little children “out of love.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
In Soviet Russia, Doctorate in Psychology and Global Leadership earns Yakov Smirnoff…?
Yep, combined with your quote:
“Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”
God interacts with us, His children. as a shepherd interacts with his morally and intellectually inferior sheep, therefore we should interact with our children as such. Meanwhile, all professional research clearly points to the best outcomes resulting from a parenting philosophy that we are not gods raising our sheep children, but rather we are partners in their ongoing development (and our own).
I suspect their “engagement” with the videos is higher too. I.e., they are more likely to like, subscribe, and comment; all things which make the videos rank higher both for the individual and for the whole of youtube.
The videos make it so they don’t have to read or think. They can just stuff their eyeballs and ears full of the things that confirm their own beliefs.
Just to be clear to everyone, this was the reason i put quotes around “engagement”.
This is exactly the kind of reply I had in mind when I read the OP. A recent event came to mind, between my SO’s mother and her grandson. We were having dessert, a fruit pie, and when the grandson saw his piece, he said something like, “mine is squished, why did I get a squished one?” Bear in mind, he wasn’t being whiny, he wasn’t crying about it, it was just a kid question. But grandma, seeing an opportunity for tough love, said, “that’s not squished, I’ll show you squished,” and proceeded to mash the piece of pie all over his plate. He was understandably put off by this, and left the table “to go and pout about it,” again, according to grandma. Is this the most banal example of this kind of cruelty? Perhaps, but I found it highly illustrative. And my SO had many stories from her childhood along similar lines. They think it works, all evidence to the contrary. So it goes.
They say they delivered my diploma, but I was there all day and nobody knocked…
Dang, that’s cold. It does real damage while remaining benign enough to be easily brushed aside by the offender if they are called on it. I believe that at the core lies a fundamental misunderstanding of where true respect comes from. Not from a place of fear and guilt, but from a place of love and compassion. We set boundaries for our energetic and adventurous four-year old and she respects them 99% of the time. When she does get sideways and we remind her, she’s way harder on herself than we could ever be. I went into parenting with the horrible misconception that their mistakes would primarily be opportunities to shoehorn in a “teachable moment”, but now I realize that those are for much later in life. We do deal in natural consequences, of course, but usually what she needs most when she makes a mistake is the oxytocin hit released from a 20-second hug, followed by some tickles, then we go about our business. It’s simultaneously far more simple in some ways and far more complex in others than authoritarian parents seem to be able to grasp. I and others have tried to get through to some of them, but they just seem to be immune to new information. They say, “This is how I was raised and I turned out just fine.” But everything they are saying to me is screaming that no, they didn’t turn out just fine. How parenting became the one area where we refuse to strive to do better than our parents did is just beyond me.
I just told this story in another thread, but I had a coworker who grew up getting the strap in school every day. And when I think about that, I think, everyday. That means that not only did the kid never change their behaviour to avoid getting the strap, but also the adults never changed their behaviour to try to avoid having the kid act up. They just kept plowing on with the same thing.
We often simplify people and think that they’ll respond to positive and negative like they are single-celled automata. Instead, especially in close relationships, they respond to negative feedback by giving their own negative feedback and you create a maladaptive feedback cycle instead of changing anything.
This is also a good explanation for why market capitalism rarely fulfills the expectations of the eggheads from the Chicago School and other proponents of “socioeconomics as hard science”. They seemingly refuse to accept that a significant portion of our own motivations are hidden from our conscious selves. I suppose it makes their job too messy to be considered a “hard science” if these notions of wild unpredictability and individual variation seep in. So they advocate for systems and mechanisms built on the poor assumption that humans are simple creatures with simple motivations. Given this, the inherent cruelty of our socioeconomic systems are as inevitable as the tides.
See: Reactions to proposals for single-payer health care.
At this point in your story, without having read further, I was expecting Grandma to take a fork and squish her own piece of pie a little — “There, we’re even”. Probable result: giggles all round and grandson not dreading his next visit.
It’s not that hard.
Your example would be one of actual ‘tough love.’
The one provided just makes the grandma sound like an asshole.
Ah yes, the venerable “I’ll give you something to cry about” approach to parenting.
