Corporal punishment is really not that bad, pursued at a reasonable level. I don't really understand the zero-tolerance attitude that seems to prevail towards even paddling a misbehaving toddler's ass. Employed correctly, its something that doesn't need to be employed very often, and its a helluva lot better deterrent than making them stand in the corner or whatever liberal shaming-based method of discipline.

If you hit an adult, it's assault.

If you hit your dog, it's animal abuse.

If you hit your spouse, it's domestic violence.

Even drill sergeants aren't allowed to hit recruits.

But if you hit your children– people who can't possibly defend themselves, people who depend on you to survive... it's allowed. It's even encouraged by a significant fraction of parents today. To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others. After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?

> Even drill sergeants aren't allowed to hit recruits.

Nope, they sure don't. Don't need to - the institutionalized psychological attacks and tearing down their worldview to replace it with the army's is much more effective than any physical reprimand could be.

> After all, pets can be controlled without hitting.

And how is this done? With pinch collars, crates, kennels, leashes, shock collars, staking them out, fences, rubbing their noses in their feces...

I'd rather the odd corporal punishment to being treated like a "pet".

Many people who don't know dogs think of crates as doggy jails-far from it. Our dog loved her crate; it was a nice, secure area where she could retreat when she was scared or overwhelmed, or when she just wanted a peaceful nap. We taught our kids that when she was in the crate, they had to absolutely ignore her and leave her totally alone.

Yes, we used the crate in order to speed up her housebreaking (working with her natural instincts), but she would also regularly use her crate (with the door open) on her own. Now, we've built her a little pseudo crate with a dog bed under a high-legged dresser. She goes there in any big thunderstorm still and will sometimes sleep there when the house is full of visitors.

I'm in favor of controlling dogs with appropriate use of crates/kennels, leashes, and fences. OTOH, I've never hit my kids, not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I think it's a terribly slippery slope, especially given the inherent stresses in raising an infant through toddler.

My parents and my (private Christian K-5) school both used corporal punishment on me, and I have to say that I don't feel harmed nor scarred/scared by it. Looking back on the few instances that I specifically recall, it was done with positive intent and was basically effective.

I'm uncertain as to whether it's inherently wrong categorically, or whether it's just wrongly used by lazy parents in >99% of the instances. (There's no doubt that it has an immediate effect. A parent could be quite easily tempted to use that shortcut in an almost addictive fashion.)

Hmm. Suppose you have children. (I don't. Have been one, and have been around younger siblings.)

Now, you can do real violence to your children. Hit them until they're black and blue and sore for days. Or you can do trivial violence: smack your kid on the bottom with your hand and make it sting a little bit, for a fraction of an hour.

Maybe you could do this violence as an outlet for the rage, frustration, and anger in your life. Maybe you do this routinely. Maybe you're an alcoholic. Alternatively, perhaps you've found your children willfully doing something very wrong or incredibly irresponsible, substantially endangering someone's life or property.

These are substantially different applications of violence. We should use caution about talking like they're the same.

"To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others."

One premise of punishing your children -- in ANY way -- is that you're defending your children's future. You hope afterwards that they will be a better person, capable of self-discipline, unlikely to engage in self-destructive behavior or violence against the world at large. And as they are not yet mature -- mentally, emotionally, physically, or in the eyes of the law -- and as they are your responsibility, substituting your judgement for theirs is a thing that you do, and you can in fact defend them from themselves, for a while at least. (It is a different situation with your wife, or at least it damn well ought to be.)

In that case, the question becomes whether the punishment is actually an effective and humane means to those ends -- physical or otherwise. After all, children can be traumatized with routine verbal abuse as well as physical.

"After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?"

Pets have substantially different brain structures and the ability to learn from negative feedback of any sort is highly variable. My understanding is that dogs can learn from it, but do best if the feedback is immediate, otherwise they're at risk of just feeling randomly attacked, and they start getting pretty neurotic. But birds can just about never learn from negative feedback. And, of course, we have substantially different sets of expectations for humans than we do for pets.

it's called "parents rights". It has been since forever. Sorry that not the whole worls lives in your utopian cultural marxist la-la-land.

What does any of that have to do with the labor theory of value?

you tell me, you started mixing it in your original post

You need to stop talking and start learning. There is NO way to correctly employ corporal punishment. At all. Time and time again, hitting a child for misbehaving has proven to increase aggressive behavior and decrease self confidence. It also has the complete opposite effect as intended. I could go into the psychology of it, but as you are on Hacker News, you know how to use Google.

For that matter, the other two "liberal" methods you mentioned, shaming and time out don't work either. I believe what you are attempting to discredit is known as positive discipline. That traces its roots to Alfred Adler, with the date being 1964 when he first mentioned it. That's hardly liberal. However, if you actually study positive discipline, it's nothing more than taking the ideas of Dale Carnegie and applying them to children. And Carnegie freely admits his ideas were drawn from the Bible and other religious texts.

They are hardly liberal or conservative.

Ethical problems? Perhaps you mean their morality does not agree with that of the wider culture surrounding them. But I have a real hard time condemning their choices when I look at what we're doing as a culture. Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Yes, yes that's exactly what he's saying. Their personal lifestyle choices are fine, but their ethics are absolutely not fine. To choose to live a simple life of manual labour and teach the same to your children is fine, but to bind their spirit by breaking their bodies is something I can't stand for. It's cruel and inhumane.

> to bind their spirit by breaking their bodies is something I can't stand for. It's cruel and inhumane.

I agree. That said, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that there are a lot of cruel and inhumane things that we do to ourselves, too.

We shouldn't compare the worst of humanity against the worst of humanity. That gets us nowhere. Instead we should be comparing the worst against the best and looking to see how those issues can be rectified.

They are set in their ways. To turn them onto the One True Path of Least Resistance we'll probably need a feet on the ground intervention, in the interests of unbound spirits and fleshy bodies.

> Perhaps you mean their morality does not agree with that of the wider culture surrounding them.

Absolutely. The Western civilization is ignorantly missing things like the incredible cultural value of sexual abuse ( http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=316371 , http://legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2005/feature... ) or the beautiful parenting experience of raising children with nephropathic cystinosis (not to mention the happy lives of the children!) with that feeling of inner peace brought to you by knowledge that God wanted it like that. Open those closed, narrow minds of yours, people!

I like how you managed to slip in 'the cultural value of', and then simply list alleged instances of sexual abuse within the Amish community neither of which implies that the practice is condoned or 'culturally valued'; because it's permissible, as long as we don't value it as a culture. The Amish aren't to be contrasted to 'Western civilisation'; they live in the West, they come from another part of the West, they practice Protestantism, an especially Western variety of a schism with a religion domiciled in the West. "But they're not civilised! They draw a line in the sand and reject technology beyond that line. They probably don't approve of genome editing. They've probably even banned it. All those happy children, never to be born."

If you read the articles closely, you'll see that they're anything but "alleged". The "morality" dasil003 mentions, which "does not agree with that of the wider culture surrounding them", disagrees with the "wider culture" of the West on many topics, including the way that sexual abuse should be dealt with or how access to healthcare should be regulated.

You forgot their atrocious treatment of women and the issue of rape and sexual assault. Yep, the Amish have crime, too, but they tend to blaming the victim in these cases.

The article also failed to mention the reason there are so many German Anabaptist sects in America: they got kicked out of Europe when they couldn't find a home sympathetic to their hyper strict version of Christianity. These sects were often started by lay-people who disagreed with the lack of beatings being dolled out by their church leader.

I grew up around a lot of Amish people. At least when it comes to dealing with "the English", they are vain, sanctimonious assholes. I see little difference between them and the fundamentalist sects of Islam that we get forced in our faces by the news to paint all of Islam with the same brush.

The point of the piece is not "every aspect of the Amish is good and they don't have any genetic problems, either".

Not the whole world needs to follow liberal ideology. It's pluralism. A good thing.

I'm surprised how often liberals turn out to be such a totalitarians. It makes me sad.

I'm not sure I understand what of the grandparent post constitutes a liberal ideology.

I think you are pretending

Dislike to all other lifestyles than a liberal one. Attack any religion or ideology that doesn't put humans and their lives on the pedestal. I.e. Amish put there their God. It goes right against the liberal values (i.e. human life and rights are the most important thing not some imaginatory "God").

I like pluralism. I like to live in a country where people believe in different things and are free to express it.

Liberals made the US a bit totalitarian in a sense that you can get fired for petty remarks about gay or races. It almost feels like in a few more years we will have Jacobins with guilottines beheading everyone who doesn't want to be a liberal or cultural marxism proponent.

Very funny how you pretend you don't see it. That's what we call left-wing hypocrisy: you are becoming exactly this what you originally wanted to fight: injust totalitarian crushing anyone not agreeing with your worldview.

So, I'm just guessing here, but "basic respect for all people" is the criteria you're applying to put someone into the "liberal" category? Can you explain what makes "petty remarks about gay or races" OK?

Do whatever you want. But don't claim that gives you the right to harm others.

petty remark about gays == prompt employment termination == harming others ???

You mean the ex-employee was harmed as he lost his employment because 1st Amendment doesn't protect him anymore?

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I am honestly confused.

no worries. Liberals have tendency to be lost every time you ask them about your Consitutiona Rights. At least you are not alone.

Do you think that we got 1st Amendment to talk about whether while drinking tea? No! We got them to ask hard questions. Like why blacks are 75% + od the prison population even though they are only 15% of the general population? `i won't get honest answer to this by anyone because you guys don't believe in human rights (right to free speech) and killed them.