271–280 of 281 posts
No matter the reason only sick, crazy parents would do that to their kids. They should either lose their parenting rights or forced to take a psychological treatment themselves.
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My reaction to these kinds of things (see also: the abuse of the Battle School students in Ender's Game ) is to think: (1) Perhaps it was the best way to teach certain things; but (2) I don't think the people who do such things usually rule out all the gentler methods first. It sounds like the "challenges" weren't necessarily intended to teach you what you learned, and you just happened to have a mind and mindset tha…
Enders game is a fiction. And while military boarding schools (and any closed seclude communities) in fact do have abuse systems amd are prone to bullying issue, there is zero evidence the abuses are best way to teach things. Being strip searched does not fixes mental health issues. Really.
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Do you really think that for 5000 years, throughout which physical punishment was the norm, nobody was "alright"? And that only in the last 50 years of human existence have we started to realize how to raise children "correctly"? We can ignore the swiftly rising depression rates among children for the sake of the argument.
Do you have a justification for implying that adolescent depression stems from the lack of abuse? I'd point to half a dozen potential other reasons that immediately spring to mind. And, to answer your first 2 questions: yes.
Our entire society is quite literally based around physical punishment for law breaking, in that you go to jail. Society does not function with solely positive reinforcement. I'm sorry about this, and I don't like it either, but it's just a fact of life. I fail to see any justification for the strange idea that a child or adolescent should never be punished physically, but an adult should be. If there exist adults who are deterred from bad behavior due to the consequences, and they obviously do exist, why do you think that such adolescents don't also exist? For such adolescents who don't respond to gentler measures, a spanking may very well deter the bad behavior. I very seriously do not understand why this is debated.
In regards to the historical context, I find your opinion on that myopic and egoistic.
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Psychology. (Ortho)pedagogues. Even some psychiatrists. It's incentives versus how human minds work. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... You see, if you look things up you will find that psychology is good at exactly what you'd expect it to be good at if you look at their methods: describing behavior "in the large". Think "Of 100 drug addicts, 10 will commit crimes due to drugs", those typ…
IDK, man… I know you’ve created a whole narrative here to conflate child soldiers and CPS/psychologists, but I’ve known several people who do CPS work here in Minnesota and the situations that get kids removed from a home are either chronic neglect, abuse and/or intense and actively harmful (like: kids chained to radiators in the basement). Even when kids are removed, the law actively requires the child go to a blood…
Some social worker (and there's lots of them) complains that they've refused necessary help. Of course, kids refusing help has direct financial repercussions for these people.
That's over 80% of placements (and let's not forget close to another 15% are kids getting arrested for crimes). Kids actually having seen physical abuse are very rare IN CPS. Hell, these days the proportion of kids that have gotten abused is higher in "Juvie" than in CPS institutions (most of these institutions will refuse kids who have "trauma as a first problem". Likewise they'll refuse addicts, anorexic, outwardly or inwardly agressive kids).
Issue is that what is never mentioned is the success rate of these social workers. Most often they're there to fix autism (and not autism like you've seen in documentaries, "autism" like refusing to listen to parents/teachers on occasion). Almost without exception problems exacerbate with these treatments (one simple reason that these kids are often smart enough to coast through (often primary) school. However, if they are denied school attendance (because social workers work during school hours, of course, so treatments happen during school hours), obviously they start failing more and more.
Given social workers' education (ie. high school, a VERY low course level in high school, sometimes not even having finished it) they are also incapable of helping out with most problems. You can't help a kid with math problems if you don't know math. So they should have a level of every subject given in high school, at least the level of teachers. To put it very mildly, they don't.
A bunch of these kids understand what is happening and start fighting social workers. This then leads linea recta to CPS involvement, mostly because these are very young kids. Violence works against them (read on), but these kids are too young to effectively use violence against an adult. Instead they cry and refuse to go or run away or the like.
Of course, the net effect is that CPS starts protecting their real clients, the ones who provide them new business: those social workers. Attacking the kids who asked for help, then refuse what they got. With threats, which doesn't work well, then, via youth judges, with violence.
And, the other side of the coin CPS becomes actively hostile to kids with real problems, whether that's abusive parents, drugs, criminal involvement or school problems.
They are very often accused that they do not protect kids. If the parents and/or the kid is really violent, CPS and social workers will keep their distance. Again some kids use this to "fight free" from CPS. The problem with that this that these kids are inexperienced, but trying to systematically escalate violence against adults, because that's the only thing that can get them out (and often back into a good school: CPS gets extra money if kids go to "special needs" schools). Issue with that is that "dosing" violence to the right level is hard for people who've done it as police agents for 20 years. Kids regularly use too little ... and too much violence, both of which have essentially the same consequence: getting locked up in isolation 23h per day for a period from 2 weeks to several years. And of course, this affects CPS employees: only the worst of the worst remain.
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IDK, man… I know you’ve created a whole narrative here to conflate child soldiers and CPS/psychologists, but I’ve known several people who do CPS work here in Minnesota and the situations that get kids removed from a home are either chronic neglect, abuse and/or intense and actively harmful (like: kids chained to radiators in the basement). Even when kids are removed, the law actively requires the child go to a blood…
IDK about Minnesota, but in Europe this is not the case. The vast majority of kids getting taken away get taken away for 1 reason only: Some social worker (and there's lots of them) complains that they've refused necessary help. Of course, kids refusing help has direct financial repercussions for these people. That's over 80% of placements (and let's not forget close to another 15% are kids getting arrested for crime…
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I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous b…
>the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race. You may need to dwell some more, because there's some higher order practical and moral contention there. Guilt over things done in pursuit of survival is the victor's luxury. If you lose, and die anyway you don't have that problem. This is one of the sharp divergences that tends to exist between the soldier and the pacifist.…
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Good faith is worse than... bad faith? Or worse than pure intuition? Because people have had intuition for all time, and they've never stopped using it, including herbal cure remedies for cancer. The option to go without institutional care is already there for anyone without enough money, and it's being exercised all the time, all around the world. Even when you choose institutions you must exercise intuition.
I meant worse than bad faith, not always... But sometimes in these circumstances. Maybe "no faith" is closer to the mark. Reformatories with no ideals, just trying to stay open and make ends meet. I suppose the canonical example is the Spanish inquisition, and the rest of the conquista culture. They were saving people from hell, barbarism, sin and such. Also Russian gulags, Canadian residential schools, and many othe…
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> A lot of historical figures contradict the prevailing narrative [that trauma never makes you stronger]. I'd argue that the key word here is "trauma"; I think _adversity_ can make you stronger (more disciplined, and more focused), but I think that Dr. Bernstein is using the word "trauma" in its technical, medical, sense, i.e. "Psychological trauma is caused by an adverse experience, or series of experiences, that re…
I would look up the life history of Temüjin, Viktor Frankl, and others. Seriously. Do a quick web search. There is a circular definition here. If we define trauma in terms of harmful outcomes, it's bad by definition, but that's arguing semantics and not psychology. The slipperiness comes in when we switch definitions mid-paragraph.
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I would look up the life history of Temüjin, Viktor Frankl, and others. Seriously. Do a quick web search. There is a circular definition here. If we define trauma in terms of harmful outcomes, it's bad by definition, but that's arguing semantics and not psychology. The slipperiness comes in when we switch definitions mid-paragraph.
They are the exceptions, that's why we talk about them.
You'll also see virtually everyone 300 years ago was exposed to things which would be considered traumatic today. It's how we evolved.
We've got a bad theory of trauma and resilience.
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I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous b…
> that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister. Uh, I remember it as Ender having been tricked into it. He thought he was still d…