Ooooh a Spanking!Follow

I think this is Smash's way of saying he wishes he'd get spanked more often.

LOL... Hmmm...


The comparison to adults is irrelevant. You aren't responsible for the actions and behavior of other adults. You *are* responsible for the actions of your own children. That alone gives you the right to apply punishment at all (as Joph's "sending a child to his room" example illustrates).

And maybe I'm an old fashioned Classical Liberalist, but I personally happen to believe that if a parenting technique that isn't shown to do any harm, should not be outlawed simply because it isn't shown statistically to do any good either. At the risk of tossing a slippery slope analogy, by that logic it's ok to ban/outlaw any action taken by anyone that can't be scientifically shown to generate a positive result.


That's *incredibly* questionable logic. So we outlaw palm reading? Horoscopes? Illegal! Pretty much any activity someone might choose to do that doesn't generate any positive benefit gets made illegal? Sorry. Don't want to live in that country. Thank you for playing though!

I think I am just misunderstanding this, but it would be okay to do that if they were over 18?

But this really all depends on what they veiw as inflicting pain, versus simply showing them its wrong. A slap on the wrist for taking a cookie out of its jar when I was four doesn't seem like "willful infliction of pain". Even if I did something serious like purposefully brake something important, I would get spanked. I don't hate my parents for it.



Edited, Nov 29th 2007 11:48pm by Justdistaint

Is that a Republican agenda I smell?

I think it is!

You think bruising is ever ok? That's disturbing.

Nexa

The perfect society versus freedom eh gbaji?

Is your free society the one in which 'we' (not 'they') have the right to bomb innocent people, take over countries at will, torture individuals for information? Is it the one where rape is ok as long as there are no marks? The one where little boys have their weiners cut for sentimental reasons? The one where the attrition rates for social workers are astronomical because they're forced to witness child abuse that they can do nothing about.

Personal rights are granted and squelched for the good of society all the time. It's a passe argument.

I think the child would probably bruise easier when they're spoiled rotten.

ba-dum-dum-pish

The phrase "perfect society" was in quotes for a reason. It's not perfect. But it's presented to the public as a goal to strive for. So the public gives them the power to make the changes, not realizing that they're giving up their own liberty in the process. I thought my statement was pretty clear.



None of which have anything to do with individual rights and freedoms, much less the criminal justice system.



No. One in which people don't get convicted of crimes unless there is proof that they committed said crime. Get it?




No clue where you're going with this. Are you arguing that a parents right to circumcise their male children is somehow a horrible thing? Seriously... WTF?



Is it the attrition rates that you care about? Or the child abuse? Cause maybe I'm silly, but I care more about the children then the social workers in this situation.

Maybe the problem is that you're assuming that every single problem has a good solution. They don't always. And this is one of those sad situations in which there isn't much we can do. Ultimately, parents have a right to raise their children. They are responsible for them. Some parents will abuse that right. But we should not reduce the rights of all parents because some of them abuse them. We should instead spend as much effort as possible detecting and preventing actual child abuse. But we should not cut corners on this. Let's not write vague and poorly defined laws so that we can nail people we suspect of abusing their children while not applying it to everyone else. That's capricious. Our laws need to be written such that they apply equally to everyone.


And guess what? Sometimes that means that bad people will get away with their crimes. What happened to "better that a hundred guilty men go free, then that one innocent should be punished"? I know it gets all emotional when the welfare of a child is involved, but we shouldn't be allowing emotion to affect the laws we write. Those laws should be reasonable and "fair".




It's not for those of us who think it's wrong that we do it now. It's funny, because you're effectively articulating the other side of the Slippery Slope fallacy. When people justify something with "well, it's wrong, but we already do this sort of thing already, so we may as well do it this time", they are exactly justifying a Slippery Slope counterargument.


Sorry. The fact that personal rights are squelched for the good of society is a "bad thing". It's something I believe strongly we should stop doing. I certainly don't think we should be doing more of it, especially for such dubious reasons.

Your amazing and IMO idiotic belief in a government that will never abuse the power you give it is downright scary Smash. I's amazing to me that I'll state 100 times "Be careful of those darn crazy Libs. Because they'll pass laws that give the government more power over you and just kinda hope that it never abuses it", and everyone (including you) responds that I'm wearing some kind of tin foil hat and that would never happen

No, we respond that the people *YOU* advocate voting for have done just that, although to be fair, they've largely stopped bothering with passing laws to trample your civil liberties and just go ahead and do it anyway.


Gee. Maybe this is crazy. But how about we have a system in which we make the things we believe people shouldn't do illegal and *only* those things.

That'd be nice, but it's not the system we have now or have had in the last 300 years. There are thousands of never enforced laws on the books. Laws against oral sex, laws against Indians entering cities, whatever. No one cares. We don't live in a nation of laws, we live in a nation of selective enforcement of those laws. The entire legal system hinges on the fact that government can choose to prosecute certain people and groups and not others. Without that premise the entire criminal and civil justice system falls to pieces.

Now I realize that you understand how the law works about as well as a seven year old child, so I'm not going to bother going into this yet again. I'll just laugh at how unquestioningly blindly faithful you are in government to fairly enforce laws. Who knew you were a Socialist?

So you basically acknowledge that this new law is in the same category as all the "dumb" laws that most people laugh about,

No.


and yet you still support passage of this law? Just checking...


Yes.


And just to double check: You're saying you'd support a law making it illegal for an Indian to enter the city limits, just so that on the off chance that we thought an Indian committed a crime but didn't have enough evidence of it, we could charge him with that one instead?


No.


And you don't see why people think this is a bad idea? Seriously?...

Yes, of course I understand why people think it's a bad idea. I also understand that people have absolutely no idea how the legal system works.

Gee Smash. And here I was pretty sure you were arguing that it was ok to pass this law because we already have other really stupid laws on the books.

Please keep arguing your case though. It just gets more amusing each time. ;)

Wait! Let me see if I got the point or not.

1. You support the passage of a law that punishes people for application of corporal punishment which most people believe fall squarely into the area of parental rights.

2. You initially defend your support by arguing that even though there's no proof of harm caused to children from appropriately applied corporal punishment, there's no proof of benefit either, so it's ok to make it illegal.

3. When that argument gets attacked as a violation of parental rights and a massive slippery slope (the whole "outlaw it since you can't prove it's beneficial thing), you attempt to defend it by arguing that it wont be applied to all parents, just those who abuse their children.

4. When that argument is attacked because it allows the government to effectively pick who gets charged with a crime based on criteria outside the actual crime itself you defend it with some kind of bogus argument that selective enforcement is somehow integral to the functioning of our legal system.

5. To defend that position, you list off a bunch of really dumb laws that everyone agrees shouldn't be on the books anymore, but still are, so we don't enforce them.

I think that brings us to "the point"


Which is you trying to argue that it's ok to pass a "new" dumb law because we still have some "old" dumb laws on the books that we don't enforce anymore. Seriously. That's got to be the most idiotic argument I've ever heard. But coming from you, it's not actually that surprising.


You do see how using laws that everyone agrees shouldn't be on the books anymore as justification for passing a new law isn't the best way to argue your position, right? Just checking...