Gary Farber is my blogfather--he nagged me to read his Amygdala until I started reading it, followed by reading other blogs and posting comments. After a while, I started Input Junkie at livejournal.
My current notion is that Dobson published his revenge/control fantasies about his own kid.
Bruce, thanks for writing that up--it certainly isn't the sort of horror story I was expecting.
And QUIT turning the sun black when I paddle you!
I did a fast tabulation of the 108 comments about Dobson's book at amazon. I tried to only count people who cited personal experience with Dobson's ideas of discipline--not the people who were for or against for theoretical reasons, though I'm rather fond of the person who raised the question of whether Dobson would have used such punishment if he'd been raising Jesus.
Parents in favor: 18. Parents against: 5
People who'd been raised that way (ex-children?) in favor: 3 1/2. Against: 7 (quite harrowing)
Pro-Dobson, non-spanker parent: 1
People who said Dobson was useful but should be taken with a grain of salt: at least 3
Having done this tells me both why sociologists and psychologists use questionaires and how much of the flavor and variety gets lost in questionaires.
The variety of responses leaves me wondering if some non-pathological parents read Dobson, mostly pay attention to the parts about love, and end up applying more discipline than would be really good but aren't disasterously bad. On the other hand, if a parent's pathology matches, Dobson's, the result is serious abuse.
More "it was very bad to be raised that way" reviews.
It does seem that almost all the favorable reviews are from parents, not from those who were raised according to Dobson's ideas. I'm especially unnerved by the 2 or 3 positive reviews I saw from people who felt their three-year-olds were taking over their lives.
As seems usual at amazon, the favorable reviews get lots of stars and the unfavorable reviews get very few. Maybe people should give "that was useful" points when a review convinces them to not buy a book?
A small thing, but it gets to me when an administration which is willing to lock people up forever and torture them on no evidence is so enamoured of "innocent until proven guilty" for itself.
As for American culture, I'll mention the Destroyer novels, which were about a covert arm of the US government which secretly protects the Constitution by extra-legal means (including torture), since if the need for such protection were known, the Constitution would be wrecked. The first book was published in 1971. It had the usual feature of the torturer never targetting the wrong person, and the aftermath of torture for the victim never being shown. After all, it was a humorous series.
I've seen countdown traffic lights in California--at ConJose, I think.
When they said "playgrounds for adults", I was hoping they were for actual play. It seems odd to me that adults (well, at least some adults) put a fair amount of effort into getting in shape, and then, what they do is more exercise.
Why not ask the person who thinks he can do a better job of negotiating for himself why he thinks so? Maybe he's a very good negotiator, or maybe he's got a lousy union. (I don't have any particular union in mind, just a memory of someone complaining that their union just took the dues money without doing anything useful. I believe that any sort of organization can go bad.)
Once you know what the person you're talking to is thinking, you can fine tune your arguments and/or learn something.
Mind you, there *are* people who are hypnotized by catchphrases (or at least so they seem to me), and I don't know what to do in that case.
As for righteous anger and addiction, I think you earn righteous anger by being willing to pay attention to the facts and especially to be more interested in achieving your goal than in hammering on the opposition.
Teresa, "Unearned self-righteous anger comes with an unearned but quite undeniable buzz" implies that earned righteous anger doesn't have the addictive feature. How is righteous anger earned? Is it truly non-addictive?
"These men know it does devastating damage to your soul, but they don't care....". I find it hard to imagine that those folks care about the the souls they're duping, but maybe I'm missing something. If so, what?
I'd assume that they just care about their own goals--other peopls's souls aren't even slightly on the radar.
I'm not worried about whether it's fascist--I'm sure it's disgustingly authoritarian. granting that so are many school administrations, what does it say about a president who has such a fragile spirit that he can't stand to see an opposition button?
Mac, I've been suspecting for a while that there's an element of spite in a lot of spam. It's not just about money.
I agree that there's something broken about spammers, especially the ones that specifically target conversation--while email spam is bad enough, I count spam with fake subject lines as considerably worse, and put comment spam in the same category.
I'm not sure what's best to do about spammers, or even how the laws against spam should be written--I've heard that there are European laws against spam, but I don't know what's in them or how well they're working.
Emotionally speaking, I want the large scale spammers dead. Unfortunately, spammers are *very* good at concealing themselves and getting other people blamed. The false conviction rate is likely to be even higher than it is for non-computer crimes. There's nothing like thinking to damage a good revenge fantasy.
The column of new material is only about 8 characters wide on IE4.
I hope there'll be some follow-stories about Gary Gardner's friends and neighbors end up treating him.
Teresa, thanks for the demonbuster link. That one looks very sincere though crazy. There seems to be both an ulterior motive (hope that the fear will be less if everyone does what the writer does) and some territorial stuff (don't go to any church that isn't doing demonbusting).
Avram, thanks for the tact about complexity handling--I've definitely experienced that sort of overload. What I don't seem to experience is the desire to make people who overload me stop doing it in general, though I hit a point where I don't want to hear any more of it at the moment.
Rivka, I think you're right about the religious anti-RPG folks believing that devils and magic are real and very dangerous, and that gaming is way of getting involved with them. It's just that looking at those beliefs from the outside, it's hard to think that people could believe anything so unlikely without an ulterior motive or at least that some of the people pushing the belief have an ulterior motive.
This might be a good forum to check on something I only have one source for--Charles Williams said that one of the strong points of early Christianity was the belief that Christians weren't vulnerable to magic. Is this true?
Avram, why do you think there's Fundamentalist opposition to RPGs? It's looked to me like an effort to get a monolopoly on weirdness, even if as you say, the fear that people will give up religion if they have gaming isn't reasonable.
James, I think the Catholic Church would be in a lot less trouble if they'd even managed a much milder policy--say, transferring priests to jobs with no contact with children after the second or third similar allegation--but they didn't even do that much.
Anyone know what Charles Pearce had in mind when he mentioned missionaries in Africa and the South Pacific?
If the Catholic Church really thinks it's that important for every child to have both a mother nad a father, then it should be cracking down hard on parents who are single for any reason and requiring them to marry/remarry. This includes parents who've been deserted--they shouldn't spend too long hoping that the marriage can be preserved. They should get a divorce and find a more reliable partner fairly quickly.
General question: does the pedophile priest scandal impact the hierarchy's moral authority to oppose the death penalty?
Another piece of the problem is that your neighbors (and in the global village, everyone is your neighbor) can disapprove of *anything*. There's a reason why a lot of people don't want to live in small towns, and it's not just the lack of live theater.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 8 |
| 2004 | 4 |
| 2003 | 23 |
| 2002 | 2 |
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