...to do it on paper and outside of class time.
Dear Sally:
"Spontaneously organized political action" kept within the bounds of official rules and schedules and sites does little but reinforce and reproduce pre-existing structures of domination. This is mere re-creation.
You can tell S. that a friend of mine did much the same thing at our high school, was suspended for a day and still ended up valedicting and going to Harvard. I wasn't present for the demonstration, for various reasons, but I understand that it was the mildest of displays; our school's administrators were the worst sort of tinpot despots.
Oh, I'm not particularly worried, as long as she learns to keep it from disrupting class, and doesn't get thrown out of school.
My theory: If you only take the tubas, no witnesses will report you.
After watching the video, I wanted to break the father's kneecaps.
Was it the Southern accent or something? Sounds like the daughter's being a fairly standard entitled little turd so he shot her laptop. I found myself being annoyed at him describing hollowpoints as "exploding".
When I was young, I used to complain about chores while talking to our dog.
We got our headmaster fired when I was in high school. And eventually I finished college! So not to worry.
That guy sure talked a long time before shooting.
I quit at 1:57 after thinking the daughter is completely in the right to complain.
After my initial spontaneous fist pump, I gave her a firm talking to about respecting the teachers and the administration and all that sort of thing.
My experience with the parents that take these sorts of extreme countermeasures is thankfully limited (you know, the ones that really did throw away all the kids' toys when they fail to put them away, etc.), but the conclusion I reached even as a kid was that these folks were neither sane nor happy.
I've worked with a few guys like the one in the video and I'm 95% sure he just looooves to talk about his guns and shooting and hollow points and what have you at the workplace. One of the unfortunate aspects of the 2nd Amendment, assholes who won't shut up about their guns.
And now he can talk about his awesome "I sure showed her" video, too.
She should have taken a page from the Moby playbook and just bitch to the dog or something. Don't be an idiot and do it on facebook. Might as well learn that now. Some of her cohorts will doubtless get that lesson as an adult by getting fired after doing something similar about their boss.
I think it's totally appropriate to be pleased with Sally, and likewise appropriate to give her the guidance you did on exhausting administrative options before going all out civil disobedience. Take a Good Mom victory lap!
One of the unfortunate aspects of the 2nd Amendment, assholes who won't shut up about their guns.
That's the 1st Amendment. The 2nd Amendment doesn't say you can talk about the guns.
Sounds like the daughter's being a fairly standard entitled little turd so he shot her laptop
This was already pushing the cuntometer needle toward the danger zone, but then he posted a Youtube video of himself doing it.
16: I was making a joke about how he would have shot the dog.
I thought I'd be amused, but I was sad and a little scared afterwards. That guy needs a serious chill pill. Kids are going to rant to their friends. And FB means they're going to do it online.
All that rage on all sides in that family. I could relate to it a bit - my preteen is awfully angry right now and she drives me and my wife around the bend sometimes.
But ending with a gun in the backyard. It's very threatening.
This was already pushing the cuntometer needle toward the danger zone, but then he posted a Youtube video of himself doing it.
Totally, I just wanted to give the New Englanders shit for hating on Southerners.
Can I give the Utahn shit for thinking New York is in New England?
18: In truth people who talk incessantly about their guns* at work are one of my hot buttons.
*This is to stipulate that the low-hanging fruit is hereby acknowledged, and some appropriate joke playing on it has been registered with the blog authorities.
Some of her cohorts will doubtless get that lesson as an adult by getting fired after doing something similar about their boss.
An excellent parenting strategy is to be an asshole to your kids while they're young, because then they won't ever get hurt by the assholes they meet outside the family.
Up 1:57, she doesn't even sound that entitled. She wasn't complaining that she had to clean up after herself. She was complaining that she had to clean up after them. For example, she complained about how after she would mop the floor, her parents would track mud into the house, and make her clean it up. As Shakespeare once wrote: Christ, what an asshole.
Uh. That video is insane. Can you imagine that guy being your dad? Dude. Relax. Chill. Take the "you WILL do what I say" thing down like 5 notches. Yes, your kid is an entitled little shit. Guess what? So are you. She learned it from your ass.
New York is in New England
York is in England. New York is is New England. If they wanted out of New England, they should have kept the name New Amsterdam.
Yes, your kid is an entitled little shit. Guess what? So are you.
Yes. This.
Gswift exempt from 27.1.
Seriously, I know exactly what you mean. Loads of people are over the top on that shit.
27.1: That would be a bit creepy, unless it is deer season.
16: She'll learn the lesson even better after her father gets fired for posting a video to the Internet demonstrating for all the world that he's mentally ill.
33: I hope the residents of Norfolk, VA are going to be okay with this heuristic.
Someone needs to tell that guy that adolescents getting over the hump where they think parents are god and start rebelling a little is a healthy part of growing up. And her rebellion isn't even a real rebellion. She's complaining about doing chores on Facebook. Seems like she's still actually doing them.
Him shooting the laptop would have been funny if he was being like over the top ridiculous. It's pretty obvious this guy is dead serious and seething with rage.
18: The First Amendment of Fight Club is that congress shall make no law abridging your freedom to talk about Fight Club.
33: Why they changed it I can't say. People just liked it better that way.
York is in England. New York is is New England. If they wanted out of New England, they should have kept the name New Amsterdam.
But then they would have had to move themselves and their city to Australia, i.e. New Holland.
Why did this video warrant an article in The Register? Because the guy works in IT?? How is this newsworthy?
44: When a laptop dies, it calls out to its kin.
The actual shooting part wasn't that great. If you're going to shoot something in anger do it right and use a 12 gauge.
The father's crazy either way, but whether the kid is being unreasonable depends on whether she is cleaning up after her parents, as she claims, or only after herself, as the father seems to be claiming.
I posted this recently deep in an another thread, and it most certainly is not the Onion's best (idea is better than the execution, but re-watching it does have a couple of moments, "Are you for real killing me"), but topical.
"Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized"
The parents of 13-year old Caitlin Teagart have decided to end her life, saying she can now do nothing but lay on the couch and whine about things being "gay."
I just realized how many Pennsylvania counties are named after English counties. Are any other states like this?
York County = Yorkshire
Lancaster County = Lancashire
Berks County = Berkshire
Bucks County = Buckinghamshire
Chester County = Cheshire
Westmoreland
Cumberland
Northumberland
Somerset
44: The Register feels the need to display enough "edge" to keep it from lapsing into something like Gartner. And it's worked for a longer time than I might have thought.
48: It gets really good play on literallyunbelievable.org
I'm not watching the video, but any kid of mine has every right to whine about me on facebook as far as I'm concerned. Really I'm just posting this to say that Val and Alex leave today and they're thrilled about it (as am I) though also sad about leaving. Mostly it'll be a relief for all the parents involved.
52: Congratulations and condolences. Give them a computer and shoot it before they go.
New York is is New England.
New York isn't really named after the city of Jorvik. It's named in honour of the Duke of York, younger brother of King Charles II, who subsequently became King James VII and II, until he was run out of town.
I know very few parents who don't complain about their kids on FB. Maybe this guy doesn't, I dunno.
55: I know. But if you comment about how he'll probably grow up to be Hilter 2.0, all of a sudden you're the asshole.
49: Maryland has Kent, Somerset, and Worcester[shire] but also counties named after members of the English nobility: "Prince George's", "Queen Anne's", "Anne Arundle," and cities like "Princess Anne", "Prince Frederick", and "[Lord] Baltimore."
The whole state is allegedly named after Queen Henrietta Maria, although that's just some bullshit pretext the Catholics made up so they could have Virginia and Maryland next to each other.
So far I've had no desire to look at my daughters facebook accounts because I imagine it would be a lot like actively seeking an opportunity to listen to the conversations they have with their friends. Fuck that.
My kids and I don't complain about each other on facebook, because, well, that's rude. But we certainly have other places to do the complaining, and if you go there and read something unpleasant about yourself? No sympathy, you shouldn't have been listening at doors. He must have looked at her fb on her laptop whilst logged in as her, surely? Nothing to do with his leet skillz.
When we first moved to Reading, I was looking online for bus information. Started reading about the buses in Reading, Berks, and only realised I was in the wrong place when I got to the instructions about how to actually catch a bus.
Queen Henrietta Maria
Huh. Given Lord Baltimore's religious proclivities, I figured it was named after Jesus' mom.
(Just doing my bit to make every thread a Catholicism thread.)
Admittedly, I mostly know parents of children not yet old enough to read. Maybe they'll stop bitching about their kids so much once the kids might potentially read it.
Aren't Lord and Lady Baltimore kinds of cake?
49: New Jersey has Essex, Sussex, Middlesex, Somerset, Gloucester, Cumberland and Monmouth.
7: Actually, the Southern thing was why I went into it thinking that the laptop-shooting might be okay; someone around here who was shooting inanimate objects to make a point, I'd think was a true loon. South or West, I'd not sure, but my guess going in was that it might be reasonable comedy in context.
What tipped me over the edge was a combination of his tone, and what Walt said in 31: that she does seem to be doing a fair amount of housework. Nothing wrong with that, but someone who's pulling her weight around the house has a right to bitch some. Also, the crabbing at a kid for not having a job, these days, is really shitty. The FB post was whiny and incautious, but I bet the kid has some very reasonable gripes.
Massachusetts has Suffolk, Hampden, Hampshire and Berkshire Counties.
44: Yeah, El Reg is a combination of serious IT news and random goofy shit. My sources get very testy about the fact that metrics measuring the value of a story by hit count have a tendency to favor yet another series of pictures of really impressive dust bunnies found inside computers over something dry about the server market that took months of research.
61: Or stop teaching the kids to read.
65: also Norfolk, Middlesex, Plymouth, Bristol, Barnstable, and Worcester.
The Register were total assholes to me in a story once. I may have kind of deserved it.
I know very few parents who don't complain about their kids on FB.
For real? Complaining about Rory on FB would feel like such a violation of, well, I'm not sure of what. Of her trust? Hell, I'm already learning that she's not entirely thrilled with me bragging about her on FB.
Huh. I thought The Register was more sober than that. I guess I was wrong.
The sober bits are sober, but there are silly bits.
Delaware has Kent and Sussex, which is two thirds of all of its counties. Hawaii only has four counties, but according to gogle there aren't any English counties named Honolulu, Maui, Kauai, or Hawaii
71: see 61. Also, no, not for real: I realized after I wrote it that was an overstatement. But I know lots and lots of people who do seem to do a lot of bitching about their kids on FB. Again, though, I'm talking about preschoolers, so it's mostly "Why won't these kids go the fuck to sleep??!", or "My children are wrecking my house!", or "Tommy wiped his ass on my towels!! AGAIN!!!!", etc.
Huh. Given Lord Baltimore's religious proclivities, I figured it was named after Jesus' mom.
My point is that it was, but in order to get away with it, he came up with some bullshit story saying it was being named after King Charles' French wife. How is the king supposed to shoot that one down?
74: Hawaii has the Union Jack on its flag, which I think trumps the county naming thing.
Nearly every state has a stupid flag.
I dunno, Sifu, sounds like you might have deserved it.
Texas and Wyoming are all that have decent ones.
Actually, the Southern thing was why I went into it thinking that the laptop-shooting might be okay;
No. Uh uh. Defining deviancy down. Soft bigotry of low expectations.
You don't violently destroy your kids' belongings to make a point. That's a pretty basic rule, even in the South.
I mean, okay, maybe in Utah it would be all right.
"Tommy wiped his ass on my towels!! AGAIN!!!!"
And that's why I'm switching to a gym with stronger lockers.
None of the counties in Idaho are named after English counties, but Owyhee County is named after Hawaii.
Okay, I watched the video. I don't think it's that bad. It doesn't actually sound like her gripes are that legitimate, and mouthing off like that was something she knew would be a huge transgression if discovered.
Here's what I'm super confused about: Remember the [male celebrity] rant where he left the horrendous message on his daughter's phone, chewing her out for being ungrateful? He was so cruel with the name-calling - I was horrified by that one. But the same people who weren't ruffled by that are horrified by this guy?
This guy isn't voicing Thomas the Tank Engine.
82: Using a firearm to make a point is a mistake, categorically.
And I like shooting. As much as the next timid, effete New Englander, I guess.
This guy is angry as hell, and it's never a good idea to parent out of anger, but everybody does, at some point. This isn't his finest moment, but I don't think he's a terrible parent.
87: Eastward colonization, sort of. Wikipedia:
The name "Owyhee" derives from an early anglicization of the Hawaiian term "Hawaiʻi." When James Cook encountered what he named the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands) in 1778, he found them inhabited by Native Hawaiians who Anglo-Americans referred to as "Owyhees." Noted for their hardy physique and maritime skills, numerous Native Hawaiians were hired as crew members aboard European and American vessels. Many Owyhees sailed on to the American Northwest coast and found employment along the Columbia, where they joined trapping expeditions or worked at some of the fur trade posts.
In 1819, three Owyhees joined Donald Mackenzie's Snake expedition, which went out annually into the Snake country for the North West Company, a Montreal-based organization of Canadian fur traders. The three Hawaiians left the main party during the winter of 1819-20 to explore the then unknown terrain of what since has been called the Owyhee River and mountains and disappeared. They were presumed dead and no further information regarding their whereabouts has been found. In memory of these Native Hawaiians, British fur trappers started to call the region "Owyhee" and the name stuck.[10][11]
the undisputed glam rockers of the hacking underground
Sifu!
You don't violently destroy your kids' belongings to make a point. That's a pretty basic rule, even in the South.
What if he just set fire to the laptop like a cross?
A laptop isn't a sentimental item like a teddy bear. It's an access point to the internet, which is what he's (violently) destroying: her access point. If she got a new laptop, she wouldn't (probably) give a shit about the old one.
I'm sure he conscientiously uploaded all her photos and files to DropBox before shooting.
99: Are too. Double-are-too now.
Oregon's flag would be O.K. if they only used the back side.
101: He may have missed the hard drive.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said that...
90: Alec Baldwin. First, he shouldn't have left that message, it was kind of awful. But: (a) that was a communication to her, not intended for public release; (b) that was him losing it emotionally, not planning "What's a reasonable way to punish my bad child for her transgression"; (c) the issue there was that his daughter, who he doesn't live with, wasn't available to talk to him at a prearranged time, and that (taking what he said at face value, maybe it's untrue) that had been happening a lot; he felt that he was losing his ability to maintain a relationship with her. Getting abusively angry at her over that is beyond counterproductive, of course, but it's a huge emotional threatening thing, that I can completely see losing your shit over. This guy coldbloodedly set out to humiliate his daughter for bitching rudely about chores to her friends; if that sort of thing sends him into an irrational spin, he's a real piece of work.
104 to [anything that] would be O.K. if they only used the back side.
105: This guy is acting out of anger every much as Alec Baldwin. He's beyond furious, feels scorned and humiliated, etc. But his follow-through doesn't personally attack her or her character. His follow-through has a logical connection to the crime. The choice of using a gun is probably jarring, but it's basically just saying "You lose your laptop" which is reasonable.
Doing it in public like that is bratty, but it does fit the crime in question.
The fact that Baldwin attacked his daughter's character and just ripped her to shreds as a person seems miles and miles worse than publicly destroying your daughter's computer.
If he's being honest, she doesn't do that much housework. I'd love it if my 15 year old did her own laundry, but she'd just wear dirty clothes. Apart from that, my kids do that sort of thing and if I ask them to do anything else I expect them to do it without moaning. I'd be pissed off if they whined in public like that because I expected them to empty the dishwasher!
My favourite bit was how when he was 15/16 he was at school, and college, and doing two jobs, and being a volunteer fireman.
We get stamps that have all the state flags on them, and every time I get to the fucking Mississippi flag, I have to be careful who I send it to. I don't care if it is on a state flag, US postal stamps should not feature a flag of the Rebellion.
The Maryland flag, on the other hand, is objectively awesome.
105 is correct. (AB and his daughter are very chummy on Twitter, so it all seems to have worked out. KB deliberately releasing that was ice cold, and not just to AB.)
A laptop isn't a sentimental item like a teddy bear.
If he'd shot - I dunno - a hair dryer, my point wouldn't be much different. He's asserting a level of ownership over his daughter - and I mean his daughter herself - that's really fucked up.
And he doesn't seem interested in the "sentimental value" distinction. My guess is that he'd be entirely comfortable using the same rationale to, say, burn a bunch of her clothes. She wants to wear nice clothes? Let her get a job!
He's asserting a level of ownership over his daughter - and I mean his daughter herself - that's really fucked up.
No, he's not. He's asserting a level of ownership over her possessions. He's very concerned about the transactional side of all living together: who brings in money and buys things for whom, who helps keep the common areas tidy and their own space reasonably clean, etc.
This may be regional misinterpretation on my part: you're more of a Southerner than I am, so you might be right about what he was feeling. But he didn't look 'losing his shit' mad to me. He looked like he was having fun: "You fucked up, so I get to punish you, and I get to do it in an amusingly elaborate way, because I like demonstrating that I can do whatever I want to you." And of course he attacked her character: I don't recall if he used the word 'lazy', but giving a kid in this economy shit about not having a job is a completely unwarranted smack at their work ethic. And I sincerely doubt he backed up her hard drive: what he did was very likely irrevocably destroying data that was valuable to her.
The gun, eh. It's not my idiom, but I'd have the same reaction to a sledgehammer.
Maryland is good, and I'm prejudiced in favour of Ohio, because flags that aren't a boring landscape rectangle make a pleasant change.
The gun, eh. It's not my idiom...
Batman is getting too self-reflective these days.
109: It doesn't sound as if she does an unreasonable amount of housework, but it does sound as if she does enough to be allowed to bitch about people making it harder for her; his description of how she doesn't do all that much sounded like he was minimizing. (And I'd call the FB rant rude and out-of-line, just not out of line enough to come close to justifying the response.)
but giving a kid in this economy shit about not having a job is a completely unwarranted smack at their work ethic.
His gripe though was about the lack of effort in looking, that she'd only filled out one application and that it was one he'd brought her.
You know who has a bad-ass flag? Nepal.
115: I'm prejudiced in favor of Ohio because it was a nice enough place to live, but the flag is stupid.
114: That's when I reach for my idiolect.
Complaining about stupid state flags on the internet is very Stupid 2.0
118: Might be literally true. But depending on the area, there's a good shot there's no jobs she can get to that there's any point in a teenager applying for. And in any case, it's got nothing to do with the transgression at hand: the only reason to bring it up is to insult her bad character.
Stupid 2.0
Wow, time for an upgrade. Whats the current version? Stupid 4.6?
you're more of a Southerner than I am, so you might be right about what he was feeling. But he didn't look 'losing his shit' mad to me. He looked like he was having fun
I definitely thought he was white-hot furious, and that he is part of the southern cult of Respecting One's Elders, and so her letter, published publicly, was one of the biggest fuck-yous he's ever conceived of. After he worked so hard, sacrificed, etc.
I haven't watched the video, but I think people should be nice to their kids.
Shit, I suppose I'm going to have to watch the video now, to mediate between Heebie and LB. I live in a border state, so I'm qualified.
He should have made her shoot the laptop. Or destroy it by turning off the firewalls and clicking banner ads until it died.
And in any case, it's got nothing to do with the transgression at hand: the only reason to bring it up is to insult her bad character.
How is that insulting her character? He wants her to bring in money. She has not been applying for jobs. (If we take his word for that.)
Stupid jumped the shark in 2000.
Does he literally call her lazy? I don't remember.
Front page poster fights are the best.
I only had to watch two minutes to determine the Heebie is right and LB is wrong.
Start with 'nothing to do with the transgression at hand'. Fair? Failing to earn money is unconnected to being rude about your parents on FB. So he's mad about one thing, and is hauling in random other bad shit to say about her.
Then, expecting a teenager to get a job these days really is kind of unreasonable. It's very difficult for unskilled adults to get jobs the last couple of years. It's possible that there are scads of plausible job opportunities she's been ignoring, but it seems unlikely to me: that sounded more like "Hey, here's something I can use to call her lazy," than a reasonable expectation she hadn't been fulfilling.
133: Kentucky's state flag sucks balls.
he attacked her character: I don't recall if he used the word 'lazy'
What are parents supposed to do with undesirable features of their kids' characters? Give a lengthy caring nurturer lecture, just like yesterday's?
There's judgement in deciding when to be critical, but even for well behaved kids, there are definitely times to be personal about it. I wouldn't myself get personally critical publicly-- though if my kid acted up enough in public, I could see publicly telling him that he's out of line and losing some privilege for it.
I think he backed it all up - being in IT - and that's partly why he can be so gleeful about it. After all, there might be school work on it, and he would value that I guess. It's a complete over reaction (and the gun thing is just weird to me too), but you can see it's an ongoing thing and that she would know he would go mental if she did it again.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you shouldn't use a gun for anything having to do with disciplining children.
It's one thing to let them shoot into the air on their birthday or the 4th, but using it as punishment seems very much wrong.
And he talks about the job thing because that was one of her complaints, it's not random shit. I laughed at her idea that she should get paid to act like a useful member of the family typo.
but even for well behaved kids, there are definitely times to be personal about it.
Yeah, not publicly. Publicly saying "You're grounded" or whatever is one thing, putting up a YouTube video (which is public on a completely different level than FaceBook), is another
Right. The job thing is because she wants to get paid for the chores.
She does say that he tells her to get a job daily, which is probably true, and it makes him a dick. But that's not his specific point here.
138 is correct. Also you don't ever use a gun as a means of communicating anything other than "I am going to shoot you if you do not comply." And that's only appropriate in a pretty limited set of circumstances.
So the gun is the problem because of the symbolism? Punting the laptop off a cliff would be different?
141 makes precisely the point that all you redneck motherfuckers are missing--he made a gleeful self-satisfied YouTube which involved weaponry about his daughter's Facebook whining to her friends.
144: It added that little bit of something.
Not to me: if she were there, I'd think of the gun as threatening, probably, but in the video as it is, it doesn't look meaningfully different than destroying it with a sledgehammer. (I think he has bad judgment using a gun as something to fool around with, but it's not particularly a parenting issue here).
putting up a YouTube video (which is public on a completely different level than FaceBook), is another
So this is how he crossed the line? Doing something that risked going viral? Obviously he wanted it to go viral around their small town or social group.
When sledgehammers are outlawed, only outlaws will have the proper tools to remove small brick walls.
So the gun is the problem because of the symbolism?
The symbolism, yes, and also the fact that he does actually use the weapon (which seems a bit psycho to me).
That said, I'm more sympathetic to the father than I would have expected. I think it's the daughter's dismissive attitude toward Linda (the "cleaning lady").
This is my rifle.
This is my gun.
One for disciplining children.
The other for conceiving them.
Yes, 141 and 146 are right - he's sunk down to her level and beyond by responding like that. Now she can just add hypocrite to her list of complaints.
It's not that doing anything in public would cross the line ('cross the line' doesn't well describe how I feel about this. I'm not sure exactly what my issue is here, but arguing about where 'the line' is seems to miss the point somehow) but that putting up this video, in public, was shitty.
What she did was bad behavior, but she was complaining (unreasonably, but she's a teenager) about her life and her parents to her friends. She wasn't doing anything with the intent of harming her parents. He, on the other hand, is punishing her by destroying her stuff and publicly humiliating her. That's shitty.
expecting a teenager to get a job these days really is kind of unreasonable.
What!?!?! Jobs for teenagers are still available. If she has been trying and cant find one, that is a different story.
But, kids (these days!) can still get part-time jobs without benefits.
He, on the other hand, is punishing her by destroying her stuff and publicly humiliating her. That's shitty.
Are you insane?! That is our job as parents.
Now that you cant spank kids (I agree completely), all we have left is public humiliation.
I think it's the daughter's dismissive attitude toward Linda (the "cleaning lady").
Funny, that bit made me despise him even a little more. She didn't actually say anything bad about the cleaning lady, just that they had one so she didn't see why additional cleaning should be her job. Lazy on her part, but not an attack on the cleaning lady. The father, on the other hand, thinks 'cleaning lady' is an insult rather a job title. That sounds to me like someone who thinks cleaning for a living is shameful.
133: You're lying. Two minutes in is when he's reading the part of the letter where she complains about him tracking mud all over the house and making her clean it up.
After two minutes, the only possible conclusion is that guy is mentally ill, and that he should be investigated by CPS.
I'm not lying. Although, to be clear, I was only opining in the dispute in 105/107/113/114/125. I take no position on whether he's a bad person or a bad parent. From watching the first two minutes of the video, I suspect the answer is "yes", but I don't really have enough evidence to say.
What!?!?! Jobs for teenagers are still available
The problem is that there is no time to actually hold one on top of all the other expectations we lump on kids' heads.
159: Oh, the cold-blooded v. furious disagreement? I'm not strongly committed to being right about that one; this guy is not a type I'm really familiar with firsthand. Although I do judge someone an asshole for being able to stay out-of-control mad for long enough to get the laptop, get the gun, set up the camera, print out the FB post, shoot the video (and the laptop), and post it to the Internet. That's an involved enough process that an adult is responsible for getting themselves under control and thinking about what they're doing at some point during it.
Her dad should have had her running in the snow when she was a toddler.
160: Teenagers already have a full time job, albeit one with great vacation.
32 and 125 are the only two completely correct comments in this entire thread. Together they express the yin and the yang of the situation.
What I find striking is the father's lack of self-awareness. You don't like that your daughter said something nasty about you in a public forum? You don't think she's got a proper sense of the value of money?
Do a Youtube video destroying a valuable piece of equipment! That'll show her.
m. leblanc covered it above:
Yes, your kid is an entitled little shit. Guess what? So are you. She learned it from your ass.
||
Well, my favorite niece is just about to pull the trigger on joining the Marines. Anything that gets her out of the depressed part of upstate NY where she's been living is a good thing, but I do wish she'd just gotten a nice safe job someplace. It'll probably suit her, though: she definitely aspires to being a badass.
|>
Is she your niece by blood or by marriage?
166: I've got a marvellous nephew who's been in the Army for three or four years now. Somehow, he's avoided all of the Middle Eastern unpleasantness, and he's grown into a heck of a fine young man. He signed up at a time when it seemed like a pretty damn iffy career choice.
Marriage: Buck's sister has three girls. The oldest is married with three kids, Ms Badass is the second (also married: he's the one who's joining the Navy as soon as his tattoo is removed) and the youngest is just a year or two out of high school, looking for work.
This dude is an asshole, Heebie is an insane, dangerous mother, and LB is totally right. Also, if you had to pick a good time in the past 10 years or so to join the Marines, this seems like it.
Is no one going to ask why exactly Sally was protesting a change to her school's uniform policy?
Would have been harsh but consistent to donate her laptop somewhere worthy.
172: The North American Sportmen Without Targets Fund?
169. So if she's in the Marines and he's in the Navy, when do they get to see each other, except possibly on landing craft?
Is no one going to ask why exactly Sally was protesting a change to her school's uniform policy?
Rule 23.V: All pigtails shall protrude downwards from the back of the head, not upwards from the top of the head
Not with any particularly strong reason, as far as I can tell. The uniform has always been jeans, with identifiably expensive jeans barred, a school-logo polo or oxford, black sneakers or shoes, and any navy or grey sweater of your choice: if you want, you can buy from Lands End with the school logo. On gym days, black sweatpants or shorts with the school-logo gym t-shirt. The basic goal is a low stress, cheap way to keep the kids from competing over money and fashion.
The announced crackdown is not a big change, just barring hooded sweaters/sweatshirts (which is annoying, because Sally's official school-logo from Lands End 'buy this school uniform item placed on our list by the officials at your specific school' cardigan has a hood, and getting really tightassed about anything with a logo, which is a problem for a lot of very ordinary sweatpants and sweatshirts -- we just lost half of Sally's sweatpants because they have little logos, and probably need to buy another pair. I'm not quite clear why she's so irate over it, though: I've asked, but I don't really understand.
174: I don't understand how that's going to work at all, but they seem to think it can be arranged somehow.
Do such bans actually work to reduce money competition? I assume kids will be ingenious enough to find other ways.
Since he has destroyed his daughter's laptop and is banning her from the internet, when he talks to the camera and says "you" in the video, who is he talking to? His daughter won't see the video, because it's on Youtube.
This is why the cuntometer broke - he's not talking to his daughter. He's doing his own bit of showbiz. He's a wannabe reality show character.
178: I assume kids will be ingenious enough to find other ways.
That's the point, it's a clever scheme to develop out-of-the-box thinking skills.
I think it's really hard to keep the better-off kids from finding some way to show off (one of Sally's issues is that there is shoe/boot competition which the uniform does not address), but they do provide valuable shelter for the poorer kids, who can dress acceptably/unobtrusively more easily than in the absence of the uniform.
@176
Sounds unnecessarily complicated. If the school would just go with Star Fleet uniforms compliance would be much simpler.
That would work unless for some reason they had to travel to or from the school using public streets.
I'm not quite clear why she's so irate over it, though: I've asked, but I don't really understand.
Probably because kids view grown-ups micro-managing the way they dress as a fucking obnoxious power trip.
That would work unless for some reason they had to travel to or from the school using public streets.
Why would they have to do that when they could just be beamed up?
185: Yeah, I could see objecting to the uniform at all. But the changes are pretty minimal.
Surely less minimal for families with less spare cash.
But the changes are pretty minimal.
Minimal, but inconvenient enough to cause significant wardrobe replacement, and perhaps arbitrary enough to be viewed as petty tyranny.
I remember when baseball caps were banned at my school, and that was seen as the administration just trying to remind us who is in charge. Nobody likes to be made to feel like they are being controlled by The Man.
My dad went to high school at a very fancy prep school. It was far out of the range his family could afford, but he got free tuition because of my grandfather's (highly non-remunerative) job. I think my dad mostly fit in by claiming he didn't want to do the things (like hockey) that he did want to do, but couldn't afford (no money for skates). But some things were just so obvious that it was really socially uncomfortable; everyone had these things, and everybody else was wealthy enough that it wouldn't occur to them that it would be a problem to get these things, so, although it seemed like an extravagance, he begged and pleaded with his parents until they agreed to get him (as his christmas present) a plaid cummerbund.
He already had the rest of the outfit you'd wear with a plaid cummerbund? What is the rest of the outfit -- I'm seeing white linen jacket, black pants, but I'm not sure.
Eh. I'm lowkey about dress and comfortable in hierarchies. I wouldn't experience the complaints that Spike mentions.
192: I think maybe it was a thing you wore under your school uniform as a signifier? I'm not sure. He definitely didn't have a full set of evening wear.
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So why are men who hate women drawn to fashion design? Is it like pedophiles and the priesthood--you go where you can inflict the most damage with the least accountability?
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Generally, I'm delighted by the uniform because I don't have to be involved in fashion decisions. I hate shopping for myself enough; I don't want to have to manage Sally's fashionability level. On the other hand, I wouldn't want her to be a pariah at school for lack of a cummerbund. This way, I don't need to worry about anything other than whether her jeans fit.
I remember when baseball caps were banned at my school...
I agree with that one.
Eh. I'm lowkey about dress and comfortable in hierarchies. I wouldn't experience the complaints that Spike mentions.
Well, I'm lowkey about dress, but hierarchies piss me off and I absolutely hate being told what to do.
I might add that I hate telling other people what to do, even more.
I may be overcynical, but I tend to think that arguments in favor of school uniforms are outweighed by the immemorial fact that the vast majority of school officials are contemptible little martinets whom I wouldn't let address, much less discipline, my offspring skepticism (based on my own experiences being lectured by people I didn't, and knew I would never, respect) about the enthusiasm of school officials for what Paul Fussell calls, in Wartime, "chickenshit":
Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige... insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called -- instead of horse -- or bull -- or elephant shit -- because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
Mmm. There hasn't been much chickenshit at the school in Sally's first year and a half, but I am worrying that they're transitioning to a higher chickenshit level.
At my school, many girls were upset because they had a uniform and the boys had only a restrictive set of rules (no jeans, no sweats, shirts with collars, etc.). It turned out that nearly none of the parents wanted to get rid of the uniform so they made the boys wear a uniform. I assume the reason why there was no boys uniform earlier was simply because social pressure kept the boys from trying to dress nicely.
I think I would have done better with a uniform because Sears cords were what I wore for pants for something like six years.
195: They don't hate women, I think, as a rule: e.g., from Charles Worth to Hubert de Givenchy and Cristobal Balenciaga most of the best have been very sympathetic to the desire of women to be beautiful, elegant, graceful and, of course, bitterly envied by other women. But they tend to develop and rely on a narrow (literally and otherwise) conceit of woman-as-canvas for their most demanding purposes, and few women can, or wish to, meet those exacting standards, much as few could play the sylph for George Balanchine.
Is no one going to ask why exactly Sally was protesting a change to her school's uniform policy?
This was addressed in the original post:
Sally just got detention for organizing a protest of a recent change to her school's uniform policy that disrupted class.
Sally is very studious, and objected to the recent uniform change because it disrupted class.
Or maybe it's the reverse. Maybe she likes disruption, and objected because they changed a uniform policy that disrupted class.
Anyway, it's clearly one of those two.
Compared to Vionnet, any of those except perhaps Worth have an effect indistinguishable from hating women. Using other people to their detriment, and setting them against each other, is wicked.
206: Perfection is a cruel mistress, but think of all the magnificent, fleeting beauty that people like Worth have brought the world. And surely it doesn't take a man to set women against each other, typed the cynical sexist.
It's never hard to set people against one another (types the pejorist); we are the more enjoined to refrain from doing so (types the meliorist).
Vionnet -- and Toledo and McArdell and Kleibacker and Miyake, look, some of these are even men -- prove that the waif in the Iron Maiden isn't the only female beauty.
Also, comfortable beautiful complicated clothes are even harder to make. If you must have the assisted wasp waist, at least swoon over Charles James.
* "$14.95 for the Bible? What a preachy book! Everybody's a sinner! Except this guy...." -- Homer Simpson
Why do all these gays religious leaders keep sucking my cock turning out to be assholes?
But they tend to develop and rely on a narrow (literally and otherwise) conceit of woman-as-canvas for their most demanding purposes, and few women can, or wish to, meet those exacting standards, much as few could play the sylph for George Balanchine.
In what other profession do the world's best take pride in saying anything other than otherworldly abstractions are too difficult for them to handle. Okay, other than in economics.
212: They forget that they aren't Jesus, which one would think ought to be pretty obvious.
212. Fred Clark did a job on this story a few weeks ago which bears reading if you haven't read it.
For starters, they aren't even Jewish.
Oh, but they're Judeo-Christians, you see.
Was the rise of Muscular Christianity at the rise or the decline of the British Empire? Can we put it into an investment index with hems and ties?
218: Didn't somebody say it was Prince Albert's fault for dying and leaving V.R. nothing to do but disapprove?
Was the rise of Muscular Christianity at the rise or the decline of the British Empire? Can we put it into an investment index with hems and ties?
After the decline of the first (America-centric) and at the rise of the second (India-centric). The key text is Tom Brown's Schooldays. So, to your second question, probably not. Jelly Bellied Flag Flapping, however, should be included with a strong negative weighting.
The key text is Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Which, I should point out, is not a very good book, except for having given us Flashman.
221. Oh god no, it's a terrible book, of interest only as a sort of counterpoint to Lytton Strachey.
When I clicked on the link in 217 I was expecting a website called "Doom Burrows". Let down again.
I was expecting a website called "Doom Burrows".
Good name for a spelunking/cavediving Tumblr.
_Digger_ is good. Don't know that it's particularly goth.
In comics: A mad scientist, loosely affiliated with the good guys, living in a Victorian castle in the Scottish highlands.
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I have a tenure-track faculty offer. Not necessarily one I will accept, but still: woot!
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Woohoo safety job offer! You're waiting to hear from something more attractive, I figure?
You're waiting to hear from something more attractive, I figure?
Black Hole U?
A cognitive linguistics friend of mine just got a t-t offer today as well. He also doesn't know if he is going to take it. Yay for standards!
And congrats, essear!
Hold out for a supervillain, Essear.
Congrats!
Go essear!
(Supervillain TT positions follow the up-or-piranha pattern.)
231 You're waiting to hear from something more attractive, I figure?
Waiting to hear about a lot of things. Have one new interview in the pipeline. It'll be several more weeks before I have anything decided, I guess...
247 is actually an injunction issued to single laydeez on the site.
Congrats, essear!
Apparently the dad has given the follow up on FB which was then reblogged here.
250: While we appreciate the interest you're all putting forth to get in touch with us regarding the video, we're not going to go on your talk show, not going to call in to your radio show, and not going to be in your TV mini-series.
Well, that shows some decency on his part.
I'm not liking him any better after that.
My sympathy is definitely with the dad here. I would have approximately zero sympathy with the "oh, she had to do housework" stuff even if I were inclined to believe her snotty, entitled account of her supposed life as a drudge (and I'm not inclined to believe). Seems to me her dad is well within his rights to be hurt, angry and insulted and to take away her laptop. That he is remarkably calm and rational throughout the video makes me a bit incredulous at all the people who are professing to find it scary.
253: "Taking away," "shooting with a .45" and "shooting with a .45 on YouTube with a punkass bitch's whining little rant about being disrespected" are three different things.
More seriously, and I acknowledge that I may not be entirely dispassionate, violence -- even against inanimate objects -- is not an appropriate parenting method.
254.1: No, they aren't. For which reason I find 254.2 completely unconvincing.
I might be less doctrinaire if I were more mature had children of my own to discipline, LC, but I don't think showing off one's phallic symbol is a healthy conflict resolution technique in any context.
showing off one's phallic symbol
Meh. Sometimes a .45 is just a .45.
I'm not going to watch the thing, but my instinct is to say that's way over the line. For some people--for me--one's computer is the most personal possession one has; destroying it would be a huge violation. I also think it's a huge mistake to take the view that you have complete dominion over all your child's possessions, even if you were the one who bought them. But I'm generally on the "children should have more rights against their parents" side of things.
260: I'm not going to watch the thing, but my instinct is to say that's way over the line.
I sort of think that would not be a worthwhile insight if you refuse to watch the actual video.
For some people--for me--one's computer is the most personal possession one has;
So, perhaps a useful lesson is "get less attached to your f***ing computers, they're inanimate objects for Christ's sake." And less entitled about it, too. Computers, iPhones et cetera are a privilege for kids that their parents typically purchase for them. Their parents are therefore perfectly entitled to dispose of them as they see fit if the kid acts up.
Nah. Kids have a right to private property, just like anyone else.
Kids have a right to private property
Just not a right to abuse it and expect their parents to put up with this in addition to footing the bill. Kids' rights to "private" anything are conditional on good behaviour.
I'm tempted to say that anyone defending this whiny bitch fool of a dad against the charge of being a dickface is therefore a dickface by implication, but maybe that's unfair.
262: Sure, if she had a gun for her own, I'd not think his shooting her computer would be as over the top.
264: Yeah, probably premature until you've actually demonstrated that it's the dad and not his detractors who best fit the WBF appellation. But excellent use of the saying-it-while-affecting-not-to-be-saying-it ploy.
But I don't think she did abuse it; she whinged, in private, about chores. Her father broke a rule by reading private writing, and that's wrong. He can hardly subsequently play the wronged party.
Also, clearly, there's an entitlement issue around the whole having a maid thing, which the parents are worried about. But again, the kid's not a servant, and why shouldn't her dad get off his fat ass and get himself coffee? So that seems to be intruding. The dad's worried she'll turn out a spoilt brat. Well...
If you can't tell who the WLB is and only one party involved is an adult and one isn't, go with the adult.
118: His gripe though was about the lack of effort in looking, that she'd only filled out one application and that it was one he'd brought her.
I filled out all kinds of applications when I was that age, in a significantly better economy than this one, and nobody ever even called me back. Of my friends who had jobs at that age, I'd say at least 75% were jobs their parents had arranged for them. Which shouldn't really be surprising, because that's the way the world works. Of all the jobs I've had, the only ones I've gotten cold are 2 student jobs during my first stint at college, a job in a fast food restaurant, and my current job, for which I am ridiculously overqualified and in the taking of which, I'm seriously undervaluing myself. Every single other job I've worked, I've obtained through connections, or because I was already temping there.
254.1: No, they aren't. For which reason I find 254.2 completely unconvincing.
I don't follow the "for this reason" connective here.
250 makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing - assuming it's truthful.
I had more or less LB's initial reaction - shooting the computer is really scary (whereas, say, smashing it with a hammer would not have been, since that's less plausibly a threat of deadly force), but if the daughter's doing OK, then I don't see why my emotional reaction is relevant.
210: Crazy deja vu on this comment -- have you written something similar in the past?
However, I still think it was incredibly dickish to say she had to pay for the bullets, because (a) she didn't force him to use that particular, costly method of destroying a laptop, and (b) he shot it after the laptop was already effectively destroyed, so the shooting was an expressive act on his part - only the first bullet (or 2 or 3) really counted as punishment.
So why are men who hate women drawn to fashion design? Is it like pedophiles and the priesthood--you go where you can inflict the most damage with the least accountability?
Er, this is one of those things that covers anti-gay slurs heaps. Which is interesting. And I am also uncomfortable with `too thin' lines of thought.
255: 254.1: No, they aren't.
Poppycock. It was well within this fellow's power to say to his daughter: "I'm hurt and offended that you posted that complaint on YouTube. I disagree that your chores are too onerous, and I feel very strongly that you should make a good-faith effort to look for work before you give up on that. I feel so strongly about these issues, in fact, that I'm going to take away your laptop, wipe the harddrive, and donate it to a community organization or religious institution of my choosing."
Acting the fool in public merely underscores (as is quite obvious in light of the public reaction) the fact that his approach to child-rearing and his methods of dealing with stress and conflict in his life leave a great deal to be desired.
A friend was describing a conflict with her HS age son recently: Her rule is that the kids have to wear their helmets if they are going to bike. She caught him disobeying her, so she impounded his bike for a month. He whined that now she would have to drive him to and from school, to which her response was "No, we only live a mile and a half away, you can walk." That struck me as a very reasonable and age-appropriate parenting response. And frankly, I'd say breaking an important, safety-related rule warrants a much more serious punishment than whining to your friends, even if you're shading the truth when you do so.
What she says on Facebook is, basically, "I don't like doing chores." Boohoohoo for her, but who cares if she bitches and OMG somewhere out there there is a teenager bitching about doing chores. And then whiny fool bitch Dad not only shoots her computer but puts up a YouTube video about it, in which he compliments himself for being an "IT guy." We're pretty much at the core case of a dickface dad here.
What point is destroying the laptop supposed to convey? "Adults are entitled to be extraordinarily wasteful and histrionic when confronted with a minor irritation"?
Apparently all his time working and studying never imparted any sense of the value of money to him.
But I don't think she did abuse it; she whinged, in private, about chores. Her father broke a rule by reading private writing, and that's wrong.
I thought this was about her writing on Facebook.
253: Seems to me her dad is well within his rights to be hurt, angry and insulted and to take away her laptop. That he is remarkably calm and rational throughout the video makes me a bit incredulous at all the people who are professing to find it scary.
It's the gun. A sledgehammer would likely bother me as much. I confess I generally endorse the view that the violent destruction of property owned and/or loved by others close to you is problematic -- wrong -- because violence makes people afraid (of you). It's an abandonment of rational discussion in favor of a power play: a plain display of destructive power. The question whether the father's actions constitute good or bad, right or wrong parenting doesn't even seem to me to be to the point.
I see from the link in 250 that the father says his daughter isn't emotionally scarred; it may be that this is the way people normally address things in their cohort, and the daughter is just chastened and pissed off, but is otherwise unfrightened. I don't know.
her dad is well within his rights to be hurt, angry and insulted
Because his daughter bitched about having to do chores on Facebook?
Val and Alex just left for the last time, though their dad says they will indeed be able to visit eventually. No one was shot, though Lee might have considered it when their dad called an hour after pickup time to say that he'd be at least another hour late but he hadn't had access to a car or a phone. We all managed good goodbyes and I'm thrilled for them. They're so happy about going back to their family.
Logical, appropriate consequences (like impounding the bike) are more likely to produce the desired result, ie. a kind, respectful, responsible adult. Punishment produces side effects which interfere with learning TRUE respect, (as opposed to the I'LL TEACH YOU TO RESPECT ME! kind of respect.)
But I don't think she did abuse it; she whinged, in private, about chores. Her father broke a rule by reading private writing, and that's wrong.
Yeah --- with a group of friends is private. It certainly wasn't meant for him to read.
What she says on Facebook is, basically, "I don't like doing chores." Boohoohoo for her, but who cares if she bitches and OMG somewhere out there there is a teenager bitching about doing chores.
But this isn't at all what's going on. She knows perfectly well that nothing would provoke her father more than public disrespect. She knew this was a huge transgression when she posted it. He isn't mad that she's bitching about her chores, he's incensed about the lack of disrespect she's showing him, and in public no less, and after he worked so hard and always respected his elders, etc.
I think it's a dumb standard, but it's internally consistent within the family (probably) and she was acting out in proportion it.
However, I still think it was incredibly dickish to say she had to pay for the bullets....
Not to share too much, but that piquant little detail reminded one rather painfully of one's estranged mother's very unpleasant habit of demanding (emphatically, at impolitic times: e.g., birthdays, friends' visits, Christmas) to be reimbursed (by an elementary school student, a middle school student, a high school student, a college student -- she didn't produce much new material) for the random costs of bringing up children not particularly well.
Considering one's mother's manifest inability and/or disinclination to obtain and/or maintain employment (hence to pay for any of the things for which she demanded to be repaid), this ploy comes into focus, after many bitterly estranged years, as rather sad evidence of her own unhappy childhood and the ugly things people will do even to children in order to feel incrementally less powerless.
"lack of disrespect"...not that.
She knows perfectly well that nothing would provoke her father more than public disrespect.
Because her father is an insecure whiny bitch dickface, of course.
Yeah --- with a group of friends is private. It certainly wasn't meant for him to read.
I don't think we can assume this. She has plausible deniability that she didn't wave it in his face, but she was fed up and might have semi-intentionally posted it publicly.
Because her father is an insecure whiny bitch dickface, of course.
It's way too common an insecurity to load all the extra shit on it, as well. There are plenty of cultures where disrespecting your elders is tantamount to shitting in their soup.
Bullshit, you're doing redneck affirmative action or something here Heebie. This dude is a modern American (an IT professional!) and he can understand as well as anyone else that it's OK for teenagers to complain about chores to other teenagers in a semi-public form. His background may explain something, but he's still an insecure whiny bitch dickface.
Like, yesterday at lunch an older colleague recounted a story of how her family was vacationing in Mexico, and her sister was being mouthy, and her father said "Don't you dare do that again" and she did, so he left her on the side of the road. In the middle of Mexico.
They drove for a little bit and their mom started getting really upset, and eventually they saw a bunch of cop cars drive by, and the girl was waving merrily from the back seat of one of them.
There's like a cultural thing of "I'll teach them a lesson they'll never forget" and it's supposed to be so clever and cruel and memorable that it makes it into your small town's Greatest Hits. This is in that vein, and it's exceedingly common, and the southerners love love love to recount these Greatest Hits stories.
Which is why we all look to the south to rise again lead us through these morally-troubled times.
I mean, the whole phenomenon is stupid, but this isn't particularly terrible within that context.
Also often times the Cruel and Memorable Lesson takes elaborate planning. Like the kid shows up at school and their desk has been removed and all aspects of their belongings vanished, etc. That'll teach them not to be late anymore, or whatever. Also when you tell the story, you say "Mind you, he was never late after that!"
And then he got his arm ripped off in the old threshing machine. "Mind you, he was much more respectful around his grandpa's farm equipment after that!"
299: I feel like the South is missing the rather crucial points that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was gentle and loving and not a flaming asshole.
Also I'm never clear on what the target does in the moment. Breaks down and cries and pleads forgiveness? Throws a fit? Wails and gnashes teeth? If it had been me, I'd have hidden behind a wall of eye-rolling and stony-faced-ness. How exactly does it pass, if the target refuses to wail and gnash their teeth?
Maybe that's the point - it's supposed to break their spirit? You've tamed the wild horse or something?
I don't get it. Are you actually defending this, Heebie? What's your feeling about fraternity hazing? That also gets lovingly retold, greatest-hits fashion, or so I'm told.
Nobody's denying that plenty of parents are extremely touchy about anything that smacks of challenging their Authoriteh; nobody's denying that some cultures support this obsession more than others. What some people are questioning is whether this fixation with, and the concomitant overreactions to threats against, parental authority is something we should respect as a valid worldview or reject as an essentially barbaric ideology that tends to legitimize petty tyranny.
Pull out a knife and slice a piece of your ear.
294: so he left her on the side of the road
My father did to that to me once. He was driving me to high school (I had missed the bus?) and we were arguing, and he just pulled over and left me there on the sidewalk. I honestly don't remember how it resolved -- he probably circled back and picked me up. The argument was probably to do with me giving him shit for expecting my mother to wait on him hand and foot, since I went through a brief phase of such shit-giving.
He didn't engage in violence, though, you see. He basically said "Stop. Enough. Get out of the car." There seems to me to be a difference.
I don't get it. Are you actually defending this, Heebie? What's your feeling about fraternity hazing? That also gets lovingly retold, greatest-hits fashion, or so I'm told.
I think it's not great parenting, but not so out there that I'm concerned in any sense. Far less harmful than the Alec Baldwin phone message thing (as discussed above).
Well, you should pretty much have your kids taken away then.
Whereas frat hazing can be super damaging, because the kids can die. Short of the kids dying, it's mostly just a weird thing that gets some people off.
314: Can someone be here at 6 am tomorrow morning?
Far less harmful than the Alec Baldwin phone message thing (as discussed above).
I'm uncertain how this can be known.
You just ask me, and I'll tell you.
You could answer questions like that on the radio.
I don't find "it's common in the South" a good defense.
Yes, I should get some sort of public format where I can issue dumb off-the-cuff opinions, and then many people can explain to me why I'm wrong.
321: no, that's really not true.
There are plenty of things that are common in the South that are batshit crazy and dysfunctional and I wouldn't defend. But the principal things here seem to be that it's 1) public, and 2) involving a gun, and neither of those seem that inherently disturbing to me.
321: I should get some sort of public format where I can issue dumb off-the-cuff opinions
I recommend csv for values.
But the principal things here seem to be that it's 1) public, and 2) involving a gun, and neither of those seem that inherently disturbing to me.
What?
You're originally from Florida, aren't you.
Involving a gun doesn't bother me until it involves disciplining your kid while branding one.
312: Of course, there's a big difference between being forced out of the car on the way to school, and being forced out of the car in the middle of Mexico.
But there is no implied in-person threat whatsoever. He is not taking the gun out in her presence and making her heart pound. This would not give the kid PSTD or any sort of actual violent after-effect. It's just a punchline.
The use of a firearm to, let us not mince words, prove to one's superiority to a tween/teenaged girl isn't disturbing?
Am I just a pushover?
On the local StoryCorp last week, the Cruel and Memorable Punishment was this: Adult recollects that when he was a gay middle school kid, another boy sent him a valentine, and his mother intercepted it. She took her gun, put him in the car, made him carry the gun, drove him out to the middle of nowhere, made him carry the gun deep into the woods, and showed him a tree. Then she said "This is the tree where I'll kill you if I ever find out that you're homosexual."
Now that is fucking abusive as all hell. But this? Eh.
It's just a punchline.
Time will tell, but with a father like that I'd put money on the "come to grief" square on the green baize of that kid's prospects.
The use of a firearm to, let us not mince words, prove to one's superiority to a tween/teenaged girl isn't disturbing?
Why? I mean, as opposed to destroying it in some other way? Or as opposed to confiscating it and donating it to the library? It's not great parenting, but I can't see it as much worse than that.
Maybe I'm just oversensitive/a pushover.
But seriously, guns aren't toys. If your plan to show somebody something/teach somebody a lesson/prove something to somebody requires a gun, you really ought to consider a new plan.
No, you're not a pushover. Heebie is just trolling.
333: Making him carry the gun seems short-sighted.
339: That's part of the power display. Bullies use that one all the time: "Come on, pussy, punch me! Hit me! Stab me! Shoot me! You're such a pathetic little piece of shit you can't even hit me when you've got the bat/pipe/gun and I'm just sitting here!"
340: That too. But also impractical.
Jesus Fuck, heebie, it's not like people said he was history's greatest monster or something, just a common run-of--the-mill asshat. (And yes acting out an atavistic script which is common in Southern culture.)
The first 3 words of 343 could make one of those cute facebook reminders that commas have a grammatical purpose.
337: Dangerous toys, but often still just for playing with. Plinking, target practice, and so on weren't high-tension events for me or the kids.
Wasting the ammo and the computer strikes me as pretty dumb but not at all into REMOVE THE KID! territory.
No one is saying to remove the motherfucking kid. I mean who would want a whiny little punk like that anyway?
343: People have totally been calling him history's greatest monster! LB said in the OP that she wants to break his kneecaps. Whiny little bitchy dickface. He's completely insane. Etc.
346: Yeah, that's true. They deserve each other. Let 'em eat collard greens!
345.2: Not that bad, just closer to "Christ, what an asshole" than Father of the Year. The guy's not the wit or charmer he fancies himself, but who among us is? Besides me, of course.
Dangerous toys, but often still just for playing with. Plinking, target practice, and so on weren't high-tension events for me or the kids.
Exactly. If there's not tension or anxiety around the gun and dad using a gun regularly, then he's just being an unremarkable jerk.
349: But now we can get a review of your wit and charm. If you'll point her here.
LB probably wants to break lots of people's kneecaps, Halford is a whiny little bitchy dickface himself so no one listens to him and things that have been called 'insane" in this thread: the video, LB and you.
347: Hold on. If an adult male permitted to possess firearms and, presumably, vote and own real property, cannot keep his cool in the face of a tween/teenage girl's online "my dad is so lame," he opens himself quite patently to charges of being a whiny little bitch. To quote (I think) the late Ted Williams, "Easy on the clutch, Maverick, you're grinding metal."
Elvis used guns to turn off the TV and his kid seems fine.
352: Oh, yeah, jerk he is. Not at all unusual though.
355: Elvis had personality, though. Personality goes a long way.
I would not actually break this man's kneecaps if given the opportunity: "Christ, what an asshole" sums up my thinking pretty well.
I do agree that the gun is no particular thing -- I mostly think anyone clowning around with a gun is an idiot, but the gun thing looked clownish, not threatening, to me.
Look, you've not reacted in any way I would not expect from your average Texan.
355: I've been very, very tempted. I mean, VERY. If I had Elvis' kind of money and privacy I'd do it on occasion.
That's true. This guy has negative charisma.
358: but the gun thing looked clownish, not threatening, to me.
Sure, you weren't the one dissing him on Facebook.
My read on the thread above was that people felt he was being abusive. Perhaps not chronically abusive in general, but in this instance. That's what I'm arguing against.
And he thinks he's such a cool badass!
353.1: Hey! I mean, I suppose that's accurate, but I didn't realize it showed so clearly from here.
360: The new screens don't explode or anything interesting.
And he thinks he's such a cool badass!
Actually I think this video wins me the "90s clothes look repulsive" thread.
Yeah, this video mostly showed up in my Facebook feed linked by people I went to high school with with commentary that was all variations on "LOL!!! Old school parenting! You tell her, Dad!"
I'm basically with heebie on this. (Note: I haven't actually watched it.) He sounds like a garden variety redneck engaging in garden variety redneck behavior. I roll my eyes at it, but people are constantly doing stupid shit and slapping it up on Youtube (and not just in the south).
Honestly, I can't take that guy seriously. He shot a laptop. Come on.
Elvis used guns to turn off the TV and his kid seems fine.
Elvis' kid married Michal Jackson for 10 minutes. That takes a special kind of crazy.
I really do not have that strong of an opinion. And I will admit that I am reacting more to my own extrapolations of the guy's character in general and the whole "I'll show you the life of the mind a lesson you'll never forget" culture* than I was to the act itself.
*Something I was pretty deeply enmeshed in during two of my sojourns in Houston, and which despite some of its admittedly refreshing aspects was in the end annoying as all fuckshit even back in the '70s.
He shot a laptop. Come on.
The laptop was trespassing.
363: I'm having the same "I don't like that phrasing" reaction to 'abusive' as I did to 'cross the line', above -- not that there's anything wrong with your using either phrase, they're both perfectly natural in context, but they both kind of fail to capture what hits me about this.
Mostly, I think any grown person who handles bad behavior from their kid by setting up a public stunt-humiliation is an incredible asshole, and that they're probably a consistent asshole, because most people are pretty consistent. That doesn't necessarily make this event abusive, in itself, and doesn't mean that he's meeting whatever the CPS standard is for child abuse. But I feel bad for the kid, because she's being raised by an asshole.
He sounds like a garden variety redneck engaging in garden variety redneck behavior.
Somebody come up with an appropriate quote from King of the Hill, stat.
365: 353.1: Hey! I mean, I suppose that's accurate, but I didn't realize it showed so clearly from here.
Where do you think you are?
I still don't understand what the daughter did wrong, and "provoking your insecure dad in a way that could annoy him" isn't a sufficient answer.
I knew a guy who shot his parents' refrigerator, which is pretty much the same thing except that he said it was an accident.
Mostly, I think any grown person who handles bad behavior from their kid by setting up a public stunt-humiliation is an incredible asshole
This aspect is what I'm not-quite-defending but placing in a context of The Cruel And Memorable Lesson, which is Old School (and dumb) (but widely celebrated.)
I suppose what I'm defending is that within the Cruel And Memorable tradition, it's more memorable than cruel.
376: Ignore Hollywood Boy, he's weakening the case of the right-thinking kneecap-breakers.
376: She said profanely rude things about her parents to a broad group of her friends: if I walked into a room and heard Sally talking about me like that, I'd be pissed off as anything, and I'd speak sharply to her about it, and possibly punish her. I think that was bad behavior, just not justifying his reaction.
I suppose what I'm defending is that within the Cruel And Memorable tradition, it's more memorable than cruel.
Defending that doesn't seem worth burning the calories.
376: I don't know how to explain the whole respecting your elders thing, then. Students call me ma'am all the time. They get super apologetic if I say "Hey, I'm busy, come back during office hours, 'kay?" It's just a standard.
At Heebie U, I'd say about 35% are indoctrinated in Respecting Your Elders. It's not near universal.
What the fuck is your problem? And what did the girl donwrong?
378: Yeah, I'm not seeing how the existence of the C&M tradition makes any individual practitioner any less of an asshole.
So the whole C&M punishment tradition is a problem? It's dumb, but people love these stupid stories more than life itself. By definition, they're supposed to be rare.
382: There's rather a lot of daylight between calling one's elders "sir"/"ma'am" and respecting them, but I have about as much regard for the traditions of the South as Churchill for those of the Royal Navy, so I may be biased.
383 to 376. And I just don't see how complaining about doing chores to your friends is punishable behavior. I mean, weren't everyone's teen years filled with kids saying (to each other) things like "god, my fucking Mom is making me do x.". Not a big deal.
So the whole C&M punishment tradition is a problem?
Yep. At least by my standards. I could imagine something that sort of looked like this that was much more tongue-in-cheek, where the kid was playing along; as I said, I was mostly expecting to be amused. This looked like a grown man enjoying himself by showing off that he could inventively shame a kid, and that seems disgusting to me.
388: If we don't condition kids early to obedience, mute compliance and submission to force, they'll never grow up to be the voters that the Republican Party needs.
Here was a Cruel and Memorable lesson I heard about once. "And you know what they do with homos in the Merchant Marine, right over the side, middle of the night." And then everyone takes a swig from their "longneck".
I think 388 meant to say, "383 to 379".
If you're willing to condemn the whole C&M thing, then it's totally consistent to call this guy an asshole.
I've honestly never thought directly about the C&M phenomenon before this thread. It's omnipresent, but I hadn't labelled it.
I'm probably resisting the cognitive dissonance. If I agree that the entire C&M phenomenon is bad and wrong, then I'm going to squirm the next time I'm at lunch with my colleagues and they start recollecting about their stories of being raised. It's much nicer to just be entertained by the stories. (Which are generally not entertaining, like this guy. They're usually dumb but everyone agrees that they're entertaining because you play along nicely.)
392,393: That's good. I thought it was directed at me and was a little taken aback.
Given the typo, I sort of wondered if Halford had gotten ahold of some bad bison.
Bad bison! Bad! It's Ted Turner's restaurants for you!
I think I'm going to stick with just rolling my eyes at this guy, and the C&M lesson tradition.
because you play along nicely
Or else they might shoot you.
I will also say that I am beyond tired of the whole fucking personal gun culture thing. And while I'm in the business of slagging on anyone and everyone, I'll mention that that most certainly includes almost all of of the gun-woofing discussions here about them.
You know what's worse than bad bison?
Pasta.
As you can tell from the rest of the post (and everything else I've written ever) I'm a squishy NorthEast liberal. To the extent my kids are well-behaved, which they are sometimes, it's not about respecting your elders: I occasionally feel a bit more like a rawhide chewtoy than a respected elder. The underlying theory is about mutual respect and kindness, and you do get breakdowns in the functionality when they run into a chickenshit kind of situation, where they're expected to come across with respect but aren't given respect themselves.
Still, I'd rather teach them to manage situations with mutual respect when they can get it, and fake their way through chickenshit, than teach them to sincerely buy into "Kiss up, kick down" as a moral code, which is what the guy in the video looks like he's trying to inculcate.
Er. That was directed toward disapproving of the Cruel and Memorable punishment tradition, and the whole one-way "respect your elders" thing as well. So, aimed at the guy in the video rather than anyone else.
And to cement the hatred, I provide this link. First person who does it report back.
I think the Respect Your Elders thing is dumb, and always have, because sometimes the elders act like assholes, and sometime the young people are kind and thoughtful, so why not base respect on people's actions? (Of course, in no way was I raised Southern. My mom lived in North Florida for over thirty years before she encountered white gravy.)
2.3 meters ... a new personal best.
I can't even figure out which Q,W,O or P to start with.
408: Just punch then subconsciously, I got to where he can kind of shimmy along in a split. 5 meters!
4.5 meters! Limping along with one knee on the ground.
331: This would not give the kid PSTD
It wouldn't give her Papa Sho-nuff The Dickhead? I beg to differ.
Even the best look pretty clunky; I'm a bit disappointed.
24.3! But I still can't get his damn knee off the ground. It must be bloody by now.
So now I've watched it. Dad is a ridiculously insecure guy who got picked on a lot in middle school. And a dumbass to boot. Wipe the drive, donate it to a charity, and take the deduction, genius.
Of course that wouldn't let him do the whole spread-legged, pistol-packin' cowboy drag performance that I'm sure he's been rehearsing versions of since he was a kid. But he could have just taken her on the Jerry Springer show to have an audience of broketooth simpletons bray at her instead. Would've been more dignified.
posts a video of self shooting a laptop:probably a violent abusive asshole off-camera::posts a cute cat video:probably somewhat twee off-camera
I know we've debated what twee means here before, but I don't think it's the cat-video demographic.
Unless it's Cats With Hitler Mustaches or Cats Looking At Pictures of Cats or Ironic Cats.
Jesus, I've been insufferable with the random capital letters in this thread. Put a sock in it, Heebs.
In lighter news, the girl you reprobates call "Lunchy" (honestly, people) just e-mailed links to a couple of things that she has been invited to attend tomorrow evening.
Is cats shooting laptops considered twee?
419: It's true that the audience for cute cat videos is by no means exclusively twee. Why, I myself watch cute cat videos on occasion, and I will immediately launch into a derogatory impression of a Monty Python sketch if someone calls me "twee".
423: Is she implying that you're invited, or are you making that inference all on your own?
Twee = [Zooey Deschanel + (any movie directed by Wes Anderson - Bill Murray)] X Cute Overload.
10.1 meters, sort of shuffling on one knee. I can't make it take anything that looks like a step.
I am unclear about how the game is supposed to function. Is it supposed to work on a regular computer? Is it the speed with which you can type the letters? I am very perplexed.
If we make too big a deal out of this, are you going to quit the blog? Will you and Lunchy still love us?
As you may recall, I posted it in the spirit of "cementing the hatred".
If we make too big a deal out of this
*WE* ??!!!??
Will you and Lunchy still love us?
In the case of Lunchy, at least, this assumes facts very much not in evidence.
Right, but it's just confusing, not really infuriating. Is it some kind of cipher? That kind of thing is really boring to me, which is part of the reason I hated Cryptonomicon so much, and why I don't generally do crossword puzzles.
433: I know, I know, I have not been holding up my end of it, but I've been busy with work.
It's not a cipher, it's just an incredibly difficult interface. There are people out there who can make the guy lurch walkingishly for multiple steps.
I've gotten 73 m with the leg drag. Now can get a few steps with the right leg actually going in front and cover more ground more quickly, but am very unstable.
But difficult how? I don't know, I don't actually care that much, to be perfectly frank.
HOLY SHIT I just took my first real steps. How did I do that?
Involving a gun doesn't bother me until it involves disciplining your kid while branding one.
Any argument along these lines is totally disingenuous. The gun was nowhere near the kid, nor are the allegations that the use of the gun was intended to be threatening particularly compelling.
Hints: Togetherness is a blessing and outie/innie/outie/innie.
Ha! Fwd'd an crazy, vituperative email from a third-party vendor to my boss this afternoon. And instead of replying-all, to myself and the other two recipients, she copied back in the vendor, with a fairly confrontational take on the issue. Oh well, we didn't really need to maintain that relationship anyway, I guess.
And there's a fucking hurdle at 50m.
There's only one thing worse than dealing with vendors--being a vendor.
267: she whinged, in private
The Internet is not private. Jesus. Have we not learned this by now? (If the supposedly-stupid redneck has grasped this -- and was bright enough to make it a takeaway lesson for the daughter about both her posts and his video -- it's really not the hill you wanna die on.)
And the "it's perfectly okay for kids to whine about their parents" line doesn't cut much ice either, I don't think. That kids will inevitably do it is one thing, but if you get caught dead-to-rights talking shit about how your parents are such lazy stupid assholes for making you totally do a bunch your maid's work, like gross, then you should really obviously expect them to get pissed and take away your toys. This is not rocket science.
444: Oh, that's not right. I'm up to 15.3 meters with a Groucho-style stride.
445: Truly, at this point, no additional evidence of organizational dysfunction will come as a surprise to me.
But difficult how?
Difficult like SHITTY, like sailing a boat by drawing in the sand with your toes or steering a car by poking a cat with a stick.
449: Yes. Remember, posted in the spirit of H.A.T.R.E.D. y'all.
Do me a favor. Don't be a good neighbor to her anymore. Or I'll send you a love letter... straight from my heart, fucker! Do you know what a love letter is? It's a bullet from a fucking gun, fucker! You receive a love letter from me, and you're fucked forever! You understand, fuck? I'll send you straight to hell, fucker!
The internet should be treated as private by parents though. It's like a kid talking to friends. Sure, you could listen at the door, but that's wrong.
I became fully acquainted with its cat-poking delights a while back. I thought they were pretty transparent.
The internet should be treated as private by parents though.
Not when the kid accidentally sends their insulting messages to the parents, it shouldn't. That's how this one got busted, remember?
452: Surprised to see how long it had been a round, one of my kids just sent it to me this evening. "Transparent" is opaque to me a this hour of a Friday evening.
What I mean is that I thought it was pretty obvious how and why the game presents the player with a difficult and frustrating task.
My super power is eliciting explicitness.
Hey, Kotsko's at the top of Daily Kos.
Not when the kid accidentally sends their insulting messages to the parents, it shouldn't. That's how this one got busted, remember?
But they didn't send it to the parent. The parent went looking*. Which, you know, that's what you get.
* At best, they stumbled over it, which is still pretty sus.
459: Lame, come on. The parent "stumbled" over them while doing something unrelated. The kid busted herself, that's it.
The larger point is this: although it's annoying and all when Mum goes through our things, OTOH fuck a bunch of this notion that minors have rights to some kind of absolute firewall around their shit-talking about their parents. Even if the Dad had gone deliberately looking, doing so is just one of the prerogatives of parents. It is even one of the responsibilities and basic expectations of parents. I find it very hard to believe that many people here would genuinely have a hard time wrapping their head around this.
Oh yeah, that's fair enough. I don't think the dad did anything particularly wrong by reading it, or even did anything wrong if he'd gone looking for it, really*. But he can hardly be angry that she's sassing him, or whatever, given it wasn't aimed at him. Unless he's claiming the right to control everything she ever says about him, which is (a) crazy and (b) doomed to horrible failure.
Even if the Dad had gone deliberately looking, doing so is just one of the prerogatives of parents. It is even one of the responsibilities and basic expectations of parents. I find it very hard to believe that many people here would genuinely have a hard time wrapping their head around this.
(I actually watched this now.) Castock and I are coming from very different planets, I think. Is hunting down and reading a child's diary also a basic responsibility of parenthood? Listening in on phone conversations? That would be insane, and I think parent-excluded facebook conversations are much closer to the latter than they are to, say, a public tantrum with the same semantic content.
Children are people, and they have dignity, and they have rights. (I'm talking morality, not law; I don't care about the latter, here.) Now, the precise contours of these rights aren't identical to those of adults, and they interact in complicated ways with the special rights and responsibilities of parents; but as with any argument about why Person X doesn't deserve the normal set of rights, the person making the argument needs to bear a certain burden of proof. Why is it necessary to the successful development of this person's full personality, &c., that (as Castock apparently thinks) they have no personal privacy or personal privacy beyond what the parents decree is expedient at that moment? We're normally deeply skeptical about that sort of arbitrary, unchecked authority, and rightly so; and if anything, history should have taught us that it's more rather than less worrisome when exercised behind family walls. (And given what the father says about living on his own at her age, I suspect he himself felt that particular constraint was utter bullshit when he had to put up with it, and acted accordingly.)
Privacy and the security of one's personal property and both extremely important, especially to children, who're subject to all sorts of arbitrary domination over the vast majority of their waking hours. I think it's easy for adults to forget just how common and how painful this experience is for children: being suddenly reminded that your own views mean nothing, that your self-understood interests count for nothing, that someone else will do what they want with you and quite possibly force you to pretend to like it if you don't want worse. Fully shielding one's child from this would require a level of counter-cultural radicalism that's unreasonable to expect of most parents (Waldorf schools, unschooling, &c.), yes, but even cash and time-strapped parents can and ought to resist the temptation to take the full measure of authority society's willing to grant them, and make clear to their children that they have a certain inviolable human dignity, and that as a reflection of that, a certain private sphere free even from parents' meddling.
I'm not saying every kid has a right to a laptop of their own. But if you do give one to your daughter, you can't just destroy it as punishment for disrespect, any more than you can destroy her friends' computers for the disrespect they've surely been posting in the days since.
If I understand well: YouTube goes medieval. I'm lucky my children do everything to keep their parents away from their facebook, and when I say everything I mean 'practically nothing'.
Another vote for bad father.
Violent, posturing idiot wearing cowboy hat, that he probably wears to configure Active Directory.
I'm in the middle on 'did the kid do anything wrong' issue -- I think she did, and the father is justified in being annoyed and doing something about it, I just really dislike his actual reaction.
Obviously, I think, if the kid's rant had been intentionally directed for the parents to read, that would have been bad behavior. I think equally obviously, if it had been handwritten in a diary with a lock on it kept hidden in her room, the parents would have been complete shits to have read it at all (in the absence of some kind of emergency) and certainly would have been shits to react angrily to anything written in there.
There's a sliding scale inbetween of how public what she said was, and I think 'actually getting busted' is on some level a fair measure of how aggressive the kid was being. The analogy I used above was 'walking into a room and overhearing': in a case like that, the speech wasn't directed at the overhearer, but the fact that it could have been overheard without the overhearer taking intentional action makes it public enough for the overhearer to legitimately take offense. Pretty much anything on the internet is sort-of-kind-of public on that level, where if you get busted saying it, you have only yourself to blame.
Pretty much anything on the internet is sort-of-kind-of public on that level, where if you get busted saying it, you have only yourself to blame.
Unless you use a pseudonym.
Right??
464: are you calling me a bad father?
I have been busted for stuff I said here by people who I had never mentioned the blog to. I was sort of puzzled by the level of offense they took, but wouldn't have thought about their connecting it to me as an intrusion (I was awfully surprised, though.)
Based on what the father said, she posted it as a facebook message with settings that explicitly excluded her parents from seeing it. I'm assuming that he saw it because he was configuring her computer and her account was left logged in, or something like that. But if so, then it was the equivalent of an email message sent to a set of her friends, that the father was able to see only because he logged into her email account.
Further, I want to push back on the idea that just because you can find something online, you're justified in thinking it "public." This is a bad doctrine, and it will only get worse, as increasing data-crunching power makes it trivial to pierce all but the most paranoid veils of secrecy. The Mineshaft is a good example: the pseudonymity people use here is no real bar to determined sleuthing, I'd imagine, but one oughtn't do that sleuthing, and how you can tell isn't that it's difficult--because it will only get easier, and someday it will, no doubt, become trivial--but rather simply the fact that there's some minimally clear intent to play a separate role. Contra Zuckerberg, wanting to put on different faces in different aspects of our lives indicates only that we're human, not that we lack integrity. As tools for flattening out those aspects and gaining a single perspective on an individual (whether they like it or not) become more powerful, we need to correspondingly strengthen the social norms that say: that's rude, that's gauche, that's not cool. And if you do it, you should pretend you didn't.
||
Maybe this is relevant but at least it's interesting
David Graeber engages Chris Hedges on the Black Bloc, "pacifists" and "violence" The original Hedges is easy to find, and responses are all over. Graeber makes the point that in practice and history, it is the pacifists and liberals who become violent towards those on political margin. See, well, all social democrats.
(Pacifists, liberals and others who make rules that they expect/demand others to follow are by definition authoritarian and predictably violent to those who would deny their right/power to make those rules.)
PPS:There is another long discussion of non-violence over at FDL
|>
If you read the followup, the father claims that he found it through her careless screw-up: their dog had a joke FB page, and she didn't put the dog on the 'family' list that was excluded from the rant. Being entitled to having things taken as private is related to how much care you use in keeping them that way: private email or paper correspondence is one thing, but Facebook is set up to be a broadcast-to-everyone-you-know medium, and if you want it not to act that way, it's on you to get it right.
What happened to me is similar: I talked about people I know with enough identifying details that they recognized themselves and me, despite my notional anonymity. It hadn't occurred to me that what I said was offensive: I would have (and may have, I don't recall) said the same in conversation with them. But if they could recognize that they were being talked about, the fact that I was making a gesture toward being anonymous doesn't give me any right to not own what I said.
That does make it less of a privacy invasion, ok. I still think the proper response is to just ignore it: of course your kids are going to talk shit about you. That's what teenagers do. (In addition, tying in to my previous comment, when the IT infrastructure conspires to pierce our veils unintentionally, or to make it easier for us to slip us, as here, I think we ought to cultivate a strong norm that the right thing to do is pretend not to see.)
But to the point: the fact that the parents apparently see this in terms of Lese-majesty is, I believe, quite fucked up. And I continue to think the response itself--destroying her property, while simultaneously talking about the importance of thrift, as if to emphasize that his power is unconstrained by anything so petty as consistency--auctoritas non veritas facit legem!--is just awful.
(Plus, yeah, echoing what was said about the troubling way he seems to think "cleaning lady" is an epithet--not a good sign!)
468
are you calling me a bad father?
Unless you are the guy who shot his daughter's computer, no.
472
... It hadn't occurred to me that what I said was offensive: ...
Were these the people who wrecked your car?
Hah. No. (And there was no damage to our car, or at least none we could identify in amongst the other dings and dents -- the only problem was that she cracked someone else's tail light and got our insurance hiked.)
I couldn't even shoot in my own foot so I am fine.
What is the worst of this guy's actions: having such long toes, owning a gun, using it, destroying his daughter's means of communication or putting everything on YouTube?
It really is a close race.
If I understand the sequence of events, he'd apparently grounded her previously for posting a my-parents-are-assholes rant on Facebook. So I infer this was a repeat performance that she'd already been been explicitly warned would be punished. I mean, the guy comes off as an immature blowhard in full compensating-for-tiny-penis mode, to be sure. But still.
If I understand the sequence of events, he'd apparently grounded her previously for posting a my-parents-are-assholes rant on Facebook.
I missed that. I heard him saying he'd taken her laptop away for something before, but not for what it was.
Oh, never mind -- he says for something 'very similar' right in the beginning. Doesn't specify, but I see what you mean.
Doesn't change my sense of the situation at all; she misbehaved, but he's a godawful jerk.
I inferred it from the explanation page linked above:
"She apparently didn't remember being talked to about previous incidents, nor did she seem to remember the effects of having it taken away, nor did the eventual long-term grounding seem to get through to her. I think she thought "Well, I'll just wait it out and I'll get it back eventually." Her behavior corrected for a short time, and then it went back to what it was before and worse. This time, she won't ever forget and it'll be a long time before she has an opportunity to post on Facebook again."
473: I'd agree that it's unreasonable to require that your kids never express disagreement, frustration, or even anger towards you at times, but I think it's not unreasonable to feel that something's gone wrong (either in your child's behaviour, or yours) if they express contempt, even if it's behind your back. And that's what I'm hearing from the girl's facebook post ("don't sit back on your ass and watch me do it" etc.) You'd be rightly pissed if someone you thought was a friend talked that way about you. I think a healthy relationship has a place for occasional disagreement, frustration and anger, but not for contempt.
On the other hand, in this particular case the father has probably brought it upon himself by taking it as his right to express himself contemptuously towards his daughter. In other words, what m. leblanc said.
In other words, what m. leblanc said.
And other right-thinking persons, such as LB.
481: That sort of thing did change my mind a little bit - the claim that there was a long escalation, rather than immediate massive nuclear retaliation.
He still comes across as an asshole, though.
428: EXPLICIT EMAILS? YOU SHOULD RESPOND WITH EXPLICIT TWEETS!
462 & 473: parent-excluded facebook conversations are much closer to the latter than they are to, say, a public tantrum with the same semantic content.
I think that's complete horseshit. First, if you screw up and send such a tantrum to an account your parents can read -- though you had tried to exclude them -- you take the consequences. Not complicated. Not in the tiniest, least little bit a grey area.
And second:
Children are people, and they have dignity, and they have rights. . . Why is it necessary to the successful development of this person's full personality, &c., that . . . they have no personal privacy or personal privacy beyond what the parents decree is expedient at that moment?
Children have rights: to shelter, to healthy food and medicine, to a nurturing environment, and to parents who pay attention to them, set boundaries for them and teach them how to act like decent human beings. Insofar as privacy can be prejudicial to that latter goal (and it can), they do not have an absolute right to it, and claiming that they do is nuts. Privacy is something kids earn by demonstrating that they can be trusted to behave morally even when they are not being watched. It's a fairly rare parent who won't occasionally breach the privacy firewall to make sure their kid is acting right, and reason for that is that doing so is commonly construed as a very basic responsibility of parenting, with good reason.
I think we ought to cultivate a strong norm that the right thing to do is pretend not to see.
I don't, because aside from such a "norm" being an absolutely perfect recipe for strained and fake relationships gradually buckling under the pressure of things-we-dare-not-say until somebody snaps, "pretending not to see" when your child is acting out would also (by most people's lights and I think with good reason) be straight-up irresponsible parenting. If Dad had "pretended not to see" this little rant about how his daughter was supposedly being treated like Kunta Kinte because the maid wasn't doing all her chores, he would have been tacitly reinforcing the acceptability of a thoroughly entitled and whiny mindset that would make most people want to smack her. That is nuts. Saying he should have done so is nuts. Allowing it to go unchallenged once he knew about it would have been a disservice to the kid.
I'm not saying every kid has a right to a laptop of their own. But if you do give one to your daughter, you can't just destroy it as punishment for disrespect
Well yes, actually. You can. Because it's likely that the kid did not pay for it (as was apparently the case here), and it is therefore their property only to the extent to which they do not abuse it. In fact it's an excellent punishment for disrespect. If you disrespect your parents and your family and they catch you at it, it's extremely fair game that the punishment should be the withdrawal of something meaningful to you that was provided to you by the people you are disrespecting.
Now, if she'd scrimped and saved and bought the computer with her own money from her first job, then destroying it would have been a dick move. But then of course, if she'd done that, the whole situation in question probably wouldn't have come up (since then she would have been the opposite of a whiny brat sitting on her ass and complaining about how her providers are supposedly sitting on their asses).
As it is, really all there is to complain about here is the slightly loopy parenting-by-Water Sobchak-vibe of shooting the computer. Which, granted: not having been raised around a nutty Southern gun culture, shooting the computer wouldn't be my first idea either. But F's 441 is right on this: the various cries of how this was implied violence or an implied threat etc etc are not convincing. At best it's a slightly loopy execution of what is otherwise a perfectly correct and aboveboard point.
So, yeah. Like I said before: my sympathy is definitely with the dad here. Loopiness and all.
484: Mmm. I have a reasonably detailed image of the sequence of events that makes me sympathize fairly strongly with the kid, but it's based on guesswork and demeanor, so I'm not really relying on it.
I'm curious: do you think the rights and wrongs are affected at all if the laptop was a gift from, or bought from money given by, someone other than the father? His response includes:
Presents and money come from all sides when you're young. Most of the things she has that are "cool" were bought or gifted that way. She's always asked for very few things, but they're always high-dollar things (iPod, laptop, smartphone, etc). Eventually she gets given enough money to get them. That's not learning the value of a dollar. Its knowing how to save money, which I greatly applaud in her, but it's not enough.
That sounds like this is something she saved up for: from gifts rather than work, but not provided as a utility by her parents.
488: Different versions of essentially the same thing. Laudable as saving up your allowance or various holiday gifts of money might be, other people still bought the thing when it comes down to it. Also, cheerfully accepting help and hundreds of dollars in software to run the laptop from someone you then turn around and express contempt for is not on; plainly one of the things that stuck in Sobchak Dad's craw and understandably so.
So, adults have property rights in gifts given to them, but children don't. I'm not seeing a moral basis for that distinction.
Man. Remind me not to be Castock's kid at any point.
I wasn't going to watch it because I could get more than I wanted to know from this thread but Apo was kind enough to watch it for me (yay!):
So now I've watched it. Dad is a ridiculously insecure guy who got picked on a lot in middle school. And a dumbass to boot. Wipe the drive, donate it to a charity, and take the deduction, genius.
Sure sounds like that from here.
359: Look, you've not reacted in any way I would not expect from your average Texan.
Uh, the whole cowboy hat and shooting the computer thing sounds very much like this guy's imitation of the sort of people I think of as ridge-runnin', egg-suckin', knuckle-draggin', famility-tree-don't-fork East Texas fucks. And I am guessing you can figure out that those are really not my kind of people. Anyways, this guy's performance seems to lack ...authenticity. What with missing the point about hollow points and ruining a laptop and so on. Such a little attention whore (going by his ridiculous explanatory text).
394: If I agree that the entire C&M phenomenon is bad and wrong, then I'm going to squirm the next time I'm at lunch with my colleagues and they start recollecting about their stories of being raised. It's much nicer to just be entertained by the stories.
That never works.
max
['Not in the long run.']
490: You don't see the basis if they're living under the roof of the person who gave them the gift and depend on that person for its maintenance and functionality? Really?
Here I go, people: fourth date. Wish me luck.
Keep it clean.
490: Wait, but what if someone gives a ten year old boy a games system that the parent knows would (if kept) monopolise what would otherwise be study time, thereby leading the boy to fail his exams and become a bum? You can't take the gift away?
491: Search your feelings. You know me to be right.
It is hard to be the kid of a Lord.
Teaching respect by showing retaliation? Yeah, that just must be right.
494: At 10am? OMG are you having *brunch*?
To get broader about something I really don't like about what looks like the underlying dynamic here, it looks to me like the father is giving her stuff (as is the rest of the family) and then treating her as an entitled sack of shit for having the stuff she was given.
The chores she was complaining about don't appear to have been a reasonable share of what's necessary to keep the household running, but something more along the lines of a punishment for not having a job:
Until then, she can do chores, and lots and lots of them, so the people who ARE feeding her, clothing her, paying for all her school trips, paying for her musical instruments, can have some time to relax after they finish working to support her and the rest of the family. She can either work to make money on her own, or she will do chores to contribute around the house. She's known all along that all she has to do is get a job and a lot of these chores will go away. But if you're too lazy to work even to get things you want for yourself, I'm certainly not going to let you sit idly on your rear-end with your face glued to both the TV and Facebook for 5 to 6 hours per night. Those days are over.
That's not abusive, parents set the house rules, and all that. But it strikes me as kind of an asshole powertrip; none of us can know the actual practicality of her finding a job, but it's not trivial for a kid most places. Doesn't excuse her rudeness, but it makes me think that the sort of immature taunting the father was engaged in in the video was a steady part of the relationship.
488 makes a good point.
Relatedly, I've never "learned the value of a dollar" or saved up for a damn thing in my life, and I am doing just fine.
I only ever had one experience where I didn't have the cash on hand to buy something I really wanted, and that's when I decided to work over the next summer.
I do wish my parents had talked with me about this stuff earlier on, but it was in no way difficult for me to make the transition from a recipient of gifts into an earner of money. I suffered not at all from having no experience of having to work to get stuff until the gifts ran out.
Now, perhaps most people run out of gifts well before college. But then it's not about "learning the value of a dollar," but about needing the money to get the stuff. I see no reason for such things to take on a moral valence. Either you want to buy your kid stuff or you don't.
this guy's performance seems to lack ...authenticity
Indeed. Cowboy drag. I notice he has a mostly conquered stutter that breaks through when he starts to get all wound up (NTTAWWT, just one data point in my half-assed psych profile). I'd guess there have been no small number of screaming bitch-offs between daughter and dad.
Searching our feelings is alas not an option in Google. I guess we'll have to settle for rational argument.
495: Controlling usage is different from destroying stuff. Saying "You can't use your game system until your homework's done" or on a longer basis "Until I see a better report card" is one thing. Saying "You don't own anything, I can destroy your stuff at whim because you have no rights" is quite another.
499: it looks to me like the father is giving her stuff (as is the rest of the family) and then treating her as an entitled sack of shit for having the stuff she was given.
It doesn't look like that to me. "Having the stuff" and "wanting to spend all your time with the stuff and not doing chores or finding a job" are not the same thing. I think it's non-crazy for parents to give their kids stuff and still expect them to have a work ethic.
503: The Force shall be with you, always. Even on Google. The only known exception is 4chan.
496: no, you (in your guise as defender of Shooty the IT Professional) sound like the kind of crazy petty tyrant that gets in escalating, highly emotional wars with his kid, wars that continue more or less unabated until the kid gets mature enough to realize they just need to leave and give it ten years before they can try and have a passably friendly relationship with their parents again.
505 to 502. As for 503, destroying or getting rid of the stuff is obviously a fairly nuclear option, that doesn't mean it's off the table or that your characterizing it this way looks accurate. As noted above, it's not like this incident looks to have just come out of nowhere.
I mean, teenagers are entitled little shits who are excellent at pressing buttons, this is not news. But the idea that doing this will somehow stop her from badmouthing her father in any available forum? How on earth would THAT possibly work? "I'm an IT guy! I can keep you off the internet entirely if I feel you've been disrespectful!" Shit, dude, China can't do that, and they're a bigass country with lots of computer scientists and crap.
I think it's non-crazy for parents to give their kids stuff and still expect them to have a work ethic.
Who could argue with that?
On the other hand, I think it is crazy to punish and think ill of a kid for not having a job in this economy. I don't see any objective way to determine whether your reading of the parenting dynamic is better than mine: if he looks like a good father to you, than there's not much I can argue about.
503: OK, but it still means that kids don't have the same property rights, morally speaking, as adults.
506: you . . . sound like the kind of crazy petty tyrant
... aaaaand the needle on the irony-meter is buried.
I am not sure of this idea that there is a "calm and rational" way to have a long argument about how a teenage girl hurt your feelings (which said teenage girl cannot even hear!) and then shoot up a laptop computer.
He even dressed up in a cowboy outfit to do it. He's a perfect example of a drama queen. "Explosive bullets", really.
crazy to punish and think ill of a kid for not having a job in this economy
Particularly a 15-year-old.
Right. They're in Texas, she can't drive yet.
Shooty the IT Professional
Needs an action-figure. (Comes complete with miniature Adirondack chair and hollow-point rounds. Gun and laptop sold separately.)
509.1: From the looks of this thread, a bunch of people.
I'm not making any global claims about the guy's "goodness" as a father. I'm no more qualified than anyone else here to speak to that. All I've said is that in this case, my sympathies are with him and his detractors don't impress me.
(Of course, maybe some of them will manage to change my mind with childish name-calling; I'm not optimistic, but Sifu, you're welcome to keep trying.)
I'm not trying to change your mind. That's pointless. I'm getting what entertainment I can by boggling at your wrongness.
my sympathies are with him
I don't find either party sympathetic. But one of them is a 15-year-old acting like an adolescent, and one is nominally an adult acting like an adolescent.
512: The "exploding hollow points" thing is legitimately annoying, I'm with gswift's comment at number 7 about that.
517: Ahhh, now if you could only make the transition to learning from my rightness.
You don't see the basis if they're living under the roof of the person who gave them the gift and depend on that person for its maintenance and functionality? Really?
Ugh. When you stretch this viewpoint out (which I should note that I don't think Lord Castock is doing, it just makes me incredibly uncomfortable to read statements about parenting like this) you end up with really ugly situations like Flippanter described above with his mother. Plenty of parents decide to define a 'gift' as things other parents view as their duty to provide, and this creates ... erg, I can't even type out exactly how it made me feel as a child, to be told that I didn't deserve the house over my head, etc., that these were all gifts to me, not rights, and if I wasn't good, they could and would be taken away,* but it was massively painful and horrible.
*Of course, because my step-parent wasn't truly evil these things were never actually taken away.
517: Ahhh, now if you could only make the transition to learning from my rightness.
I dunno, maybe put on a fireman costume, take my mild grasp of human nature out back and shoot it? That'll larn me.
fireman costume, take my mild grasp of human nature out back and shoot it
Let's not go full dada. In a fireman costume, you'd use either an axe or a high-pressure hose.
I agree that the guy has a right to punish his daughter, but if his reaction to a snotty Facebook post is to shoot her compute all cowboy-style publicly I'd hate to see what happens if she actually screws up something serious. (Bet she wouldnt tell him. Wonder why.)
It's hard not to read these things through the lens of personal experience, but growing up with no expectation of privacy (I have never kept a journal because I knew it would be read; a high school acquaintance got pregnant and it was proof of my bad character and choice in acquaintances) or property rights (children are property, too, I was told) was a lot to get past. "Passably friendly" is probably the best that can be hoped for.
It's hard not to read these things through the lens of personal experience
Yep.
OMG are you having *brunch*?
Christ, am I? Do I need to wear a morning suit or something?
Best to play it safe and just wear a jumper.
521: Assuming I could locate the alleged "grasp of human nature," I'd presumably be hitting it with an axe in my fireman costume. OTOH that would be in violation of Backdraft cinematic "you go, we go" rules and the unions would hang me from a lamppost.
So I guess maybe we'd have to go with your coming up with a sensible and reasoned objection to something I've actually said instead of just trying to brazen it out with sneers, and from there we could have a constructive dialogue that
why can't I finish that paragrap without laughing? Probably just me.
Just stay away from the white mess jacket with brass buttons.
I was gonna comment btocked last night but the idea of reading 200 comments to catch up on the thread was way daunting.
Do I store Lillet in the fridge after its opened? My vague understanding is fortified wine takes like a year to cross the tracks.
520: I'm completely with you on this, but I think that there's a correlative error, on the part of the entitled snot-nosed teenager community, of acting as though, because it's the parents' duty to provide these things, the parents deserve no appreciation for doing their duty (i.e. no acknowledgement that doing their duty is not always easy or fun), or even coöperation.
why can't I finish that paragrap without laughing?
Because you know I won't fall for it?
529: Do I store Lillet in the fridge after its opened?
You're a terrible father.
529.last: I think people store it in the fridge because it's tasty when chilled. I'm not sure that you have to otherwise.
520: Plenty of parents decide to define a 'gift' as things other parents view as their duty to provide, and this creates...
I hear you. But I don't think anyone is saying a laptop is something it's the parent's duty to provide. And 531 is a good point.
532: Sure, sure. Sure. Must be it. Sure.
(Since the semi-serious snark with Sifu may obscure the point, 533 is just a joke about the thread. You're not a terrible father.)
520 and 531 remind me just how fucked up the parent-child relationship is... It's remarkable that anyone manages it with any grace.
how fucked up the parent-child relationship is
Also, she's 15? I realize this is the South, but maybe one reason she's having a hard time finding a job is that babysitting's the only legal option? And she saved up gift money for the laptop? That's as good as saving gets at that age.
539: yeah, I was impressed with that.
Goddamn, what a hilarious mall cop of a sad sack little man that father is.
I mean, I guess I should watch the video; maybe that'll change my mind.
531 & 535: Aye. I tried to be pretty specific in regards to pointing out that I didn't think that was what Lord C. was saying or what this situation was specifically about, but that personally, I get uncomfortable with statements like that because they bring up the icky feelings. (Or in other words, 524). And I should say, I didn't even have a hugely bad childhood! Just that was a huge sticking point in my relationship with step-parent (and made more complicated by the fact that it was a step-parent, for that matter).
I'm picking away at little things about this that made me really lose sympathy for the guy, but did it strike anyone else funny that one of her complaints was fetching coffee? Possibly she's such a nasty little horror that she's holding a grudge over an ordinary "can you pour me a cup of coffee while you're up?", but if it was something he made a point of, that seems more like bullying, along the lines of what Flip and Paren were talking about, than ordinary expecting a kid to pull their weight around the house.
Also, I've apparently forgotten how to write.
539: Apparently, if it's Texas, these are the applicable guidelines.
543: It could be that making coffee was on the list of her chores, and that he is making a point of the chores. I don't see what would necessarily make either of those things "more like bullying."
Southern gun culture is obnoxious and dumb*, so I'm predisposed to view his performance similarly. But also, it's just such a hackneyed and unoriginal method. If I felt compelled to make a performance of wiping the drive and donating the laptop to charity, I'd commission Shaye St. John to do the video. Let her friends know I'm serious.
*OTOH, they shoot themselves accidentally way more often than they shoot other people so at least it's somewhat self-limiting.
546: I'd commission Shaye St. John to do the video.
I could definitely get behind that.
Wait, she *bought* the laptop herself? If so, he's history's greatest monster.
548: no no, it was bought for her, by the transitive property of backsies.
545: Fair enough. I had a job when I was 13 (legal loophole) but I'm still not clear on the job hang-up here pre-driving. And I think if a kid saves up gift money to get a laptop that's not the same as simply being given one.
Because waiting on a healthy adult at table is an unconventional chore in our culture? Getting someone a cup of coffee isn't a household task that needs doing, and defining it as such sounds like making a point that the kid is in a subservient position and must obey arbitrary orders, rather than asking her to be ordinarily useful. I'm not there, I don't know all the details, I could be wrong. But in context, it looked that way.
I watched This Movie just last night.
Michael Sheen and Maria Bello. When their kid was nine, the little brat would not get up and sing a song in fron of the group, so Bello yells and the kid cries and Bello yells and the kid cries and finally sings.
Just ten years later that little boy turned two automatic weapons on his college classmates and faculty, killing 23, then himself, and embarrassing his parents just all to hell and stuff.
I mean, sure, discipline and tough love and stuff, but how ya gonna feel when that turns your child into a massmurdering maniac? Pretty bad, I'll bet. And you never can tell.
Just think about it please. And stay away from the hometowns of commenters not to be named.
551: I don't know whose culture we're talking about, now. I don't think households where kids are expected to do simple tasks like making tea and clearing up the dishes are all that unconventional. It doesn't even strike me as being an especially culture- or class-linked thing... maybe if there was a large number of domestic servants around? Is that anywhere near widespread enough to be called "conventional"?
I stand by 548, he is an evil evil man. Basically unless she committed an actual felony, there's no justification for destroying her only valuable piece of property.
You changed the nature of the task under discussion, there. Clearing the table, someone's got to do it, and it might as well be the kid as anyone else. Fetching a cup of coffee, the natural thing to do is for the person who wants it to get it. Not that people don't fetch each other food and drink all the time, but conceptualizing it as a 'chore' rather than a small favor is unusual.
I thought this was going to be a brief thread: Mock the Laptop Vigilante, maybe notice that his daughter and he have a lot in common, and move on.
heebie's effort here, later taken up by Lord Vader Castock, has been ogged-like. I'm impressed.
I wanted to make one point about the Baldwin comparison: Any sympathy to Baldwin was based on two assumptions: that he acted in a moment of rage that he genuinely regretted, and that he wasn't responsible for publicizing his misbehavior. Neither assumption seems to apply to our shooter here.
And if we really do think that our Vigilante was acting out of a sustained rage, that makes the act of shooting a hell of a lot more threatening (as it would make the act of pounding the laptop with a hammer or throwing it out a window). To me, he didn't come off as that pissed off, though, so I'd guess his daughter probably isn't in any physical danger.
And the whole thread makes me want to fucking throw up.
The minor kid to all extents and purposes is in fucking prison. They cannot get out, cannot even think about getting out of the deal. This is not a partnership, a deal, a contract, a fair and just relationship. They are fucking property.
I expect this, I think it is fair that, like a a plantation owner trying to justify droit de seigneur of fucking something.
Kids have zero ethical fucking obligations to their owners and masters. You want a kid? Kid owns you for twenty fucking years. That'd be fair.
555: You changed the nature of the task under discussion, there.
"simple tasks like making tea* and clearing up the dishes"
* Coffee, tea, whatever. Perfectly ordinary for kids to do it as a chore, it seems to me.
Clearing dishes is totally different from making tea. Clearing dishes is something that has to be done, and where the duty is typically shared in a household. Making tea is something you should do yourself, unless you're being lazy. It's nice for someone to offer, but fucked up to consider it an obligation.
554: Well, if it's any comfort, at least you've got McManus and Shearer on your side.
Controlling usage is different from destroying stuff. Saying "You can't use your game system until your homework's done" or on a longer basis "Until I see a better report card" is one thing. Saying "You don't own anything, I can destroy your stuff at whim because you have no rights" is quite another.
Got to head off to work shortly, but this is exactly right, and not something to brush lightly aside, as LC does. What the father does here, and what LC is defending, can only be justified on a thoroughly despotic, patriarchal in the original sense, "all that you have, I can take away" view of parental authority. And contra LC, I think the consequences of this lesson are much worse--for her, for their future relationship, for society in general--than being whiny and lazy and not knowing the value of a dollar.
I find it really baffling that the father, and apparently LC, think that the way to teach someone how to be mature and responsible is by making it crystal clear that they are in a completely subservient and dependent condition, and must not merely accept it, but serve with a smile.
Though, if it's something like all of you have tea together every morning and everyone participates, then it'd be a reasonable chore. But if it's all "kid make me a tea" that's totally different. Chores should be things where everyone enjoys the benefits (clean dishes, empty trash cans, etc.) but where there's an economy of scale to having one person do it.
560: I agree with them more often than I agree with you, actually.
(I don't think it's clear who bought the laptop. He talks about her saving for stuff, but not specifically the laptop. He makes a big point of having paid for some software, but doesn't say, AFAIRecall, that he bought the computer. Could be she bought it with saved gifts, could be her mother (I sort of wonder if there's a divorce-related dynamic) or a grandparent gave it to her.)
559: Clearing dishes is totally different from making tea.
Yes. It's typically way more arduous and time-consuming compared to boiling water. And yet still perfectly reasonable as a chore.
the whole thread makes me want to fucking throw up.
You'll be the one who has to clean it up, mister.
Let's check this out, try husband and wife.
"Wife get me coffee"
pours it on carpet
"Wife more coffee"
pours it on carpet
"Wife more fucking coffee"
...
Wife:"Fuck you asshole I'm leaving."
And the 15-yr-old kid says what?
This is the basic core the reality of the parent-child relationship and you have no fucking right whatsoever to ask anything of someone you have, however gently,
FUCKING ENSLAVED
if we really do think that our Vigilante was acting out of a sustained rage
Nah. He was acting out of a sincere desire to put a video of himself in his cowboy hat on Youttube, shooting something with his exploding hollowpoint bullets and ranting at his daughter, even though she can't hear what he's saying because she's banned from the internet now. And, presumably out of an all too likely accurate belief that all his friends would see it and go "hee haw! you certainly told her (albeit only in a metaphorical sense because she never saw the video)! advantage you! where did you get that fabulous cowboy hat!". Knobber.
568: But what if the wife is 15?
Relevant prior art, in the marital context, from Shel Silverstein.
Buck loves that song.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that who I wouldn't want to be is someone supported by IT guy at work (much less his co-worker, boss or underling).
561: this is exactly right, and not something to brush lightly aside, as LC does I brush it lightly because it's an overwrought and at the very best questionable account of what the father is doing, and certainly has nothing to do with anything I said. What I said is that kid's rights to privacy and property are conditional on not abusing them. To inflate that into a claim that "all you have can be disposed of at the merest whim of the Patriarch" would be ridiculous.
(Rather reminiscent of the relatively-recent spanking thread, where there was supposed to be zero difference between accepting certain limited forms of corporal punishment and sadistically desiring to see tiny children beaten to a pulp. I think Bob even showed up to troll about slavery, too! The overwrought rhetoric is much the same, and it's mostly bullshit now as it was mostly bullshit then. I get that you're sincere in believing these things, mind you, but you are not making an effective case for them.)
I'm surprised that no one has taken the holistic approach, which is that this whole family has been cursed by God and is doomed for all eternity. Their horrible traits presumably form some sort of mirror image couple. Not just this one incident, but everything that the horrible father has ever done, including buying the computer in the first place, has made her a horrible person too.
This isn't necessarily "true" or "fair", but it expedites the judgement, which is the most important thing, as Scalia has shown.
You have to wonder if 571 is the backstory here. If he treats his daughter this way you have to figure he treated his wife the same way. If she left him over that, it'd explain where the anger comes from.
You don't fucking get it.
Drown the kid in Ipods, furs, diamonds, wait on her hand and foot, give everything and more none of this fucking matters what you give can never matter...
...cause she can't get out.
Think about grabbing an adult, locking her in your basement, and treating her really really nice
i.
Also, they are in the South, which (as they themselves agree) is where families are most frequently cursed by God.
Well, 574 might be right, too. We'll never know.
When my father's children complain about some aspect of their upbringing, he's inclined to dismissively point out that everybody feels damaged by their parents one way or another, and that we ought not feel sorry for ourselves.
I dunno. He's right, of course, about parents and kids, but this just makes me sympathize more with my kids.
In my ethics class, I cover a lot of stuff on moral development, in particular Baumrind's theory of parenting styles and moral development. This dude is violating one of the central rules for getting children to internalize moral norms, that is, to take some norms as their own rules and use them to guide behavior.
If children are to internalize norms, they need to understand them rationally, and this means being able to challenge the rules verbally. Complaining on Facebook about having to do chores is a part of wrestling with the idea of responsibility. You will wind up with a grown-up more willing to do chores if you let them complain and then explain the reasons for your rules and make them follow the rules anyway.
I don't know about this guy's parenting in general, but not letting the kid complain on facebook is an authoritarian move that leads to a shallow moral competence.
571: Nice, I assumed it was going to go to some version of this.
576.last: I understand there are websites devoted to that sort of thing.
And the plantation owner says I expect my people to smile and be polite when I give them their whuppins' cause I am only doing for their own good so they don't have even worse consequences down the line if you know what I mean. I love them I really do and only want what is best for them.
If you can't leave you are a prisoner or a slave and there are no nuances to the fucking "relationship"
There is no fucking relationship.
I doubt that anyone who believed McManus's theory of childhood would ever have kids, at least not if they were sane. Who would ever agree to incur an absolute, 16-year+, non-reciprocal obligation?
Note also that he seems to be working from some kind of social contract theory of childhoodwhich strikes me as un Marxist to the max, and in fact, one of the best starting points for a refutation of social contract theory.
theory of childhoodwhich strikes me as un Marxist to the max
Say what?
There should be no private property, or property rights. Especially the fuck over people.
1st the state or community creates a place, a really nice place, for kids to go. At will, no questions asked.
(As far as "relationships" between master and slave, capital and labor, of course such relationships in reality exist, with all kinds of complications, but the bottom line is that the dominated wants to kill the hegemon.)
Only partway through the thread, but how can there possibly be any doubt that this guy is an asshole? A garden variety dick, not really rising to the call-child protective services level, but certainly a dick. I mean, imagine having him as your co-worker, in-law, etc. let alone your parent. No way.
Also, 586.2 is a thorough and perfect demolition job on McManus.
the state or community creates a place, a really nice place, for kids to go. At will, no questions asked
Will they have to do any chores while they're there? At least pick up after themselves?
The weird thing about modern childhood is this 14-17 year old period when a lot of kids could kind of sort of take care of themselves independently, pretty badly with lots of mistakes but they could manage it. There are historical periods when this was filled in by an apprenticeship. Have to give them their head.
I prefer my lillet chilled.
589.3:Kids used to function or survive on their own much earlier than that. And still do in some urban jungles. Guild apprenticeships started earlier than 14.
Fact is, just as women in times and places, kids have been internally and socially infantilized in order to justify treating them as property. My own opinion is that given respect and some autonomy, children are much more capable of making rational decisions than they are allowed.
What is the relation of these children to these state caregivers, Bob? You have just shifted to problem of the status of minors to an imaginary-pony state daycare center. These are normally called orphanages and have their own famous problems.
Children can't contract obligations before competence. They're like slaves in that sense, except that slaves really are competent and their status is violently imposed. A one year old or a five year old is going to be under someone's control. Call it slavery if you want. There are societies where emancipation occurs as early as age 12 or so, but the outcomes tend to be horrible. I have known individuals who emancipated themselves at age 15 or 16, with good results, but these were exceptional and lucky individuals. Most emancipated 16 year olds are lucky of they work at McDonalds.
Apprenticeships were a hell of a lot more like slavery than family life is. Apprentices were, in fact, usually indentured and unfree, and corporal punishment was routine.
I personally favor emancipation at age 16 (and an age of consent of 16), with the last two years of HS replaced by more specialized free schooling. The American HS experience is horrible as far as I'm concerned, an extended period of fake childhood.
But Bob's theory of childhood isn't just about 16 year olds.
592:Emerson, your points are like points made against liberation of Southern slaves and liberation of women in the 19th. Yeah, the systems, the structures of privilege, are designed to make it difficult and ugly to emancipate them. Also colonialism. But, as in those cases, I will not listen to arguments about "protecting" the unemancipated that leave them unfree.
We, the voters from age 5 to 95, will work something out. I would obviously want a fucking massive welfare state with extreme measures taken to assist the most vulnerable. That is a lot more than kids. Based more on targeting exploiters than limiting choices.
Look, there has been moderate discussion in this thread about rational negotiations with children, and why it can work. Fine. A Step. But a step based on changing the relationship to one between equals based on mutual respect. I change that step to a principle, a universal human principle, with a social commitment to treat everyone as persons.
This ain't radical. People as property is what is radical.
According to one of Molly's parenting books, Caroline, now nine years old, is ready to cook one dinner a week for the whole family. I find this assertion perplexing. The odds that we could get her to do this are slim, but I can't figure out if it is because she is unable, or unwilling.
he'd apparently grounded her previously for posting a my-parents-are-assholes rant on Facebook. So I infer this was a repeat performance that she'd already been been explicitly warned would be punished. I mean, the guy comes off as an immature blowhard in full compensating-for-tiny-penis mode, to be sure. But still.
Yeah, this. Videoing yourself shooting the laptop is over the top but repeat offenses of profanity laced Facebook rants about your parents and how you should be paid (you've got to be fucking kidding me kid) for your chores?
Dare I mention here that my 14 year old got her phone taken away this quarter for getting a B in one of her classes when grades came out mid year? I didn't shoot it or anything but it's in time out. And no, I'm not punishing her for performing at her abilities or anything. The little twerp, like most of us here I suspect, is quite bright enough to do well in jr. high classes without putting forth much in the way of effort. The only reason she had a B in that class was that she didn't bother to turn in multiple assignments.
People as property is what is radical.
People as property is what is traditional.
Apprenticeships were a hell of a lot more like slavery than family life is. Apprentices were, in fact, usually indentured and unfree, and corporal punishment was routine.
Fuck this.
Women were and are raped abused murdered exploited blah blah so treat them as minors in order to protect them? Keep them in purdah to prevent rape?
Exploitative and abusive apprenticeships were not the fault of the kids, fucking obviously, and the way to protect should not involve limiting the options of kids.
You always attack power. We don't say workers can't contract for 16 hour days as much as say employers can't. In theory. There are reasons we approach it this way.
Depends partly on how complicated dinners are; boiled dinner, cold salad, & maybe biscuits? I wasn't responsible for full dinners until I was 12 or 13, but then they were from scratch.
And then Dad brought home giant rutabaga, and I resorted to _Mastering..._ to ameliorate them. This could have been his cunning plan.
The mastery to which clew doubtless refers.
I didn't think rutabaga was licit.
596: Be careful with the admissions of extreme cruelty. I couldn't take the kid's phones away 'cause they didn't exist but I could remove the Atari and disconnect the 300 baud modem. They both seem to have survived to reach a reasonable adulthood.
For Christ's sake, Bob, do any of your ideas about childraising have anything to do with childraising? Yes, the arguments for slavery and male dominance infantilized slaves and women. That's the analogy. Are infants not infants either? Your trust in state-run institutions is touching, as if they haven't historically had their own problems.
Up to some age children will be in a dependent status. Urban jungle emancipation is a horrible gamble. The historical and anthropological alternatives are wishful, misleading, and inapplicable.
If it ever came down to actual cases in the real world, you and I might agree. I believe in early emancipation. I believe that abusive parents should lose custody. I believe in extensive welfare-state childraising assistance.
But your ideologization of The Family under the rubric of Slavery is horseshit. Parenthood is an enormous and costly obligation, and most parents give more to their kids than they ever get back. Many bad parents (not tes guy in the post) are just the human wreckage of a dysfunctional system. And up to a certain unspecified age, kids are incompetent to manage their own affairs.
It's this type of crap that makes me ignore critical theory the same way I ignore trolley-car philosophy (though I do rant less about critical theory).
I'm sorry, I know this thread has moved on a little, but are you trying to tell me that asking a teenager to pour you a coffee is an imposition? FFS, one of the best things about having kids big enough to use a kettle is being able to say, hey, can you make me a cup of tea? Seeing as I make them the vast majority of their meals, I think we're even.
I already said I think he's an arse, but I think some people on this thread are filling in all sorts of details completely ex recto.
Bob, what I said is that infants are infants and that slaves and women aren't. As I understand, you say that infants aren't infants. I'm willing to talk about the transition to emancipation and competence, but apparently you aren't.
Slaves and women were competent, economically productive workers who were denied the fruits of their labor and kept in servitude. Most children are economic parasites dependent on their parents (or in your model) on the state.
There's no profit in parenting. It's a state-enforced obligation which can be quite burdensome and in some cases, crushing.
Caroline, now nine years old, is ready to cook one dinner a week for the whole family.
That was one of my chores at that age, but I was assigned it because I genuinely enjoyed cooking and hated doing the dishes.
Also, there is such a huge difference between denying access to something that a kid 'owns' and actively destroying it. Denying phones, etc. seems perfectly reasonable. (At one point, when it became clear that confining me to my room wasn't much of a punishment (for legitimately bad behavior) as I happily settled in and read, my mom attempted to take the books out of the room. (This was not entirely successful, as I had them squirrelled away in every corner.) I was not particularly happy about it, but it was a hell of a lot different knowing that I'd get them all back then if she had, say, burned them.)
In my experience, a 9 year old can cook a meal. It has happened in our house, voluntarily and with support, rather than as a chore, but it doesn't seem crazy to me. A 9 yo I was looking after a couple of weeks ago baked 2 dozen chocolate chip muffins with no adult help.
Yes, my actual assignment was a meal one week, a baking project the next week, then back to the meal. And of course it was with plenty of parental support - I picked the meal, my mom bought the food, and was present if I needed help. All in all, way better than doing the dishes!
For Christ's sake, Bob, do any of your ideas about childraising have anything to do with childraising?
They are not fucking chickens, and your phrasing offends me. I do not train women or manage Afro-Americans.
I do not view children as a qualitatively different class. Individuals might need extraordinary assistance. I don't fucking command anyone.
You might ask how I treat my dogs. Obviously I do things to protect them, but to a degree shocking even to myself, our relationship and interactions are based on communication, negotiation and the establishment of mutual trust. I don't say "Don't step in front of the car" as much as "Danger" and the dogs listen. If they don't want to do something or go somewhere, I pay attention.
And if they wake me up at 3 AM to bark at the raccoon, I reserve the right to grumble.
A nine-year-old should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for grad students.
Do you know what my mum just did? She made me go out to the garage to get a bottle of wine. It's freezing out there! Shall I shoot the bottle?
Well, go fuck yourself. Your phrasing offends me.
It's really rich hearing a childless dog owner pontificating about childraising to a bunch of parents. Dogs have been bred for servility for something like 10,000 years. Of course they love you, Bob! They're bred that way. Fascists really love the faithfulness and blind devotion of dogs. They'd die for you, Bob!
609 - and a nine year old probably could do all that. A *teenager* though? No way.
Asilon's daughter, if your drunken mum fell down and hurt herself on the way to the garage, you'd never forgive yourself. You will be rewarded in Heaven.
It's freezing out there! Shall I shoot the bottle?
Seems like a waste of good wine. You should shoot your mum's handbag.
I completely agree with all of 581, and that's a huge problem with this kind of fella: not being willing to let their kids wrestle with their moral dilemmas. But I think of that as the kind of parenting that requires high levels of introspection and self-reflection and self-control, etc.
Boiled dinner, cold salad, & maybe biscuits,
Sounds a lot better than Cheez Whiz and Triscuits.
9 year old kids, cookin' up a storm,
The muffins are ready and the tea is warm!
581: ... not letting the kid complain on facebook is an authoritarian move that leads to a shallow moral competence.
And not teaching the kid that letting someone with power know you hold them in contempt and are doing so at least semi-publicly can result in retaliatory reaction is doing them a great disservice.
The brat needs to learn some discretion, among other things.
603: Sorry, I thought I tried to make my reaction there clear, that there wasn't enough to be sure about the basis. There's nothing even a little odd about asking a kid to get you some coffee while they're up. If that's a point of resentment at all, though, which it is from the kid's rant, either the kid is very unusually touchy, or what their parent is asking them to do is unusual.
I didn't shoot it or anything but it's in time out.
I don't think anyone here (besides bob) is claiming that it's inappropriate to take objects from children or young people at times.
The offense of the Laptop Vigilante was that he:
1. Destroyed the laptop
2. Did so in a way calculated to humiliate his daughter
3. Isn't sorry
Me, I had a talk with my 9-year-old about his B, and we strategized about how he was going to bring it up.
If I thought the grade was related to him failing to get points for turning in homework, I wouldn't even have talked to him about it, probably. A kid who wants to skip the busy work and just learn the material doesn't have a big problem in my opinion.
Emerson, no, this was my actual mother, I'm at her house. The wine was to go with the dinner she cooked me. Definitely the handbag *nods*.
581, 617 - discretion, for sure. Bitching about anyone in a place where you could get caught is stupid and hurts people. Did no one learn anything from Harriet the Spy?
618 - that's where I thought you were extrapolating. Seems likely to me that she's just whinging about anything she can think of, and .... And ... And ...
I am against homework for 9 year olds, but homework for 14+ is often more than just busy work, and generally worth doing for various reasons. From what I have seen.
often more than just busy work
It often is. It sometimes (and not infrequently for some students) is not.
And of course you want to instill in a child a proper respect for busywork. It sucks, but it's a part of life.
Still, I think we have to have some tolerance for folks who sometimes prioritize real work ahead of busywork in such a way that the busywork gets neglected.
620:I could be wrong, and if I am wrong, the kid's being even more unpleasant than I thought she was. It just seems like a peculiar thing to occur to her as a grievance unless it's literally one of her chores to fetch coffee for her parents, rather than a casual request for a favor. If it's a chore, I think it's kind of screwy and bullying.
I figure we're only disagreeing on what the facts probably are, right?
It just seems like a peculiar thing to occur to her as a grievance
When you're a kid dealing with an asshole, anything can become a grievance.
My younger sisters had a lot of complaints about each other that sounded trivial to anyone else's ears, but which were often rooted in something real. "Mom, she's breathing funny," sister 1 complains. Well, that's silly and trivial, right? But sister 2 was breathing oddly just to get a rise out of sister 1, and sister 1 resented it.
If the Laptop Vigilante asked me for a cup of tea, I could see him doing it in such a way that made me want to throw it in his face. The Vigilante may have many wonderful qualities, but the only thing we actuallyknow about him is that he's proud of being an asshole.
I don't see the act as abusive, but it's definitely a warning sign. Aggressive use of a lethal weapon to establish discipline? It doesn't matter that it wasn't in her presence or directed at an inanimate object; guns are symbolic to the slowest of us.
The video now has >14M views and the demographic of those who would bother to push a like dislike on a YouTube video is coming out 13:1 in favor.
I'm amazed that this thread has been so on-topic. I haven't even been interested enough in it to stick with the youtube video beyond halfway through the ad that precedes the youtube video. Anyway, while clicking on links out of distraction, I went to the guy's FB page and saw that his cover photo is from "myFBcovers.com" which suggests that he did not actually take a nice picture of some place that looks like it's located in the south Pacific himself.
"...we cannot enter into and sympathize with the excessive self-estimation of those characters in which we can discern no such distinguished superiority. We are disgusted and revolted by it; and it is with some difficulty that we can either pardon or suffer it: We call it pride or vanity; two words, of which the latter always, and the former for the most part, involve in their meaning a considerable degree of blame." (Theory of Moral Sentiments)
Backing up a bit to helpy-chalk's comment, I would asy that the best way to teach one's kid how to internalize rules of conduct is to have internalized them oneself. I take the parent in question as claiming to operate by rules of `don't waste' and `don't air dirty family laundry', but he's flagrantly breaking both rules himself. It takes a lot of self-discipline to make `hierarchy above all' and `retaliate twofold' generate a pleasant world.
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Ugh, this single-parenting thing is so tiring. I get my energy up and decide "OK, LET'S PLAY!" and join them on the floor and feel pretty pleased with how present I am. I'm such a great parent, look at me! Then I realize "FIVE MINUTES?! IT'S ONLY BEEN FIVE MINUTES?" Parenting is the slowest longest task on earth.
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Parenting is only slow for the unarmed.
Or people with constipated babies. Have you tried slipping them some pureed plums?
628: But your kids will be totally grateful for your efforts when they're teenagers.
622 - I have a feeling I may have been on the receiving end of more irrational complaints from a child/teenager than you have, LB. Sadly, I wouldn't be at all surprised to have a cup of tea metaphorically thrown in my face, and I'm no caffeine-fueled slavedriver. It has probably warped my perception.
I'm with Asilon. As a teenager, I would have been perfectly capable of scrapping for examples of how I was exploited and inflating the occasional request for coffee-while-you're-up into help-I'm-being-oppressed!
Quick, somebody shoot heebie's laptop!
And, I'm sure he's a dick, too. Whoever said above that he probably asks in such a way that it makes you want to throw the coffee in his face.
Shoot it with cupid's arrow...my laptop's in LUV!
My younger sisters had a lot of complaints about each other that sounded trivial to anyone else's ears, but which were often rooted in something real. "Mom, she's breathing funny," sister 1 complains. Well, that's silly and trivial, right? But sister 2 was breathing oddly just to get a rise out of sister 1, and sister 1 resented it.
This kind of thing starts happening less frequently when all parties involved are summarily given a bunch of pushups to do for bothering me/interrupting my coffee with nonsense.
639 to 636.
I think my kids would laugh at me if I ordered push UPS. And then I'd have to shoot them.
Too bad we can't do a clean experiment with the same thing recorded by some guy wearing UMC business casual clothing, sounding like a network anchor, and using a sledgehammer. I bet the reaction would be totally different.
Someone very charismatic, who eventually shoots the computer with an arrow. And the computer falls in LUV!
634 Do you know, maybe I am a TERRIBLE parent, because I don't even ask for coffee-while-you're-up - sometimes I will send them to the kitchen to make tea even though they weren't up.
Maybe I'm a terrible parent because I'm prepared to spend the rest of the late afternoon sedating the kids with TV. Not just any TV, but Super Why, one of the stupidest programs ever.
Someone very charismatic, who eventually shoots the computer with an arrow. And the computer falls in LUV!
It's not Valentine's Day yet. Hold your horses.
How many times can Hokey Pokey crap in one day? About five. Today he has wailed to be picked up, or been being carried, or has crapped himself and wants changed. That's the entire day in the life of (poor, sick, snotty) Hokey Pokey. Oh yeah, and pigging out on ketchup.
Too bad we can't do a clean experiment with the same thing recorded by some guy wearing UMC business casual clothing, sounding like a network anchor, and using a sledgehammer. I bet the reaction would be totally very slightly different.
When a former student's FB status says "Who wants to help the boys finish three handles? Yes, this is a serious question," I don't actually think they're talking to me.
646: My concerns are not valid, I see.
one of the stupidest programs ever
The competition is fierce and plentiful. And thank god for stupid television that makes them sit still.
648: Only one way to find out for sure, though.
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Occupy Maine, where much of my last 4 months have gone, was evicted yesterday, and we also found out about the death of one of our occupiers, in a doorway on the outside of town. Its hitting me much harder than I expected, and I have to wake up for work in five hours. On the plus side, I got to join Billionaires for Romney yesterday, when he spoke at get this, Portland Yacht Services.
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My son just bingoed me in Words With Friends with TITTIES. I expressed my disappointment in him for not publishing the achievement to his wall.
641: Angry Dad is explicitly getting cut some slack for his presumed socio-economic attributes, but I don't think people would find the guy in your scenario that much worse. I'm certainly not inclined to cut the shooter much slack, so for me they'd be about the same.
Condolences LRT. That really sucks.
The dad is manifestly a prick, and to whatever degree his daughter is a prick, it's because she was raised by at least one prick. I would expect a debate on the propriety of this on youtube or on the comments section of a local newspaper, but am genuinely surprised to find this issue so controversial here.
654: and we also found out about the death of one of our occupiers, in a doorway on the outside of town
Oh, Light Rail, I'm sorry.
644: I just made my kid turn on the TV because it was too quiet in here. Now I get to listen to her bitch about how stupid some of the crap on TV is. (And I mean "get to" with no irony. I am easily amused.)
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I just got in from watching MASTODON. This means I have no standing to judge adult behaviour, or indeed teenage behaviour. Naturally they were beyond awesome.
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655- Wow, the four year old's spelling skills are pretty advanced.
Wait, 4 is the daughter- younger son is 7? Still, impressive.
It's hard not to read these things through the lens of personal experience
Absolutely true. I find this a bit painful because my dad was a bit of an authoritarian (believing, for example, that a man was the king of his castle; also in peace through strength), but he was also a strong believer in the 'don't air dirty family laundry' rule (Clew at 627), which meant, among other things, that he'd defend the family members to the end, and did in very real ways.
Things get into trouble in nuclear families over time, of course, when outside ideas intrude. Certainly, my bitching at my dad for expecting my mom to wait on him (see 312) came along around when, at age 14-15, I realized that *not everybody's family* expected mom to leap up from the dinner table to get the salt, or whatever was lacking/desired. So I accused my dad of treating my mom like a servant.
This was all in the days before the internet; I'm wondering if there is more tension along such lines in families now that the dissemination of ideas is that much wider.
That's monstrosity to me, partly turning on the TV but mostly destroying that fragile jewel, quiet. Of course, you are not me. I wonder how many families would be happy if tempers weren't mismatched? One of my biggest worries about a hypothetical kid is that we'd get an extrovert.
Clew, there are people who turn on the TV at 7 a.m., for the background noise while they're getting ready for work! I know, right?!
NMM to Whitney Houston. Sad.
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NMM to Whitney Houston (at least per the AP).
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Oops, skipped. Actually to parsimon: I wonder if the internet is making the culture wars more bitter for people who need to be (the monolithic ) normal.
Wow, huh. That's sad. Just today or yesterday I saw some clip of an upcoming movie she's in and had the thought "Huh, I guess she's doing better."
Also, kids are in bed and the door is closed and the baby is asleep and I can ignore everything from here on out! And Jammies gets home tonight!
673: Examples? I was speaking on a very local level: I can't imagine what I might have been saying to FB friends nowadays about my dad, when I was 14. I was very mad at him; at the same time I had already internalized a strong privacy ethic, inculcated by my family. In this day and age, I don't know whether I would have.
Well, you say your opionon of what was OK in the family changed when you found that other families did things differently. The more people publish, even stuff that's not transgressive in the eyes of the publisher (like maybe the OP), the wider the range of possible behavior becomes. And it's harder to live up to the parts of a moral style that are difficult if you fear that the rewards can be unbundled from it.
Forgive me `unbundled', but I can't think of a pleasanter word right now.
Flippanter went out for lunch or brunch some time ago and hasn't reported back in, eh? Eh!
Re 663
Excellent. I expect ears are ringing.
678: Right, okay. Mm, it's difficult to generalize from the experience of adolescents, pubescent teens noticing the wider world for the first time and examining boundaries, to the overall population.
We can hypothesize that the overall population is going through puberty! Or just an education. Because of the internet. Shall we?
667: Middle son is 7. Oldest son is almost 15.
I feel confident that Flip and Lunchy are out for either potato pancakes or Vietnamese food. At a restaurant that requires reservations, because. At this point they're exhausted, since they have appointments for events tomorrow anyway.
Are you implying that they're doing it, right now?
678: The flip side, of course, is the value for people living through bad situations to know that other families do things differently.
rob's 581, as has been noted, is awesome.
Do I want wine badly enough to walk half a mile in the cold? Assume I have bourbon and gin, but no beer.
Lazy defeats all alternatives in my value system. Especially if you have bourbon anyway.
Not with that defeatist attitude.
When the liquor stores close at nine, who can avoid being defeatist.
Sobchak already invoked in this thread, but at dinner my daughter came up with the applicable Lebowski moment: You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.
|| OT: ima video unpleasnt what you odo but that's just the way it is I guess fuckk all that. But who cares anyway?Its true, I started drinking aftrwards. Inclsuding now. JOHN DENVER!
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Shit I hope you werent talking to me```````````
Drunk and spoiling for a fight? This thread could go to 1000, after all.
NMM to Whitney Houston. Sad.
That is sad. Not somebody that I have particularly strong associations with, but far too young to die.
692: Heh. I read the Sobchak comment around lunch today and asked my coworker what it meant: this led to a roughly 30 minute disquisition (on his part) on the joys of The Big Lebowski, during which I kept saying, "I sort of remember that part. Um, yeah, no I don't remember that aspect specifically, though." Apparently I really have to watch The Big Lebowski again; or, some people know it by heart.
I'm impressed by the use of pause and fast-forward symbols in 695.
654: That's really terrible. I hope people can regroup to mourn and plan for new actions. I'm feeling really down on radicals just about now, but they are one of my main social groupings. We haven't had to deal with a death of anyone who wasn't quite old, and in poor health, in the recent past.
I don't have even close to enough bourbon to hit 695-levels.
Can someone be arrestested for public intoixiatcation for commonting drunken ON THE INTERNNET? Cause it's like, public and shit, according to this LOGIC of CERTAIN POEPLE in this THREAD>!
That was me, obviously.
Parsimon: Do you really want to start getting into pop culture memes at this point? It doesn't end with The Big Lebowski, you know.
Seeing TBL on its initial release date at a matinee in Uptown filled with Coen Brothers fans is still one of the highlights of my experience with cinema. Some crossover stuff is not so bad.
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Salmon, peas, onions, ginger, shaoxing wine = tasty.
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YOU DONT HAVE TO HAVE BOURBON IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH GIN.
707: And paleo-friendly, too! Does that mean things went well?
I second 705, although I am not intoxicated...yet.
urple's not for real here, I don't think.
Salmon, peas, onions, ginger, shaoxing wine,
Five little foodies, sitting in a line.
One was a vegan, one gluten free,
One was paleo and didn't like tea,
One was an organic locavore,
And one'd eat anything if he got bored.
I have enough gin, but I don't have more than one lime.
706: Do you really want to start getting into pop culture memes at this point? It doesn't end with The Big Lebowski, you know.
At this point?
I just mean that the man (my coworker) was quoting it line by line, practically. Like a Monty Python film, or Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not awfully virginal, but come on: I don't know Walter's exact lines, and I don't remember what Sam what's-his-name said exactly at the end of the film. I was just a little surprised that co-worker did, and reenacted them for me.
Mrmph. I like TBL. I do, a lot. But I don't know it like Rocky Horror.
I have no way of proving that he isn't, I suppose.
I'm shocked that urple would speak that way about bourbon.
Saw Lebowski on a date once upon a time. Not quite worst date ever, but I really do need to watch it again when I'm not totally annoyed.
His silence is telling, though.
Speaking of Lebowski, two pictures in the flickr pool of the Dude sweater knitted by my wife. Front. Back. The actual sweater from the movie.
722: You and Rory would probably enjoy it together, Di. (My coworker said his kids quote a particular line -- "This is our concern, Walter!" -- all the time. It's like a family thing.)
That is some complicated pattern there.
724: Assume all of the mime jokes from some recent thread repeated here.
Seriously. That's one impressive sweater.
I pray 695 is real.
491/506: NO FUCKING SHIT.
595: she can cook dinner if you teach her what to cook and supervise, or pick something crazy easy and do not supervise. you can help her put the things into the oven/take them out. I think you all know my personal suggestion is roast chicken, rice and frozen peas.
I am more sympathetic to the dad than one might immediately guess. he's a grade a authoritarian asshole, insecure little showoff prick, but he may not be history's greatest monster. he's not drunk when he's making the video, for one thing. he's too confused on the exploding/hollowpoint front to be truly scary along the gun axis. if he had done anything straight-up evil on discovering the offending post he'd be less likely to call attention to it in this way. and the daughter knew he was going to trip out on this and she let him upgrade her computer anyway; that just means he's not scary enough to have inculcated total apparent compliance. so he can't be all that scary. (not to say that a person determined to fuck with you can't always find something to be pissed about, but no way she'd be openly bitching like that if he were a horror.) people that really want to scare you will be scarier than that. let's just take my step-dad for a moment; imagining him with access to youtube I foresee the video running rather differently, in that I would be apologizing profusely, and then shooting my own laptop myself, from some distance, and then being mercilessly mocked for having bad aim.
that said, clearly this shithead could ask you to get him a cup of coffee in a way that would make you want to empty the magazine into his face.
...in a way that would make you want to empty the magazine into his face.
I always shake the subscription cards out before I even carry the mail into the house.
727: There were a lot of "NINETEEN, TWENTY, TWENTY-ONE ..."s* during its making.
*Which means shut-up and go away.
726: It's "This is our concern, Dude." Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Brandt, after the whole caper has started to unravel.
Just want to be clear that I am most certainly NOT an Urban Achiever. Only person I know who is, is a guy I worked on the school paper with, who covered sports and is apparently some kind of soft right Republican. He's also a Dave Matthews fan. So.
Maybe urple's out fighting a stranger in the Alps.
733: Right, there you go. That's exactly what my friend said. After the whole caper started to unravel. I had to have it explained to me, like a child being schooled. Sorry!
shorter lb is right version: we know where she learned to be an entitled, whiny asshole, but only one of them is 15. his momma should've taught him better.
natilo's an urban achiever, everyone! pass it on!
I had to have it explained to me, like a child being schooled.
Did somebody shoot your DVD player?
Better an urban achiever than an urchin bereaver.
735: In case anyone was wondering, The Grey is reportedly even worse that you think. No matter how bad you think a Liam-Neeson-versus-fantasy-wolf movie could be, it is significantly worse than that, according to my housemate, who saw it yesterday.
738: And proud-we-are-of-all-of-them.
That is very sad about Whitney Houston.
I agree with asilon about homework for 9-year olds, but most people tend to disagree with me quite vehemently on this point. "We want our children to succeed" is the usual comeback. And it's never too soon to be worrying about college, after all.
McManus, Emerson has already covered this point, but I think it bears repeating: the idea that human companion (I won't say "owner," I know how you feel about property) to dog is as parent to child = a pretty serious analogy fail.
The analogy only works with respect to precisely that period of existence that you refuse to recognize for humans (that of complete to near-complete dependence upon others for the fulfillment of basic needs), and yet that state is a permanent condition for Fido, not a 'stage of development' for dogs but the canine condition tout court. A dog is basically a domesticated and (therefore permanently and constitutionally) infantilized wolf. Your dogs cannot live without you, bob, or not without some other human to provide food and shelter. They cannot live alone, though they may able to catch a rabbit or a squirrel; they cannot live in the wild: they have been bred to utter dependency upon humans; and an adult dog is no less dependent upon humans than a puppy, though hopefully house-"trained" and probably better behaved. Whereas a human arrives in this world in utter dependence upon other humans, and then has to be educated and socialized (while being fed and clothed and sheltered and etc.), out of that dependence and into some kind of self-sufficiency.
I just had to come out of lurkation to praise 695. It's like old times. JOHN DENVER! So awesome.
Since I'm here--this is the part of a really long thread where you just say anything, right, especially if you're on Pacific time? What I have to say is that my business partner is psychotic. This is totally not really anonymous, I just didn't include my pseud so as not to be searchable or whatever. But I have this wine shop, see, and one partner is in NY and was basically the bankroll (though he happens to be the one who knows most about wine), and the other partner is a walking business disaster who has now basically melted down at me twice, with swearing and anger and everything, in front of her 7-year-old daughter. Going into business with crazy person while separating from spouse: not recommended. Though the funny thing is, having only one of those things going on might just make me sad, but having both going on kind of makes me laugh. It's la comédie humaine, folks! Try the veal! Me, I'ma have some Bourbon.
Sorry to hear that, PaDP. Bourbon sounds like the right answer.
I should probably have included some details. Here's one: she didn't just write bad checks, she wrote a bad check to the very agency that could revoke our license for writing bad checks (she just managed to get the bank to claim it as their error, but then had to send in our license renewal fee via money order). I had to applaud her for that one.
Jeez. Very sorry, dead prez. Best wishes from a non-psychotic NY person who knows a little about wine and loves what you're doing. Definitely have some bourbon.
The thing is, we have really great wines. Ask Blandings and oudemia. Right now, though, Bourbon is what's for dinner. In other news, leftover goat and pigeon was what was for lunch.
See? Here's Blandings now. Dude, the Dressner/Pastor wines are totally where it's at.
Update to 494 et seq.: I -- we -- had a lovely day. Once one isn't thirteen years old, it can be pretty pleasant to feel that way.
Update to 494 et seq.: I -- we -- had a lovely day. Once one isn't thirteen years old, it can be pretty pleasant to feel that way.
I had a tasty Pastor wine from the Canary Islands just this evening.
Was there handholding?
Gallantry silences one.
I don't want to silence Flip--he may have just silenced himself, anyway--but which one, Blandings?
The Juan Matias Torres Vid Sur.
or rather, one wishes to approve of both the loveliness of the day and the gallantry.
I approve of the gallantry, but will take 756 as a "yes, and...".
Damn, our distributor doesn't have that one. I'll need to talk to him about that. I just tasted the Tajinaste the other day, and it was fantastic, maybe my favorite of the Canaries. I totally love taking people to that section and encouraging them to geek out.
Anyway, fess up and tell all, Flip.
holy fuck people, should I just take the rest of the morphine I have now since there's no point unless one wishes to not be in pain or should I tough it out in order to have some for later? DESIRE TO SAW OFF OWN HEAD SPIKING. I am watching stupid shows with 1/2 eye open and only peeking at words periodically. I worked a full day yesterday and I thought I could do it again if I got 12 hours of sleep, but nooooooooo.
FUCK EVERYTHING I HAVE HAD A FUCKING MIGRAINE FOR 9 WEEKS.
Holy fuck, al. I'm sorry. Maybe you could saw off my business partner's head instead.
tell all that is consistent with gallantry, flip, because it may amuse me. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GO BACK TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL AREN'T I.
What you really want from Pastor, if you don't already have it, is the Luiz Rodriguez Ribeiro.
Is there anything to be done for chronic migraine suffering? It just sounds so wretched. Are there even any crazy alternative theories more appealing than "Let me hook you up to this old car battery. OK, Earl, put the pedal to the metal"?
772: there is some crazy shit involving botox, I believe. also, I am giving up and going to the pain specialist. something fentanyl patch mumble something.
there is some crazy shit involving botox, I believe
Oh yeah, I just heard about this from a friend of mine who went through something similar last year. FWIW, it seems to have worked for her.
||
The Voyager's record carried greetings in 55 languages, including a folksy one in Amoy, a Chinese dialect, which was translated as: "Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time."
Oh, great.
|>
Heh. I read the Sobchak comment around lunch today and asked my coworker what it meant: this led to a roughly 30 minute disquisition (on his part) on the joys of The Big Lebowski, during which I kept saying, "I sort of remember that part. Um, yeah, no I don't remember that aspect specifically, though." Apparently I really have to watch The Big Lebowski again; or, some people know it by heart.
If you don't know Lebowski by heart, you really have to watch it again. Also, fun fact: any board game can be converted into a drinking game by requiring players to recite a line from the film before their turn. If they screw it up, or repeat a previously used line, they drink.
695 JOHN DENVER!
Yes, John Denver, remind me why I'm flying to a snowy mountain town in February. What was I thinking?
Anyway, 695 is the best comment in the history of the internets, but 751, 771: yay!
So sorry, Dead Prez. That is shitty.
Yeah Flip and Lunchy! Now touch her heinie.
After catching up on the last couple of hundred posts: woohoo handholding and drunk-commenting; boo migranes, crazy business partners, Occupy Maine evictions and deaths, and whatever happened to Whitney Houston.
[W]hatever happened to Whitney Houston.
Drugs are bad.
779.2: I thought it was a bit early yet, but if the august body of Unfogged commenters thinks it's time to get handy, who am I to dissent?
Well, did you graze her heinie under the pretext of cramming into a cab or a full subway car yet?
Do you for some reason think of me as the sort of fellow who wears a pinky ring?
Just - slowly, drunkenly - catching up, but I love that we apparently have a cage match between those two great trolls of Unfogged, Emerson & Bob. It's like... Ali and that other guy. Or something. I dunno.
Oh, hey, if we're all getting bored because Flippanter is gonna totally marry Lunchy and have a million babies, I have an ATM dating question, having made out with a girl tonight.
I have an ATM dating question, having made out with a girl tonight.
If you want, email me and we can make a big deal out of it.
I have an ATM dating question....
"Be excellent, be desireless, and be gone."
Shit, no, it's not serious enough for a real ATM, it's more, well, since Flip is so clearly almost married: Ok. So...
We danced, we talked, she took me to her super sekrit after party, we talked; at the end of the night, she went home to her bf., but that's totally cool, because, you know, San Francisco--
Anyway. She's free Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was thinking of suggesting we go see Shame, because I'm all about having us discuss a 30-something man fill his empty, meaningless life with sex, but apparently she hates movies. There was a thought about her meeting me for coffee in the UHB outpost in my neighborhood.
Anyway. So I have no idea what to suggest. Either 140-character SMSes or emails are valid. I'm going to get completely drunk tomorrow, but I should definitely contact her tomorrow night at the latest, so I'm cool with outsourcing this to The Mineshaft and just using the best suggestion.
If you don't know Lebowski by heart, you really have to watch it again consider yourself immune to it's charms.
I tried watching it again in reaction to the cultists but I just fell asleep.
Oh, and hey, she just texted me. Eeep!
What'd she say? Don't respond until you consult us.
"Thanks for a lovely finish to what was promising to turn into a perfectly dreadful evening. Hope you remember who I am when you read this ;-)."
Shit. I've already forgotten why it was going to be a dreadful evening. Fuck, fuck.
at the end of the night, she went home to her bf., but that's totally cool, because, you know, San Francisco--
Yeah, well, sometimes. Other times, it turns out you're a HOMEWRECKER.
(Too late; I responded with banalities.)
Don't respond until you consult us.
Don't take their our advice! Just play it cool like Opinionated Peter O'Toole.
Other times, it turns out you're a HOMEWRECKER.
No judgments! Unless you're Claire Danes, in which case (i) Homeland wasn't bad and (ii) what does Billy Crudup use in his hair?
Other times, it turns out you're a HOMEWRECKER.
I'm just listening to this and feeling melancholy but badass.
794: Better than responding with bananas.
More seriously: there was discussion of polyamory; comparative constitutionalism; wishing one were more genderqueer than one actually feels inclination towards; the tensions between BDSM & radfem theory--basically, everything that gets me hot and bothered. Sigh.
799: I am, and have always been, in awe of your mastery of the interwebs.
(Oh, and we kissed a bunch, and it was awesome.)
This sounds like wonderful future fodder for Unfogged. Please don't screw this up.
This sounds like wonderful future fodder for Unfogged. Please don't screw this up.
I have no idea what you might be thinking of.
(Sorry, for the benefit of any newbie lurkers who haven't RTFA.)
Is 800 Halford-bait or what?
Halford-bait? Moi? Again, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Anyway, in your next text, call her "slut" affectionately.
there was discussion of polyamory; comparative constitutionalism; wishing one were more genderqueer than one actually feels inclination towards; the tensions between BDSM & radfem theory
San Francisco: you're everything I thought you'd be!
810: noooooooo it's not true. I promise it isn't all like that.
810, 811: Many years ago my wife and I were in San Francisco and spent an evening out on the town with an old college friend that went swimmingly and was a lot of fun. He, however spent the latter part of the evening repeatedly insisting, "This is wrong. This isn't the way it is." He now seems to be happily married and living in Rochester NY.
Although we did not discuss polyamory.
Look, I lived in SF for years and loved it, had some great times. But, uh, perhaps trapnel and I appreciated different things about it. Is how I could put it.
Hippie.
And now I need to get a few hours' sleep before today's brunch.
Man, x. trapnel's story reminds me that I have for a while been wanting to describe my current relationship-oriented BAD DECISIONS to the Mineshaft for your amusement and the opportunity to shame me, but only once I figure out how best to anonymize my IP address (since I know the front-pagers are looky-loos).
Honestly, what I love about it is the weather. I decided to take a detour home from work, and bike up an unnecessary mountain! It was awesome! But the other stuff is great, too.
This is me not looking at your IP address. But if you're serious enough about anonymity that having the posters be able to see who you are worries you, I'd think hard about getting chatty about your problems: most commenters are fairly obvious, fairly fast.
(No, I don't work at the Millbrae Pancake House. I wish!)
Well, yes, obviously.
(works to 820 or 821)
Shit, I should ask if they're hiring. MPH, I mean.
I honestly almost never look up people who are posting presidentially. There have been one or two occasions when I decided it was ok, but it's super rare.
I promise it isn't all like that.
It totally is.
You have two projects named...?
Oh it is not either. Josh, stop scaring her.
776: Also, fun fact: any board game can be converted into a drinking game by requiring players to recite a line from the film before their turn.
ZOMG I am so doing this.
but apparently she hates movies.
Well, movies and houses are the main problem with relationships, so as long as home ownership doesn't come up you should be in great shape.
830: I object to that. I don't know The Big Lebowski well enough. You laugh while you can, John Big Bootay, I mean Monkey-boy. Uh, I don't give a flying handshake what your name is.
I promise it isn't all like that.
blume, it totally is like that, sorry.
