Introduction part of a longer series of drafts about the novel experience of being a parent, to someone currently best defined as ‘a young child’. I once wrote a lot about my experiences of things, then took a break, and drafted this blog post on a few pages of yellow legal pad, by hand, brought/edited/extended for the internet here. Write It Now and such. This will end up maybe being a series of recommendations and anti-recommendations Please skim, or make judicious use of the anchor links to skip around. I am happy to watch movies/shows with my kid. Because of that, and that I follow their interests, generally, I’ve watched a few movies/shows lately that I wouldn’t normally watch. This blog post started as a single page of handwritten notes about the movie Frozen. Why did you draft a blog post by hand, in this particular format? Often-enough I watch a movie with eden, if it’s a painful-to-me movie, a way I process my feelings/disappointment/anger is by creating something out of it. I also don’t begrudge Eden her taste for the interestingness of things. I get why Frozen is so appealing to kids, that is precisely why, or part of why, I am so frustrated by it. Some of the reasons it’s appealing is perfectly valid, of course. Interesting music, interesting visuals, crunchy-enough story line. Eden has normal-for-young-person taste, and I think sophisticated taste. I love to watch movies with Eden. We’ve watched and enjoyed the movies of Studio Ghibli, over and over. There’s also been a whole bunch of days where the temperature has been extremely cold, like a weekend of a high of four degrees farenheight. On most of the days we’ve gone out side at least a little, but my gosh we’ve been inside a lot lately. I’ll probably find more to say about it at some point. For instance, we’ve seen Ponyo (2009) many times 1, and enjoyed it’s beautiful depictions of all sorts of sea life, dignifying view of the ocean, people who are young, people who are old, the world, the ocean, water, hills, trees, sky, weather, food, independence, and more. We’ve seen many more Ghibli films than just Ponyo, but Ponyo is a good example of a movie that perfectly attracts the interest of a child, and is not demeaning to an adult, and is full of beautiful themes, beautiful depictions of the world, and interesting and exciting movement of the plot through the movie. You might be able to watch it on Amazon Prime right now: Ponyo with English dubs on Amazon Prime Studio Ghibli films are so dignifying and beautiful that to watch them is, to me, like taking a vitamin or going on a walk. It’s so dignifying in so many ways, I’m pleased for anyone to soak in any aspects of those movies. More recently, Eden has begun to get socialized into American media, because (unfortunately) we happen to live in America, and kids references to Paw Patrol and movies like Frozen and Disney and a number of other bits of media intended of kids are ubiquitous. There’s of course a giant commercial industry around making tons and derivative media around Frozen, Paw Patrol, etc. 🤮 Those shows unfairly weaponize kids’ interests and attention spans into something that honestly feels like grooming, and it’s despicable, and anyone involved ought to feel shame for their role in the creation of the piece of media. Truly. I think I’d never watched the movie Frozen until watching it with Eden, and my jaw hit the floor many times. When someone else saw just a few minutes of the movie with us, they also routinely expressed shock at what was in the movie. Strong words Josh, can you back that up? Oh yes. Keep up. I’ve got a media review of Paw Patrol coming up appended to the bottom of this post. Regarding Frozen, I wrote this blog post via paper, as I watched the movie with Eden. She likes to ‘process’ media, usually some of the interestingness she experiences is around knowing what’s coming next, so she gets a lot of enjoyment from re-watching movies. Without further adeui, here’s the notes, with light editing, as I captured them across multiple re-watches of Frozen. I’ll sometimes quote dialogue or a song, and add my reactions to it. I don’t think Eden is unfit to make her own assessments of anything, by the way. She often has astute observations. When we watch a movie, if it’s the first time we’ve seen it or especially later times, I sometimes (SOMETIMES! NOT OFTEN) ask a question like: - what do you think of that person’s tone? can you tell they have anger? can you hear that tension? are they being kind? do you think they are happy? sad? what do you think they are feeling? did that seem safe? what do you think of that music? notes upon watching Frozen Oof, re-reading the notes as I transcribe them here is a trip. Skim, treat the formatting loosely. I don’t dislike only patriarchal themes, I also believe that political authority is a myth, and dislike mononormativity, and moto-normativity. I don’t like jokes in a kids movie that are callbacks to american car culture. Anna, at the beginning, showing that her entire existence revolves around getting chosen by a person to become that persons… property? 🎶 Maybe I’ll be noticed, maybe I’ll find romance? 🎶 Both the children in this show, elsa and anna, experienced a few gnarly things in sequence. emotional abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents, then the parents died, and the kids were raised by… no one? for a few years? Then Anna and Elsa just reunite in advance of a coronation ball? Is a nation really choosing a traumatized child to become their symbolic head? The beauty norms, so painful. sexualizes children, explicitely, as the movie starts with the depiction of these two female protagonists as children, maybe 5, and ends with them supposedly ‘adult’, where someone at disney finds it appropriate to see these people as sexualizable objects. Many parts of the the look is the same, and there is little distinction between how a five year old is being depicted, and an adult. And certainly something appreciable about that distinction might be lost to the viewer of this piece, who is often-enough a child. the ‘big, innocent doe eyes’ gives helpless, shows matching the idealized male gaze of femininity. The skinny arms, impossible waists, over-exaggerated breasts, the belt that profiles hips, butt, and pubic region. Please read Fearing The Black Body. It’s all gross, and has been said by a thousand other people. Frozen normalizes emotional neglect and abuse. The dad (before his death) repeats over and over “suppress your emotions, conceal yourself, don’t show things” to Elsa, and then _coercively destroys her and anna’s memories to hide their own past from themselves”. Identical to how supremacists ‘cleanse’ the history of their victims, to hide from the victims the extent of their own abuse. In literally every single interaction between Elsa and Anna, for much of the movie, Elsa ends a conversation with violence. Anna keeps saying “She wont’ hurt me, we’re family”, normalizing the idea that not only is it acceptable to overlook clear harms and mistreatment from someone because they are family, that it’s in fact good to end up dying as a result of their misdeeds. later, Elsa attempts to murder Anna via proxy by creating a vicious snow monster that, among other things, throws Anna off of a cliff. As soon as the snow monster lept into frame, the first time we saw it, Eden’s whole body stiffened up and she said “i don’t like that”, and we skipped the scene. In all the watchings and re-watchings of this movie, we’ve skipped that scene every time. The “we are family” admonishment is particularly painful to see, because much of the harm that people experience is at the hands of their family members. Parents abusing children, spouses abusing spouses, neglect all around. 2 Jesus, I’m three entries into this, and I’m so angry at supremacists, evangelicals, the family system in which I and others was raised, and the long, long legacy of chattel slavery + the ethnic cleansing of the natives/nations, all by european americans. Frozen normalizes centering the lives of aristocracy, for no reason. It’s dedignifying to children and young adults. This entire movie could be about two people who are, in fact, not members of the nobility or aristocracy. I tell eden “belief in kings and queens and this ‘ruler’ stuff is a mental affliction experienced by some people who live in this country right now”. It’s extremely annoying when Anna bullies others because she is assuming a magical authority by right of ‘royalty’. […] The ‘simple’ townsfolk are depicted as experiencing a naive giddy joy about the castle ‘opening its gates’ and a party. I am not interested in watching the self-aggrandizing fantasies of the ruling class. 🤢 The townsfolk: “It’s corination day!” or “The castle gates are open!!!” Studio Ghibli, every single one of it’s movies, are infinitely more dignifying, and comprehendable to children. I feel ANGRY that the seemingly nice person Anna meets after her first song (who also commits an act of traffic violence, running her over with his horse) actually is a con man who goes on to almost kill Anna at the end of the movie!!!!! OUT OF SPITE! I get to explain to my three year old what ‘willfull betrayal’ is, and why this person who seemed good is in fact now being ‘bad’. […] More family BS: Frozen pushes a message: Family would never hurt you, family is more important than everything, thus accept mistreatment’ Frozen reinforces a colonizers mindset: No one indicates awareness of the subject class, or a displaced/enslaved people. (Compare this to Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke) Anna displays helplessness, self-abandonment, needs saving because of something inherent in her femininity, not because her key support structures hurt her and abandoned her when she was a young child, including her parents, which is what actually happened. Cristof is written to be obsessed with who posseses her. “You got engaged???” or “She’s engaged!” as the only distinctive things he can note about her. Her status vis-a-vis another male. It’s painful to behold the dehumanization. In Frozen, nearly every interaction between two people who presumably have penises is an interaction mediated by dominance. It is inherent to being a man, to try to dominate someone else, and if you don’t dominate them, you’re getting dominated. Yes, this is a movie intended for children. But it’s also being watched by their parents. Every message this movie purports to send about the experience of being human makes the world a worse place. […] Anna, upon meeting a new and novel, sentient, non-threatning being pretends to surprise to justify kicking off its head, anna and cristof written to be disgusted by Olaf’s injured state, saying things like “eeeewwwww its head” or “eeeewwwwww it’s body”. When Anna puts Olaf’s head back on Olaf’s body, it first goes on wrong, then she flips it over, and Olaf thanks her. Talk about supremacist fantasy. That’s what a supremacist would love - devestate an indigenous people, then, when slightly repairing the harm caused by that supremacist, they want to be earnestly thanked by the victim. supremacists expect to be thanked by their victims for the abuse they meted out. 3 Frozen plays ethnic tropes regularly, as supporters of colonialsm. Non-state people as backwards, un-understandable, fractal variations of the ‘magical negro’ trope. […] Cristof is depicted as being seen by the trolls as an obviously superior being. #supremacy The whol movie is obsessed with romance take away romance between the protagonist and ‘love interests’ and there is hardly a plot move remaining. Obviously fails the bechdel test. The entire movie is settler colonialist propaganda. erasing the existance of anyone/thing existing before they showed up. Frozen II is vastly worse. Normalizes women as property, belonging exclusively to someone else, never to themselves. Troll song about Cristof is :vomit:, ‘shipping’ him and anna, without anyone’s consent. When he says “BUT SHE IS SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY, THATS WHY SHE CANNOT BE MY PROPERTY” the trolls say “Eh, that claim of property is weak, you can totally own her.”. Agriculturalist, state-supporting. ‘true love’ :vomit: side-note, as I’m writing this blog post a while after writing the original paper notes. got bored of the movie quickly. We would rewatch it, skipping more and more of the movie, and now when we put on Frozen we may only watch the two main songs. the opening song sung by Anna, and _Let It Go, of course._ Frozen makes white people look like royalty, or makes royalty look like white people. Frozen depicts impalement as a joke. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUUUUUUUUCK. Someone wrote a scene with Olaf getting impaled, indirectly, by Elsa, and it’s supposed to be read as a joke, not a reference to a horrific act of violence. I talk with eden through these movies. Sometimes extensively. She’ll initiate conversation or I will. She appreciates my help skipping the scenes she doesn’t like (vicious wolves, violent snow creatures attacking others, soldiers fighting and trying to kill each other with blades and arrows) We discuss themes of adults controlling kids, neglecting kids, coercion, support of the state, the myth of ‘true love’. Settler colonialists suppress the sexuality they ‘allow’ themselves to express, and obviously suppress/exploit the sexuality of the ‘other’, and then do strenuous mental gymnastics to justify the whole thing. Please see The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia The troll song about Cristof says “He’s a bit of a fixer upper”. This normalizes ‘weaponized incompetence’ and enmeshment and self-abandonment. I wonder which of the creators of Frozen are being horrific partners to their partners, and expecting the other partner to just keep accepting bad behavior. Cristof says ‘but shes engaged to someone else’, normalizing marriage, monogamy, ‘possessive’ love’, ‘true love’ Frozen has incredible violence, casual malevolence, and betrayal. Anna is so unwise, high conflict, needlessly provocative. (Throws a snowball at the snow creature created by Elsa, after being violently thrown out of Elsa’s ice palace, and the snow creature throws her off a cliff! instead, what if she read the room, said ‘ew, i hate how my sister is treating me, i am out of here’ and ran away/escaped) … I will write something dedicated about Suzume, the movie, soon. It’s the perfect drop-in replacement for Frozen. Just watch Suzeme, never watch frozen. I watched parts of it with Eden, while she was in her Frozen era, and wept with it’s beauty. I’d love to do a bunch of screenshots, or snippets of scenes, to help illustrate a point. There’s obviously things challenging to convey about a musical through the written word, especially if you’ve not seen the movie(s) in question, or recently. My notes contain ‘call outs’ to parallel/comparing/contrasting themes between Frozen that really shows the intellectual/emotional un-self-conscious poverty of the people involved with Frozen. The city-scape differences of Frozen and Paw Patrol and the cities/towns/landscapes of Ghibli. You, and I, would be right to anger about the built environment in the world today, and it’s parallels in the landscapes of Frozen. Enough people in the USA have forgotten there ever was a good streetcar network in every town, so they forgot the kinds of trips and adventures and places enabled by those infrastructures. Multiple acts of traffic violence, and car propaganda. Phrases like “Oh noooo, I just paid it off” (a sled, upon witnessing it’s explosive, fire-ball-containing destruction after falling off a cliff after being CHASED BY WOLVES!), comments about treating it in a certain stereotypical way that mimics propaganda about cars, the fact that a sled explodes after falling off a cliff after being chased by wolves, all because this random helpless white woman threw political weight and threats of violence at someone, demanding that they head into the dangerous, cold night, causing catastrophe after catastrophe, because she felt obligated to other people’s obedience. The movie ends with Anna buying Cristof’s forgiveness by buying him a car. It’s a sled, in the movie, but obviously in the minds of the writers, it’s a car. […] “you should wait out here”, she’s so pushy to Olaf and Cristof and Sven, who have supported her well through difficult times, as she heads into the demonstrably dangerous territory of interacting with her sister. Abandon your friends who show support of you, to receive more hurt from a family member? elsa is dangerous, over and over, to anna. So dangerous. To rely on family binds makes all this worse. the sexualization of children. Cristof says something, she makes a breathy “I like it fast!”, seeming to make a nod to aggressive sex? Again, this is horrifying. Big breasts, the eyes, eyebrows, lips. Cristof, looking at elsa’s ice palace, he is an ice professional, says “its so beautiful I could cry” and Anna says, derisively, “Go ahead… i won’t judge”. Which directly gives judgement for the sentiment, how did this make it into the script. That was basically the single most dignifying, humane line in the entire movie, and the female lead brushed it off, encouraged emotional suppression, and issued more demands. Stuiod Ghibli films/Suzume is full of reasonable moments of people displaying nice rapt attention to mundane, beautiful nature, of course to WITNESS AN ICE PALACE WOULD MOVE ONE TO TEARS and Disney literally attacks someone who displayed an emotional response to beauty. I wish the entire concept had been cut, OR she had given a non-abusive response to his exclamation. Elsa’s power was plainly mishandled by her caretakers. She obviously has tons of creative potential, it’s a powerful tool, she just was shamed and attacked and tortured from a young age to think she had no power. She could have done useful things for her community, or made things of beauty, and ease, like parks, sculptures, slides, maybe some sort of perpetual motion machine to unburden the townspeople of some labor. If one can fabricate heavy things effortlessly anywhere in space, the potential is unbelievable and it’s dedignifying to kids and adults to act like demanding that she hide her power is at all a reasonable response. She also didn’t need to be doing work or a slave of capitalism bc she has a rare/valuable skill-set. What if she cared for children, because they found her entertaining? Put on free, funny outdoor shows using animated characters for the entertainment of all? to believe that erasing someone’s memories of their own power is reasonable enough to model in a movie is disrespectful to children. I’d like to add that Eden has me skip large parts of Frozen, because it’s scary. We no longer skip the part with the wolves, but did early on. Elsa creates a sentient snow monster that tries, plausibly, to kill the other party. The whole movie could be her doing cool stuff for the entire town, as an inventor/creator/artist/advocate/engineer. Eden has me skip the snow monstor part. Also there’s a part where soldiers attack Elsa in her tower, we skip that part. Wild to make a kids movie and inject war into it. the entire troll meme is offensive, based on a bunch of supremacist stereotypes about non-domesticated people groups. Olof, about cristof: “He is crazy”, jokes about taking off clothes, then being written to push agricultural marriage norms. to anna: “why are you holding back from such a man” (!!!???!!!) More on Frozen, from a subsequent re-watch i’ve got a few pages of notes from multiple re-watches of Frozen Are Producer/writers trying to hide their own misdeeds? Are we seeing deep into their subconcious? The normalization of emotional mistreatment makes me concerned for the personal lives of all who were involved with crafting this movie. 🎼 people do bad things when scared or tired or stressed… but throw a little love their way… [and you can maybe influence them to not harm you, themselves, or others JFC!!!] I’ll link to that song. here it is, ‘fixer upper This is the normalization of abuse. It could have been: “People get stressed and tired and scared, but if they use that to justify violence or intimidation of you, you can call them at least in your own mind on the bullshit” I skip all the overt violence for Eden, as she requests me to do, and its still so violent. prison-based motifs, arrows, implied impalement death, violent and intimate at the same time. In one scene anna is lying her entire body down on the person who she just met and later betrays her, and this moment of uncomfortable closeness she experiences becomes a joke and justification for later pushy behavior. “true love” meme makes me hurt each time it’s mentioned. so de-dignifying. To eden, I ask “Did that surprise you?” often enough. She will say yes or no, and sometimes why, often enough. I firmly believe she enjoys being able to anticipate what is coming in a story line, and how reasonable of a thing to enjoy, eh? In a world one has inhabited for only a few years, one can anticipate/predict what is happening next, in certain situations? How interesting. [^questions-for-kids] [^questions-for-kids]: I have a draft of ‘words I do and do not use with eden’. ‘was that surprising’ and ‘did you anticipate that happening before it happened?’ are rich, rich phrases. I do not use words that convey an expectation for things like obedience, compliance, obligation, authority. I don’t say ‘good job’ or ‘good work’, I say ‘that looked interesting’, or ‘that looked tricky’, or ‘i could see you thinking about that’ or ‘that was so smooth’ or ‘was that interesting to you?’ or ‘what did you like about that?’ or ‘I appreciate how you did {thing}’. It’s a very rich and active experience, to watch movies with her. It’s not turning a show on and tuning out of the experience. We often-enough have it going in the background, too, as other things happen, the normal movements of life. I don’t put a special magical power around “watching TV”, and I help her have a good, curated, enjoyable experience of the media. My own childhood was filled with this strange magical gatekeeping around screens, plus shame, plus never actually being interested in the stuff I found interesting. Once she’s digested a movie, it quickly becomes vastly less interesting to her, and if there is anything else interesting going on, she’ll attend to it. Sometimes she creates the more interesting thing (painting, playing, climbing on things) sometimes I create it (she’s happy to participate in anything like cooking, loves it when friends visit, loves to accompany me to a climbing gym or a park or a playground, she enjoys throwing and catching games, etc.) I take children seriously. Sometimes people witness it, and are obviously stunned by the kinds of cool interactions they witness. I’ll ask Eden very specific, detailed questions, they obviously think she’s incapable of hearing it or giving a thoughtful response, or of offering her own spontaneous thoughts, and they’re shocked sometimes. It’s always entertaining. I can hear her a little more clearly than someone who’s unfamiliar with her mannerisms and cadence and specific words for things, but when she tells me something, when I relay it with a small dose of translation, they’ll sometimes show with surprise how clear and reasonable they find the statement. During a movie (like Frozen) I’ll sometimes say something like ‘hmm, I don’t like how that person is speaking to that person. seems mean.’ or something like that. She also will clock, sometimes, when one person is speaking meanly to another. I really, really approve of her being sensitive in these ways. I don’t want her to think she needs to endure someone speaking meanly to her, or if she cannot escape the situation (common, when an adult is speaking meanly to one or many children) she at least will clock it as the adult’s misbehavior, rather than something brought on by her fundamental wrongness, for instance. A few thoughts about a delightful, wonderful, beautiful movie called Suzume THIS movie is the one that I’m thrilled for Eden to have in her mind. It’s not a little kids movie, so while we’ve seen most of it, together, we had to skip lots of it and some parts of it are (understandbly) not interesting to her, so it’s not in the rotation with the same level of ‘play it again’ as some other movies currently are._ It wouldn’t surprise me if someday this movie gets seen many, many times around here. Here’s the synopsis: 17-year-old Suzume’s journey begins in a quiet town in Kyushu when she encounters a young man who tells her, “I’m looking for a door.” What Suzume finds is a single weathered door standing upright in the midst of ruins as though it was shielded from whatever catastrophe struck. Seemingly drawn by its power, Suzume reaches for the knob…. Doors begin to open one after another all across Japan, unleashing destruction upon any who are near. Suzume must close these portals to prevent further disaster. The stars. The sunset. The morning sky. Within that realm, it was as though all time had melted together in the sky–guided by these mysterious doors, Suzume’s journey to close doors is about to begin. Suzume, made in 2023. here’s a trailer I’ve now seen it a few times, and found it deeply moving. I remember weeping through the end of it the first time, and again the second time. I’ve only seen portions of it with Eden since then and have not been moved to tears subsequently, but I doubt that I’ve shed all the tears I’ll ever shed watching it. In Suzume, a young female protagonist travels around japan in an attempt to achieve certain goals (just like elsa/anna) and has normal interactions with the people she encounters along the way. There are so many parallels between suzume and frozen, and in every single point of comparison, suzume shows itself to be able to be serious, dignified, and frozen shows lack of seriousness. more Suzume notes OK, these are all written out on yellow legal pad, I’m gonna draft the suzume stuff here, it might get its own post later, I wrote all these notes over the last…. at least a few weeks, I really want to get it written and done […] I’m so pleased to watch this movie compared to Frozen. so much healthier interpersonal stuff. Mom/daughter, aunt/niece, friend/friend, adult/kid, kid/kid interactions. No one gets insanely betrayed by someone who is first presented as kind and safe. (Talking about Frozen.) Features the real devestation of the loss of a parent. Also says ‘the world is made safer by feeling fully what you are feeling’, instead of frozen’s ‘let it go, the past is in the past’, ‘suppress your emotions’ motif. here’s a trailer, and here’s the delightful theme song. I’ve listened to this so many times. features a strong (like, actually strong) female lead, as a non-sexualized child. her childness is far more often a factor than her feminine-ness. (unlike frozen) it’s a coming of age trip, with strong built tension. there are even scenes comparable to ‘violence’ and ‘aggression’ but are not the absolute idiotic, fabricated drivel that is frozen. There’s intense expressions of power, force, resistance. Helps if you’ve seen/are able to appreciate Studio Ghibli films. creators love and understand cities. In one scene, a downstairs shop owner helps provide access for Suzume to Souta’s apartment. Jane jacobs, talks about this phenomina directly. this is what american-style ethnic cleansing stole from us. American-style ethnic cleansing literally wants/wanted to eliminate the ‘upstairs residence downstairs shop’ pattern, from all cities. American movies usually depict the americanized urban spatial form of suburbs/single family housing mixed with ‘downtown’ city cores and massive, car-choked streets connecting everything. There’s certainly not people walking around on streets. This is all handled correctly in Suzume Eden is sometimes activated with fear. Scrambles into my lap, shamelessly, and keeps watching. I check in if scared, or she wants to skip this part, she says ‘no’ fully credibly, so we continue. (sometimes she says yes, of course, and I skip the scene). She crawls back out of my lap when the scene ends, back and forth, this goes away as she gets familiar with a movie. I find it charming, cute, and useful for her to experience (without being shamed) fear, the safety that comes from responding to it, experiencing an adult as attentive and helpful, and then the ebbing away of that fear. I have a single memory of a scary scene I saw as a kid, it shook me and my dreams for weeks and months, and as I was watching this movie with my dad, I don’t think it crossed his mind that anything had happened. I was young, it was an Indiana Jones movie, a skeleton erupted from a wall with an arrow embedded in an eye socket. I still remember the scene. 🤮 I don’t like the english dubs a lot, vs. original audio + subtitles, this is the first time I’ve seen it with the english dubs, of course it’s far more accessible to Eden when it’s in English, though she watched a lot of the movie in the japanese, when the original audio is all I had. beautiful, beautiful depictions of indoors and outdoors places. I think Eden ‘processes’ a movie across re-watches, and easily departs the movie or skips it, once it’s no longer interesting or novel to her, in a reasonable way. I value these kinds of times, even though other people criticize it. I’m not a ‘quality time’ person, though I do care about it. I simply also happen to prize the mundane time, too. I protect us from unwanted pressure, trips, rushing, restraining, limiting. I want to see her practice feeling seen as fundamentally good and trustworthy, and her instincts for what she wants as being taken as reasonable things. She will confidently and enjoyably watch something, then, when done, herself close the laptop and move on to the next thing. Sometimes we have real grieving that happens over what happens when we cannot watch something right now, and again, I take that grief (and the opportunity to witness it and hold emotional space for her in it) seriously. She enjoys naming when some part is coming. it’s a form of readying herself for scary parts, sometimes. I see it through a lense of helping her build inner resources to deal with the tricks that adults will sometimes play in moves to get a certain response from you, with or without your permission. (jump scares, certain bits of dialogue). Complaints about other hard-to-avoid-here/now shows I don’t begrudge Eden for anything that she finds interesting. She knows I’m down for everything that’s interesting to her, and will help maximize her enjoyment of it. (Skipping the scary parts, if any, starting/re-starting the desired bits of media) I’ll pus Paw Patrol eden happens to really like paw patrol. Again, understandable, from a toddler’s point of view. I feel nothing but contempt and derision for every adult involved in the production of this show. It’s canadian, paid for by the canadian state, and ruthlessly reinforces authority, authoritarianism, political control, single family housing, and a very machanistic/industrialized view of nature. Extremely car-centric, celebrates all things involving engines, and vastly supportive of police, policing. (slave patrollers, slave patrolling) [deep breath] I’ve written a little/lot about zoning, and how I perceive zoning to be precicely enough how america did/does things that round to ethnic cleansing. I wrote the above upon discovering a certain document that is what got enshrined/encoded in Ambler vs. Euclid, in 2926. Virtually every zoning ordinance that exists in America is rooted in some way in that document, in a way that seems clear to me from a few different frames.4 So, it’s not exclusively american, but it’s some distillation of something representing the ideas of european-american-passing decendents of immigrants, and their idealized sense of social control, or whatever. It’s unfair how disney/ppl like this grab the attention in an unfair, gross way, then fills the story with colonialism, authoritarianism, pro-deputized slave patrol propaganda!. Eden likes it, and knows that I really don’t like it, so often we’ll reach great compromises. She’ll simply choose a different show she wants to watch. (E, to me: “put on {other show}. I choose it for you, because it doesn’t have police or cars”. me: “wow, gladly, i appreciate your thoughtfulness about what is easy or not so easy for me to watch.”) And paw patrol still sometimes is played. No sweat either way. specific complaints the ‘patrol’ obviously references police, policing, the concept of ‘going on patrol’, and always a ‘patrol’ is virtually synonymous with a supremacist occupying force controlling with violence and intimidation the ‘native’ peoples. In america, many police interactions are the slave-patrolling action of policing jaywalking. In killed by a traffic engineer, the author mentioned that at one point in time, something like 40,000 people were arrested for ‘jaywalking’ in chicago????? my jaw dropped. I still hope I am wrong. phew, I checked myself, I am wrong. It was Detroit, not chicago, and it was 20,000 people, not 40,000. Here’s a link to all my highlights for this book. Thanks to goodreads, amazon, kindle versions, and the delusion of ‘american police’, we have the proper quote from the book: In the same 1958 report, AAA says that “it is time that we become concerned with pedestrian violations and unwise walking practices” and then highlights all the progress on this issue in cities like Detroit, which arrested 19,765 pedestrians for crossing against the signal but only 8,662 drivers for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. The report noted that San Francisco arrested 165 pedestrians for crossing between intersections as compared to 7,304 drivers arrested for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. But don’t let the numbers fool you; San Francisco also arrested 32,968 pedestrians for public intoxication. Thus, i leave it as an exercise to the reader to infer my opinions for what is sometimes called ‘police’, in the greater united states. Here’s my thoughts on ‘jaywalking’ Therefore, because in the USA, where this show is being consumed (even though it’s created by a canadian group, and because of the internet, and colonialism, undoubtedly this show is being requested/demanded beyond the united states, so i bet people in countries victimized by american armies get to watch their kids want to watch this show), the origins of ‘police departments’ was to deputize the existing slave patrols. The very concept of deputization is sorta religeous (“here, random person, have a stamped piece of metal. Affix to your shirt, you now have magical powers”), and simply conceeds so much that doesn’t justify that concession. (“the state”, “authority”, “retributive justice”, AND THE LIVED EXPERIENCE of people on both sides of that police power, like the story told in Killers of the Flower Moon) not only ought one to appreciate police as slave patrolling, but that this role of slave patroller/deputized slave patroller filled a desperately needed position in society. what was that position, that role? maintaining the suppression of ‘slave rebellions’, also known as ‘people of the global majority taking minimum steps to slightly reduce the daily oppression of themselves and their loved ones’. So, ‘slave patrol’ energy is strong in American policing. not only are police slave patrollers. not only were they needed/wanted by american society. other energies got rolled into American policing, too. Slave patrolling dealt with only one of the two primary fears of european americans. Displacing native populations was also critical to the formation/survival of that group of european-american white-passing immigrants! Killers of the Flower Moon, mentioned above, is a good-enough sample of the experience of the people who lived in the greater united states before the immigrants arrived with political authority. For someone else’s experience of the same people group, I invite a read of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. here’s my kindle highlights One of the roles a slave patrol would fill is simply reminding people that violence could happen at any time, and no tactic (rebellion, passive resistance, fawning) could make any individual safe from harassment. This is why I don’t like to see or hear police (or sirens in general). Every time, it’s a proclamation, piercing the air and walls and consciousnesses of everyone around, that the local ‘slave patrol’ is on the move, willing to mete some coercion, if it feels right. I have a related contempt for fire departments, by the way. Their sirens are ear-splittingly loud, actually damaging to hear from any proximity, disruptive, pierce the city for hundreds and hundreds of meters in all directions from their vehicle, they drive in dangerous and entitled ways, and RAM their way through a city with their vehicles, and like children hold to strange tropes about their own profession, and continue to resist efforts at narrower, safer streets, because some part of the system acts afraid it might not be able to fit their giant vehicles into a small space. God forbid they demonstrate skilled driving or drive around with the kinds of vehicles used _in any other place. So, this show, “Paw Patrol”, constantly venerating the institutions of slave patrollers and people who do not actually contribute good things to society. I say defund fire departments, fund ambulance riders & libraries/librarians. The vast majority of trips fire departments make in their huge ladder trucks are adequately served by an ambulance, and are inspired by american highway supremacy, so like three orders of magnitude of improvement would be trivially gleaned. Not only does paw patrol hold on a giant, childish pedestal the vaunted role of ‘first responder’, it paints a unbelievable depiction of how the world works. Because kids like animals, and kids shows that depicted (for example) the police brutalizing and assaulting an ethnic group might not do so well. So instead, the police, in Paw Patrol, are involved in things like “rescuing a narwhale that got its horn stuck” or “helping guide a sleepy/hibernating bear back to its den”. Paw Patrol features a bumbling mayor and some other sinister wanna-be mayor who plays a trope throughout the show that sparks conflict, when the show needs conflict. Eden is generally unable to appreciate that adults would pour their entire lives into hurting others and controlling them, so some of the tropes in the show goes over her head, or lands with confusion. She has no idea what a mayor is, or why someone with that title would behave in the ways depicted in this show. Another page of notes more nnotes as taken by hand, across various episodes, and days statist, arrogant, high-modernist drivel. “police are helpful”. the world and nature desperately need A WHITE MAN TO TELL EVERYONE WHAT TO DO!!!!! It’s an honor to be given a command and to do it joyfully, and if you do it well enough, a white man might tell you ‘good job’ and scratch you behind the ear as your payment. Ryder passes out TREATS when they do what he says. This show doesn’t even understand real dog training, or indicates that the adults see children as no more sophisticated as dogs, and equally responsive to treats/threats. (Operant conditioning. 😬). (If one gives treats as rewards, one will also give threats as anti-rewards. This is Not Good). Isn’t it funny how ‘treat’ and ‘threat’ are so similar in spelling? Vastly supportive of the 15 tenants/characteristics of european american supremacy culture each pup has a magic backpack that has a machine, claw, gun, shovel, whatever, that because it’s a machine, solves a problem. high modernist, every problem just needs a technology applied to it. Force and mass and movement are magical, no basis in reality. Ryder, a domineering white male, in nearly every line of dialogue, is issuing a command. he is never given orders or direction, even by the pups, never shares/models sharing power or control (remember, that’s one of the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture). Basically fills the authoritative role of ‘god’, or ‘the state’, or ‘benevolent patriarch’. Exercises complete, unquestioning control of the city. constant reinforcement of the concept of role confomity. every aspect of every person’s existance, except for the role they play, is expunged from existance. The role of the patriarch is ironclad. Gives instructions, endlessly, in fake cheerfulness voice. the entire mayor motif i think goes over eden’s head right now, because she is not yet traumatized/inculcated into political authority, where the mayor/political authority motif makes sense to her in the way it ‘makes sense’ to me. childlike love of military vehicles portrayed throughout, by the shows creators. Vehicles modeled on v22 osprey, some ocean lander/transport thing, tanks. TANKS!!!! eden and I talk a lot throughout the show, often enough. Talk about things happening in the show. about the first of TWO MOVIES about Paw Patrol: The Movie which is AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH_ Movie opens with act of traffic violence, same as Frozen. It normalizes people doing things (white-passing men giving orders) to solve nature’s problems with technology. normalizes: ‘bad things’ come from obviously bad people working to nefarous purposes. tons of offensive sterotypes. people/animals need saving by emergency services constantly. they have a hero’s lair, like a marvel movie universe. It’s despicable, I am loath to see it. Iron-man esq suits for all pups, glorifying the power and authority of the state and Authority. Their HQ vehicle launching thing is so fucked. Every pup isn’t just a specialized pup, but gets a specialized vehicle, that they rev the engine on and drive dangerously. A pup says ‘I could get used to this’ about a car before launching the police car through the downtown city, totally devoid of awareness or concern for the people in the roads. that launched police car launches into a traffic jam, and then gets help from a ‘local’, native guide, codes as black, who leads them thru shortcuts. wow wow wow. An iraqi-style MRAV type vehicle gets featured/driven around! By the police! water cannon bombs a territory for their own benefit. (“bombing people is good!”). Normalizes a sense that cops risk themselves to help others. (see Warren v DC, 1981, to see how they really feel about that). Bombs a different agent of the state with water to put out flames. See? Shooting people is good! white sky daddy receives scared police force member. Literal domestic abuse. (performative violence when the mayor is angry at the pups). bluey Australian, funded by the australian government, has lots of similar vibes to a different state-funded show I’ve seen lately. (Paw Patrol). Ruthlessly normalizes suburban, single-family-home, nuclear family concept. monogomous marriage. Fumbling, emotionally disconnected dad, mom ‘momming’ the entire family, including dad. I dislike Bluey less than paw patrol, and plenty of moments in the show are fine/appreciable, but for me the whole thing is hamstrung by the context, the expectation of another terrible thing being normalized. season 3, episode 38 “cubby”. I’m trying to articulate why I don’t actually like bluey, even though so many people say it’s touching. I say it normalizes patriarchy, belief in authority, abuse. dad: “The TV is too small, it’s only 50 inches wide” OMFG, he’s ‘watching the game’ and dissociating from the family. agriculturalism, settled/domestication, marriage = the state, patriarchy = entitlement/obligation. ‘i’ll play this role, you MUST play this other role’ they’re building a play/space/fort out of blankets, a cubby. Dad shows exasperation, annoyance with them. dad plays obvious trope of bumbling, clueless male-figure the fort they built is SO COOL!!!! he didn’t say this once. how did he dissociate from their whole life/project? Bluey episode, 43, ‘dragon’ dad diminishes mom and her skills at drawing BECAUSE SHE’S BETTER THAN HIM AT DRAWING!!! he could have said “mom’s so good at drawing, I love to see the things she draws.” Jesus **. it’s literally abuse to hack away at someone’s skills, it undermines them/their confidence/independence. this is horrifying to see. that does it, my notes. might get this published finally! another episode the mom/kids get pulled over by cops, treated as a friend. the cop is wrong about the law and instead of doing something realistic, like shooting the family or at least a dog, the cop says to the mom “you’re right, I shoulda known that”. They say “thanks officer”, joyeously, and ride off in the car. Zero evidence of ppl of the global majority. The normalization of european-american/nobility/suburbanization-of-everything. Cars take us from our house to everywhere else, all activity is at grocery stories, restaurants, arcades, bowling alleys, back yards. In conclusion Mmm, this thing has been months in the making, perhaps that is clear. Based on when I first started editing this file, it was five months ago that I first started copying down notes, but I think that was after more than one page of notes had been created. I really like all things by Studio Ghibli, the movie Suzume, all episodes of Sagwa (available for free on Youtube here). For Studio Ghibli, start with Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle. I hadn’t seen or heard of these movies until very recently in my life, I’m so pleased to have encountered them, and the other films made by Studio Ghibli. You’re probably not gonna feel the same about Grave of the Fireflies as you do Totoro. Be careful, and be warned. I dislike Paw Patrol, Bluey, Frozen, in particular, and all Disney in general. Luca is less-bad than most. Finding Nemo is atrotious. Settler colonial culture is hurtful to exist inside of, and more hurtful if it exists inside oneself unrecognized. These disliked shows push a message of normalization of the supremacy culture inside of which the shows were made. Recommended Reading Killers of the Flower Moon my highlights I Saw Death Coming my highlights fearing the black body how to hide an empire spare the child my gosh there’s more but that’ll do for now. Footnotes some of the movies I’ve purchased online or found on youtube, like Sagwa the chinese siamese cat, here’s the 20 episode youtube playlist line with Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, I generally look for shows first on the pirate bay https://thepiratebay.org/, to download the raw files in a piecemeal way called torrenting. Obviously now there’s conversation about the legality of it, but I’ve always been vastly more impressed by the simple mechanics of torrenting. The piecemeal receiving/sending files, peer-to-peer, instead of server/client. How refreshing. Then save it somewhere easy to find, and use VLC to play it on a laptop, my perfectly functional but mostly retired, genuinely aged apple laptop. Would be harder to do all this quite as easily on a smart TV, for instance. It feels wasteful to stream a full-length movie many times, and on many normal internet connections in the world today, it still is. ↩ my own father, who proudly celebrates the notion of adults assaulting children, in his own words, continues to think that the concept of family makes it not just appropriate, but necessary for adults to assault and sexually assault their own children. I am still working on finished this collection of ideas around ‘spanking’. TL;DR spanking is the ritualized hitting and sexual humiliation of children, served up with a big dose of emotional abuse when the victim is coerced into believing not soley that they are causing their own victimization, but that the assault is an act of love between the adult and the child. I tell Eden regularly that anyone who hits children does not love that child/children and in fact might not be capable of love. I tell her that adults hit children only if the adult wants to hit the child, and they sometimes tell the strangest stories to explain that away, in a way that would certainly not be acceptible in other dynamics. An adult who hurts a child and doesn’t recoil in horror at what happened and take extensive efforts to prevent it from happening again needs a different imagination. I’ve another blog post about how the concept of ‘punishment’ or ‘discipline’ and even ‘obedience’ are in themselves abusive. Stay tuned. ↩ Don Thompson, when I pressed him about his abuse of me as a child, eventually exited the conversation with “I did what I did, you are welcome.”. LITERALLY. Those were his words, he was trying SO HARD to make me play the role he wanted me to play - adulating child. He emotinoally kicked my head off, over and over, but because he thinks it was an expression of love, his self-concept needs me to say “thanks, don, I think you were a great parent.” ↩ In the world of software, one encounters fancy identification labels called ‘guids’ or Globally Unique ID. It might look like 19e38c497fa028936823325fb6a57f25142f25152f5b086882c0fa38ab885538d364ffd8941cde001033b4d99d4fc5f35ea66d08d060fb6dd959b3d36f518e04 or in more likelihood, it’ll look like 9542e1b6-a78b-4b11-8a01-16d1a8adf642. If you google the first of those ‘magic strings’ you’ll find a really specific blog post by Patio11 titled ‘dropping hashes: an idiom used to demonstrate provenance of documents’. If you google the second one, you’ll find nothing. Also common in software are ‘magic strings’. Some strange little string that keeps showing up in different places. Maybe it’s the logs, maybe the codebase. Maybe it’s ‘35ft’ or 5000sq or 16 dwelling units per acre but when you see it first show up in one place, then another, they might be linked. The person who invented zoning desperately wanted to live in a supremacist enclave and wanted to keep people of the global majority in ghettos, and was pretty damned successful. ↩

In the range of the human experience, there’s a lot of possible body modifications one can purchase for oneself. Over the years, I’ve purchased three. LASIK vision correction in ~2016 When I was pretty young, mid-20s, my then-employer placed like a few thousand dollars a year into an HSA account for me, as I switched to a ‘high deductible health plan’, so since it felt like ‘free money’, I decided to spend it on LASIK. Possibly right after a long climbing trip, and I remembered struggling with glasses (mine were heavy and prone to falling off my face) and contacts (dealing with contacts without running water for days on end isn’t tons of fun) For about $3500, I got LASIK somewhere in Rockville, MD, and for a long time I’d say it was the best thing I’d ever spent money on. It’s now one of the top things I’ve spent money on, still ranks very highly. I used to take contacts out of my eyes in tents, then wake up and try to get contacts back in my eyes. I would clean my hands before touching my contacts (which would then touch my eye, of course I never actually touch my eye with my finger, when placing/removing contacts). I also didn’t like the dependence on the contact subscription, getting new ones every few months, etc. Some of you know the drill. Driving in the morning into the rising sun, wishing I had sunglasses, but preferring the comfort of my glasses. At night, not being able to see clearly while moving around my room until I put my glasses on. Issues with helmets, hair. I didn’t/don’t actually dislike my glasses much, but it wasn’t until I was fully free of them, post surgury, that I could feel in my bones all the ways I was accommodating my need for HEFTY vision correction. I’m pleased that I had a great, normal-ideal outcome from the surgury. Without glasses, my vision was so bad i really couldn’t drive, and walking on any sort of uneven surface could be dicy. Anyway, that was over a decade ago, now I just live life as a person who has perfect vision every time my eyes are open. It’s so cool. Tongue Tie “Revision”/Repair in 2024 Skip over a decade forward… Eden, who is now a toddler, was born. She was born with a tongue and lip tie, and it was preventing her from being able to breastfeed! We were lucky and fortunate to get it fixed when she was five or six days old, but at that point it had been missed by many medical professionals. She’d been losing weight, basically starving, because her mouth and tongue and lips could not work together in the correct way to generate suction. Her mom’s milk wasn’t coming in. For the mom’s body to make milk, the baby needs to be ‘requesting’ it, and if the tongue and lips are not free to move in the right way, there is no good requesting going on. After that, I didn’t think about a tongue tie again for years. “It’s heritable” they said. eventually, it bubbled up in my brain a few times. All sorts of oral health/mouth functioning/breathing things relate to the proper movement of that muscle in the bottom of the mouth. A tongue tie can be related to things like sleep apnea like syptoms (the tongue falls into the back of the mouth), which can relate to teeth grinding, because the way the brain ‘frees’ the airway after the tongue has obstructed it is by moving the jaw back and forth! Back pain (lower back pain) was related to teh tongue tie - my head had been slightly tilted forward/downward because of the reduced mobility. One of the functional tests of a tongue tie is if you can tilt your head all the way up and still swallow. When I had a tonue tie, I couldn’t swallow, I had to bring my chin back towards the ground to ‘get space’. These are all observations that were made most clear post procedure. It’s a wild change, I am a huge fan. Lots of things are different, better. I explain more, much more, in the blog post: 👉 i got my tongue tie fixed, and it rocked my world. Tongue tie’s correlate to things (that I was actively experiencing) like: all sorts of mouth problems, sleep-apnea-like symptoms, sometimes sounding like I’m choking while sleeping, but I didn’t snore. I had some of the best sleep of my life after the tongue tie revision. I didn’t appreciate how free the structures SHOULD be, between the tongue, throat, sternum, and the top of the spine. After mine was fixed, my head sat in a slightly different tilt/orientation, and there’s less/zero forward lean and there’s less strain on my lower back. Again, here’s the full blog post: 👉 i got my tongue tie fixed Vasectomy, permanent birth control Also in 2024, I had already realized that I felt fully satisified with Eden as my kid, and do not want to have another kid. I’d always figured I’d get a vasectomy whenever I was ‘done having kids’, and I think that is an easily arrived-upon spot with even one kid. I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does no scalpel vasectomy with no needle anesthesia. $800, 30 minute appointment in Boulder, zero discomfort during or after the procedure. No intake call. He’s exceptionally competant, as you’ll see if you click around. If you want a vasectomy and don’t live in colorado, Chris’ setup is still worth checking out, because if someone else doesn’t seem to be at the same level of quality as him, keep looking. Having a kid is a big deal, and so is not having a kid. For a bunch of crappy reasons it seems like the responsibility of not getting pregnant is carried almost exclusively by people who can become pregnant, people with vulvas. I got a vasectomy as a step in the direction of carrying more of the responsibility than I was before of not getting anyone pregnant. If everyone has a clean and recent STI panel, the remaining reason for a condom is the REALLY CRITICAL ISSUE of not getting pregnant. I have a friend of a friend whose then-partner lied to him about taking birth control, and intentionally, without his permission, became pregnant by him. Horrifying. There’s lots of good ways of not getting pregnant, and most of them seem fully, unfairly, on the shoulders of the person who has the uterus. Virtually all forms of birth control available to the people who can get pregant are heavy duty. IUD or the pill, both are a hassle, and IUD placements are often-enough very bad experiences. I have a lot of thoughts about the obligation of not getting anyone pregnant. Things went poorly with my kid’s mom, I wouldn’t have tried to do parenthood in the exact way I’m doing it now, and EVEN IF things had gone great with Eden and her mom, I still would want a vasectomy for myself. I still don’t want more than 1 kid. It’s easy to be generous as a parent with time when there is one child. It’s easy to be generous with emotional energy. It’s easy(er) to be unpressured in schedule, location needs, etc. Multiple kids seems gnarly, all-consuming. I can carry 100% of my children on my scooter (with a special harness/strap) because I have a single child. How convenient for me. School drop-offs for life can be done via a two-wheeled vehicle thus I’ll never have to sit in a line of cars. Ever, in my life. Seems nice. American culture is individualistic, so there’s no natural community for raising multiple kids. For this reason alone I think it’s fairest to everyone, including any already-born children, to not take from their resource pool what would be needed by another child in the mix. Anyway, the vasectomy was the “right” kind. I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does no scalpel vasectomy with no needle anesthesia. Super chill, quick, he’s got spots around colorado, I took the flatiron flyer bus from Denver to a few blocks from his office in Boulder, caught a later bus back, and was good to go. No more kids for me. I was thrilled that there was no consultation required with Dr. Tonozzi. I’d called around denver urologists and other offices, doing a little research after reading up on Reddit, and was amazed when multiple offices thought that it was fine to tell me I had to show up for a $250 intake appointment before anyone would authorize scheduling me for a vasectomy! So much needless complexity to accommodate how some americans see health care. anyway… I really struggle to find the right tone to talk about some of these things. I’ve spoken about vasectomies now with a few different friends. I heard about one of these from his female partner - she said “I wish my [50 year old!!!] partner was willing to get a vasectomy bc I hate having to use birth control” Her partner has multiple kids! She has multiple kids! She doesn’t want more, he “thinks” he doesn’t want more! I couldn’t imagine being him. the risk profile is not the same, between people with penises and people with vulvas. It’s wildly risky to become pregant! people plan for and hope to have kids all the time, and are anxious throughout the process, because it’s risky. It seems worth noting also something like: Sometimes/often times emotional safety correlates with enjoyable-for-all sexual experiences. A sense of emotional safety gets built in many different ways. Having taken real steps to measurably improve the risk profile around pregnancy dramatically increases a sense of safety for some people. My own emotional safety goes way up. A partner’s sense of emotional safety can go up. There’s plenty of world for deep emotional safety (and great sex) without having a vasectomy, but it’s unamibigous, undeniable, that the margin of safety is higher. I didn’t realize how much more peace I would feel having sex, post-vasectomy, than before. Anyway, if you’re in Denver/Boulder/Colorado, Chris Tonozzi at GoVasectomy is the way. ~$800, and a 30 minute appointment. He and I chatted the whole time, and I watched the whole procedure with curiosity and interest. That’s it, there’s my body modifications. I’m thrilled with all of them, and if you are eligible for any of them, you might enjoy having some of these too.

this has been hard for me to write, has been sitting in one draft form or another for months. Finally getting it off the ‘drafts’ list, but only reluctantly. This is far too long for even me to try to read in a single sitting, especially on my phone, so it might be too long for you to try to read on a phone, or at once, too. I sometimes imagine that if I phrase something gently enough or the right qualifiers, I’ll somehow ‘farm’ goodwill from the imagined reader. It feels adjacent to a willingness to manipulate, though, and I don’t like that, either. I don’t wanna be manipulative. I think some of you have done bad things to others. Some readers have perhaps never existed inside of the USA, others never outside of it. Some have had a lot of exposure to religeous influences in the USA. I speak with first-hand knowledge of being ‘raised evangelical’, and this particular blob of writing addresses themes common within that group of people. Specifically, the concept of “spanking”. I had gotten close to publishing a shorter first draft of this, then a book that I’d long ago requested via interlibrary loan finally arrived. It has the provocative title Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. It’s very good, and caused this whole blog post to spiral into something even longer. 1 First, book-keeping: If you have ever hit your children and then told them they deserved it, and are today, right now, willing to defend that, i feel contempt for you and it’s hard for me to contain that, so I’m not gonna try. I don’t technically feel any obligation to “you”, a particular reader, but if I tried hard to find any obligation i might feel towards ‘you’, it’s more an obligation to your kids, the victims of your assaults, than any obligation i might have to be gentle to your ego. Maybe they’ll read this and it’ll help some things click the way it did for me. I’ll get the hard parts out on the table up front. Free-associating through some of the interconnected issues: Within evangelicalism, the concept of “parents spanking children” is held up as one of the core tenants of participation with evangelicalism. Indeed, if a parent does NOT beat their child, or threaten their child with physical and sexual assault, some others in the group will shame that parent. “spanking”, as I define it, is adults, usually parents, assaulting their own children for instances of the child displaying a will. If a child says “no” to a parent, that often-enough is considered grounds for assault. The spanking itself is at best simple physical assault. On top of that physical assault is further emotional violence/verbal abuse. If the spanking is done on the gluteal region/butt, it is sexual assault. Additionally, because the ‘spanking’ blames the victim for the harm, all uses of ‘spanking’ have emotional and verbal abuse embedded within it. ‘spanking’ is the sexualized assault of a child. 2 I do not even pretend to evaluate as safe the kinds of people that think adults spanking “their” kids is fine. I view this attitude as deeply problematic. To those people, my main hope is that your kids survive you, as a caretaker, as best they can, with as little damage to their sense of self as can be had in an environment such as that. But wait there’s more: Not only is physically assaulting a child abuse, but acting like ‘punishment’ is a valid thing that an adult can appropriately do to a child is also abuse. this is all hard for me, as it puts me on the wrong side of a lot of people. My immediate family all is full of physically abusive people. The family I married into, ditto. Same with the extended family I was born into. And plenty of people around me in various social relationships. All these people believe that adults hitting kids and blaming the kids for it is laudable and evidence of good-enough parenting. The emotional distance between us grows all the more. So, I’m going to take a few turns at shitting on explaining themes of evangelicalism, because we all deserve it. The mountain of victims deserve it. I am also taking issue with something that isn’t strictly evagelicalism - it’s more describable as americanism, or american-ness, or “The West”, and to show participation in these systems, among other things, one most tout/affirm the concept of ‘obedience’, and that if someone doesn’t ‘obey’, they ‘should be punished’. 3 This language is all minimizing what really happens the message of spanking and punishments What’s a concise re-expression of punishment/spanking energy? If you do something I don’t like, I or someone acting on my behalf will hurt you, torture you, coerce you into doing whatever it is I wanted you to do. And I’ll say it’s an expression of love, and i’ll expect you to act like you believe me. Critically, there are alternatives to punishment. your only hope of existing non-abusively with the kid(s) in your life is if you and they know that you do not see “punishment” as part of your problem solving toolkit. I have lots more on alternatives to punishment below. I continue to be unsure how to channel my own anger over this. I am livid at Miriam and Donald Thompson, the people who contributed to my physical and emotional existance, for many reasons, and I have no intent or desire of ever ‘forgiving’ them. They both physically, sexually, emotionally abused and neglected me, and had abundent opportunities to do better, or differently, at any moment in their lives. Not only could they have refrained from beating me as, like, a three year old, but they displayed courdice and head-in-the-sand isolation, when I brought these issues up, they alternated between ignoring me, or saying I was the problem, and then we’ve currently settled on them blocking me in whatsapp. I’ll possibly still email them a link to this blog post. I told them both, basically, “You deserve the peace that you think an abuser of children deserves.” and “I’m honoring both of you by using the abundant experiences you’ve both provided to me, then and now, to warn others of some things.” It seems worth mentioning that the level of emotional dissociation required to beat someone else into submission is profound, and correlates with an overall inability to ever form an emotional connection. I never-not-once had a good-enough relationship with my parents.4 I am resentful of them, because there were times I wanted a hug, kindness, healthy maternal or paternal energies, and they attacked me instead. Over and over and over. But part of the harm is that as a kid, I knew what sort of attitudes were supposed to exist between healthy parents and kids, so I kept trying to pretend we had a real relationship. Once I became an adult, it eventually became obvious no relationship had ever existed, and I would never be friends with people like them. If I had my druthers, they’d never meet my kid. They both seemed extremely offended, when, individually, I contacted them to say: Please confirm to me that you will never hit Eden, nor make jokes about, or threats of, hitting children in her presence. I ran into an astonishing level of evasion around this. To make a point about the association between discipline and punishment and rules, and how punishment is really just physical assault, I said “if I find that you hit, after having heard this unambiguous statement to the contrary, I will arrange a meeting between us, and I will ‘give’ you a spanking, for your disobedience.” I don’t think they’ll ever try to hit Eden, and if they did, the psychological damage to her would be much less than it would be to me, so i’m not worried either way. So much of the real harm of ‘spanking’ is that it’s one’s caretaker who is saying ‘i love you’ and hitting and humiliating you is evidence of that love. My mom hit me many times, always saying “this is because you disobeyed me, and thus God, and the wages of sin is death, so be thankful i’m only causing you a little death, instead of a big death, to teach you to be obedient.”. Eden knows: Anyone who loves someone else wouldn’t want to coerce and overwhelm them. They couldn’t hit them, and if an adult ever hits a child, they certainly do not love that child, probably never did, and are likely incapable of experiencing love. So, she knows I view my father as dangerous, and that he hits kids, and has sexually assaulted children in the past, and then lies to kids about why he does it. She knows it’s insanely hurtful to be willingly tortured by someone else, so if for whatever reason one of my parents or anyone else decided to assault her, she could experience it as simple assault, and not as a perverted expression of love. She also is extremely quick to say when she doesn’t like something, and this instinct alone will accomplish a lot of providing for her own safety. The repeated, hopeless, helplessness of adults hitting kids at home over and over for any certain expression does a lot of damage, too. Eden gets to know what it’s like to exist in an environment where ‘punishment’ is a strange concept that emotionally immature people rely upon to coerce the people in their life they construe themselves as deserving to coerce. All the way up until I was at least 31 or 32, I would have said I thought my parents loved me, even though I also knew hitting children was wildly inappropriate. I was willing to ‘give them a pass’, because I wanted to believe I had a family. A quick map of what we are covering it’s easy for me to end up on tangents, but also I want to explain things well-enough. I suspect this particular post will end up turning into several posts. Here’s what I want to make sure I touch on: reframing ‘christ suffering for sins’ to ‘self-justifying intellectual dressings for the nobility of feudal europe, which is when it was invented’. (Anselm of Canterbury “invented” the modern motive/meme of ‘substitutionary/satisfaction atonement’, which is the pivot around which all of evangelicalism turns) I no longer view the concept of ‘sin’ as having any validity. No more so than ‘spanking’. demonstrate a coherent reframe of “suffering”, transforming it from “something maybe good” to “something certainly bad and simply to be avoided” demonstrate that the motif of “suffering is good” is how parents dissociate from the painful experiences they are causing, directly, to their children. a reframe of “Jesus significance was in His death” (what evangelicals say is the central tenant of evangelicalism) to “if he mattered at all, it was because of what he did and said, OBVIOUSLY. (Yes, I am accusing Christians of having absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ) I write in the spirit of write things now (rather than, for instance, never). Because evangelicals talk about jesus Evangelicals sometimes talk about Jesus, or seem to like to do so. I too, in very certain situations, like to talk about Jesus, if and only if the other person already finds that person interesting before even showing up to the conversation. If that’s you… a way that a big bad became a big good there was perhaps a time that jesus’ teachings were tightly bound to the literal concept ‘do not murder’. This particular injunction, simple enough for a child to plainly understand, is still bandied about. However, any churchy institution you or I have interacted now declares the issue “complicated”. Churchy institutions say: Jesus still says to not murder, and he failed to specify was that sometimes killing someone is not murder, thus not bad. play close attention while I explain… Christianity became the state religieon of rome in 300 AD. An emperor named ‘Constantine’ did it, and that’s an easy date to pick for when the state decided to improve it’s fitness by adding the ‘religeousness, christianity’ mod. 600 or 700 years later, the fitness of the state was being constrained by ‘not enough army’. The state/church looked at the problem, and the available solutions. The church liked the support of the state so “church authorities” helped raise armies for their nobles. Raising armies was tricky when the peasents say they can opt out for religious reasons. The church authorities decided they would/could “pre-forgive” the peasants who were being dragged into armies and taken off to fight a war. Now there’s no barrier on killing for the ones that wanted to kill, and no barrier for not joining the army, for the ones that didn’t want to fight. The peasants once could avoid the draft by saying “jesus says to not kill, and war is obviously killing, so i don’t have to participate in the states wars because I am also obligated to the church”. That was, as I said, inconvenient to those trying to raise an army, so the church did them a solid and said “hey, cannon fodder, i just said magic words that i’ve decided makes it cool for you to kill on someone elses behalf, have fun in the army, bye!!!!” To “make it permissible”, they said they would not issue fines or punishments for murder anymore, and might even incentivize murder with first dibs on loot and plunder for the most murderous and such. If murder can be made good, why cannot adults hitting kids also be made good? It’s that easy to go from “murder is bad” to “if it is desired by the right person (an authority, the pope or the king or the president), it isn’t murder, or if it is murder, it isn’t bad, or even if it is murder, and it is bad, it’s not as bad as not committing murder”. Hitting is bad, we all agree, but to permit someone to utter or hold the term spanking, one accepts (sort of) the statement: “It isn’t hitting, if the right person pre-determined that you should be hit. It magically becomes ‘discipline’, ‘punishment’, a ‘spanking’, and therefore, obviously an acceptable or laudable thing. So, this isn’t a diatribe just on the concept of “spanking”, or “adults hitting children and then convincing the child it is an act of love”. I also contend that to assume the validity of the idea of spanking is already a disaster, because this perversion already drags behind it further perversions, usually floating around the idea called ‘discipline’ or ‘punishment’. To accept the validity of discipline or punishment, one is casting their lot in with child abusers and (literally) Nazis. It couldn’t be me. I hold rage in me, and feel indignant, that I am going to say some of what I’m about to say. I’ve spoken on this topic with a number of people, including those who abused me when I was a child. They said “well, nothing else was working, so we had to abuse you”. I wanted to scream in their face that perhaps their obvious needful desire to assault a child ought to have been evidence enough that something was obviously already going very wrong. The framing becomes clear as soon as you reverse some of the players: well, if my aged parents do not instantly obey me, how will I extract future obedience from them if I do not physically, emotionally, and sexually assault them to break their will? my wife did not give me instant and unflinching obedience, so I hit her hard a few times, until she’s I can tell by the change in tone of her crying that she no longer is resisting me, then I tell her I love her. I wouldn’t have to hit her if she didn’t make me. Obviously we’d say “you are a domestic abusers and intimates should be kept far away from you. You’re not safe to have around vulnerable populations.” never not once have I felt inclined to hit a child, especially my own child, and I’d like to help you find an easier way of being than your current pro-abuse stance. There is obviously a lot to be said about how one can foster a loving and trusting relationship with a small/young person that isn’t based in violence and terrorism, but when my brain is in the mode of “writing against child abuse” I do not find it easy or pleasent to drop into a mode of answering the question of “well, if I am not going to abuse a child, how else should I engage with them?”. Another blog post will perhaps talk about that. For now, go read https://takingchildrenseriously.com/ for a primer. the theme of entitlement/obligation and supremacy In the year of 2024, I’ve talked with people who have built into their sense of self the “rightness” of adults hitting children, while at the same time rejecting the possible rightness of children hitting adults. I want to tie in to this piece themes of supremacy. I use ‘supremacy’, ‘entitlement/obligation’, ‘abuse’, and ‘emotional immaturity + exploitable power dynamic’ throughout. I believe a certain form of supremacy is in operation for adults who hit children. If anyone “makes” it permissable to exploit a power dynamic to cause pain to someone else, it stinks for them and the person they are hurting. It’s also a bummer to these sorts of people sprinkled about society, because if it’s okay a little bit, to them, it needs to be okay in big ways, to them, and they’ll undoubtedly be complicit with some other harms, if the situation were to go just right. Settler colonialism is obviously built on the idea that it’s okay to do a litte murder and violence somewhere, as long as the “benefits” are “worth more” than the costs. The root attitude, one that is clearly visible over and over and over again when interacting with these people/systems, is one of entitlement and obligation.5 The man whou contributed to the pregnancy that led to the birth of the person we now know as “Josh” (me), his name is Donald, he is obsessed with the concept of authority. He perceives it to benefit him today, and its a primary organizing principle for the world around him. He is military, a doctor, has an ‘advanced degree’ from the educational institution most affiliated with the southern baptists/slaveholder christianity. He’s obsessed with authority, believes it’s real, and thinks he has TONS of it. 6 The Origins of Pro-slavery Christanity Christians didn’t start purely with beating their own children. They got plenty of practice beating slaves, in fact needing to beat the slaves, to prevent the slaves from walking off or walking away or resisting the beatings. Here’s a quote from The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia When black men and women of their own initiative joined evangelical churches in numbers that far surpassed white evangelicals’ expectations, white evangelicals realized the irrelevance of the Old Testament model of slavery and searched for new ways to understand a master-slave relationship in which both parties belonged to the community of faithful. I just gave the above quote without context. it comes from a book titled _. Read other quotes from it here. It explains how slaveholders were effortful and strenuous in their re-workings of ‘theology’ to support their overt domination of the people who were slaves. As soon as the power dynamic shifted (unfavorably, to the slaveholders) they were quick with a response, to minimize the change, the loss. Evangelicals today continue that noble tradition. Some slavers claimed that an authority external to the slaver demanded this treatment of those they enslaved. [a god] ordered the world for slavery, I’m simply doing what he wants me to. Ah, the Nuremberg defense. When I found the title of this book, the first time, I instantly purchased it for my kindle and began reading it. Generally, when talking about it with christian people, I get met with a fascinating look of passive non-engagement. Like, they’ll willingly order their entire lives around this thing (christianity), they will claim it’s the most pro-freedom way of being imaginable, they’ll allocate dozens and hundreds of hours of time to the regime, and then claim they don’t have time to read a book about it. I think it’s actually because they clearly see the book, even from the title, in the exact same way I did, and know that it is far too dangerous to read. To read it and appreciate it would end their way of life. When I read this book, I remember saying “I don’t know if I’ll ever attend another church again”. At that point in time, holding to the premis of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, I was using the “voice” option, excitedly sharing what I was learning with others around me. I’d send this book to church people, I talked about it with a pastor, I told my friends, and I remember gaining such insight from their responses. Some of my friends heard it, appreciated it, and have largely left the church. this book wasn’t the only reason, but the concepts inside of it did for them what it did for me. I struggle to give my full reasoning for why this book is so powerful. I might be code switching repeatedly throughout this writing. I’ll exlain it through the lense of ‘frame control’. Frame control is a rhetorical tactic by which someone in the conversation keeps forcing the conversation to be had through a certain frame. I refuse to talk to you unless you use the language of {x} is a form of frame control. I link this piece regularly: Frame Control. It’s an excellent piece written by an interesting person, I think it’s worth the read. As part of something of an experiment/attempt to improve the state of things even as I expected it to not work, I became “pushy” with my parents, about decisions they made raising me that previously we never discussed. (Like their decisions to hit me until I gave them what they wanted, and to use other forms of emotional coercion, terrorism) To the degree we never discussed things they proudly did to me, they kept a sense of comfort about themselves (perhaps) when thinking/interacting with me. I didn’t ever discuss what I wasn’t supposed to, because I was terrified of my father during and after I lived in his house, because he would terrorize me into compliance with whatever he wanted. I’d learned to get safety by making him feel good about himself, and ignored the parts of how he treated me that was dehumanizing, and mostly didn’t have a relationship with him, though he liked to claim everything was good. (We have hardly spoken since I was 16 years old, I’m now 35). A few years ago, at the beginning of this little pro-slavery christianity journey I was on, when he started realizing fractures were growing, he said “I have not changed in the last few years, I have no idea why you’re pulling away.” This ignored that I was telling him, and that the environment was littered with clues about why things had shifted. His need for plausible ignorance wasn’t a good look. But, since I wasn’t using one of “his” frames, he could claim to not understand it. Miriam does this too. If you speak to her from outside one of her perferred frames, you will not be heard. She is not distrubed by not understanding, she’ll just let everything slide off until it lines up with her patriarchal, slave-holding christianity view of the world. It’s maddening As I was appreciating that miriam and donald’s right to comfort didn’t equal my need to self-abandon, and because they are occasionally seeing/interacting with Eden, and because I wanted the relationship to be clarified. They claimed to love me, I claim they hated me, lets just bring it back up and see what shakes out. This post is part of that story, and it contains excerpts of conversations (spoken, text) I’ve had with them, that explains a way that some people today cling to ideas that cause incredible harm and suffering. The thing that changed A lot got clearer in my mind once I had a kid, especially once she became the age at which I know my parents had already begun hitting me. It hurts enough to witness constantly the oppression and coercion and dehumanization that is pointed towards children today. At her day care, I’ve heard adults barking orders at groups of children, being mean, being aggressive, being dissociated from the kids. I always say something like: oof, can you hear the way that adult is speaking? that tone? That’s not appropriate. I hope you never experience someone speaking to you like that. That’s mean, and demanding. If anyone does speak to you like that, they are being mean and cruel, and if you cannot avoid a person like this, I hope you can at least find a way to be safe from them. Alternatives to Needing Violence The alternative to using violence on your children is not trying to do all the same stuff without violence. It’s to stop persuing things that justify or demand being overpowering. No appropriate goal can ever call into existance violence around itself, so if you’re willing to use violence, it’s your fault. Here’s a list of things that will cause me to hit my kid (and any kid): Here’s what causes others to hit kids: an attitude of entitlement expectations of obedience a willingness to overpower, overwhelm, coerce Here’s what I do instead of hitting kids: bring mutuality and co-creation to the table Mutuality and co-creation respect differences in power, and are incompatible with overwhelming energies. These particular words come from The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond. I witness verbal abuse from parents towards children constantly. To stop being abusive to someone, one needs more than a goal of ‘not being abusive’ or ‘not being controlling’ but one needs a clue at the alternative way of being. Patricia Evans in the above book talks about abusive people living in ‘power over others’ reality, while non-abusers live in a ‘power with others’ reality. Kids, and people overall attune to the difference in energies between mutuality, co-creation, and the energies of a willingness to overwhelm, to coerce, and to extract compliance in the least painful way for the authority figure. An extra quick shortcut to parenting without violence would be to read The Most Dangerous Superstition, and extract from it a reframe, perhaps, of your relationship with authority. I.E. read the book, update a mental model to view a belief in authority as a dangerous superstition, and proceed in your life without ever again relying on the concept of authority. It’s not technically a parenting book, but one of the domains I see most soaked in language of entitlements and expected obligations is parenting. Children are a deeply, oppressed class. In part because this ironclad belief in the authority of parents’ permission/expectation to treat their children as farmable property, not so different than cattle. Cattle never had rights. a meaningful line from Killers of the Flower Moon, during a “legal trial” about some very murderous people, was: “No one is questioning if this american killed these indians. It’s simply that the americans don’t think any murder happened. No people were killed. Animals were killed.” The level of dissociation from the humanity in another that can be directed towards any non-self ethnic group can also be directed towards ‘outgroup’ members of the same ethnic group as that person. The part of the soul that needs to be alive to stop one of those would stop both, if it existed, and because it doesn’t, all parts of the self that would rely upon it doen’t have structure. That root issue of ‘violence feeling right’ is entitlement. The few times I’ve spoken to the people who gave birth to me about the violence they meted out to me, and listened to them justify their own violence against me, I can hear their words dripping with entitlement. I was labelled ‘rebellious’ since well before high school, and my parents cannot imagine that I perhaps disliked being controlled and disrespected, continuously. Evangelicalism Is Similar In Enough Ways To Colonialism Evangelicals point the techniques of settler colonialism at the personalities of their own children. When someone is entitled, they think others are obligated to give them whatever they’re entitled to. American society is drenched with entitlement and obligation, someone acting like there is a right to coerce, and a duty to obey. I am, broadly, addressing evangelicals. Obviously there are people who beat their children who are not evangelicals, but there’s something particularly insideous about the beatings that evangelical parents dispense, because along with the beatings is also heavy psychological mistreatment and coercion. it’s also what I experienced, thus what I am speaking to. Most concisely, the modern sense of entitlement and obligation, emobied by the treatment of parents towards “their” children, is firmly rooted in the sense of entitlement and obligation that european americans exhibited towards people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, and who’s ancestors were kidnapped from Africa. The Origins of Pro-slavery Christianity part 2 This book ended my ability to exist within evangelical circles: The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black And White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia I now view existing within or parallel to evangelicalism in silence as being complicit with the kinds of supremacists that created the pro-slavery christianity described in the above book. Here are a few highlighted sections from the above book If the command to love one’s neighbor made Lumpkin realize in 1915 that segregation was wrong, why did so few white southerners realize that race-based slavery was wrong? By all accounts, white southerners in the nineteenth century were among the most devoted Christians in the Western world, but their faith seems only to have strengthened their determination to hold another people in bondage. This book represents my attempt to understand this staggering moral failure-to understand why the parable of the Good Samaritan fell on deaf ears for so many generations. […] As long as the vast majority of slaves had “lived and died strangers to Christianity” in colonial days, keeping the occasional convert enslaved had not caused white evangelicals many scruples. When tens of thousands of people of African descent were clamoring for admission to evangelical churches following the Revolution, however, and were starting their own churches when whites were too slow or unwilling to facilitate the admission of blacks to white congregations, it became impossible for whites to maintain the illusion that religious commitment provided a meaningful distinction between them and their slaves. […] He justified slavery as one of many hierarchical relationships approved by God in a 1757 sermon, The Duty of Masters to Their Servants. In what would become the most important plank of the proslavery argument, he taught that “the appointments of Providence, and the order of the world, not only admit, but require, that there should be civil distinctions among mankind; that some should rule, and some be subject; that some should be Masters, and some Servants. 7 This was brought into hilarious and tragic relief for me recently. I was in my early 30s before ever considering that I’d been raised by emotionally abusive people. I believed the spoken narrative, that it was ‘love’, and I’d accepted that there was no relationship between me and my parents. When my dad left the house when I was 16 to conduct colonialism in the middle east on behalf of American empire, we hardly ever spoke again. It never struck me as odd that I had no relationship with my mother. Never once in my life did it cross my mind that I could obtain nurturance or emotional comfort from her, or a sense of attunement. It wasn’t until I started watching other adults having nice relationships with their parents that I realized something had been wrong in my own childhood. I still couldn’t place it. I noticed having a confidence that my parents hated me, but they enjoyed having me around IF I was playing the role of ‘successful, subservient son’. If I stop playing that role, or raised any sort of issue, I’d get treated with either withdrawal and shunning, or open opposition coupled with intimidation and manipulation. For some context setting, my parents read and embodied the ideologies of a man (of course) named James Dobson, who was a eugenicist, and taught that parents, if they suitably controlled the behaviors and thoughts of their children, could ‘raise’ them to be good members of a civil society, defined as “participating in european american settler colonialism with a certain ideological bent.” Settler colonialists use ethnic cleansing as a primary tool for accomplishing their goals, because it works well ,obviously. So, the kinds of people that would support population confinement and displacement and genocide, on the concept of ‘race’, make for interesting parents. I resonated with what the athor of The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir shared about his childhood experiences. Settler colonialists use violence and coercion to get what they want. Violence is expensive and risky, so sometimes other, ‘gentler’ forms of coercion can be made effective, if the person is willing, interested in using violence. Economic coercion, for instance, might seem gentler than knocking someone’s house over with a bulldozer, but it’s all on the same spectrum. The bulldozer shows up only if the other methods are deemed to have failed. Abusers say they usually don’t have to assault their children, but it is still all full of violence because they and their kids know that if certain compliance isn’t had, the violence emerges. I think this is a good way to ‘give’ someone ADHD, by the way. Let them stew in an environment where violence lies behind many doors, and they have influence over if the person sometimes uses that violence agains them, or not. This is the core, fundamental dangerous attitude of all people who concede the correctness of the concept of ‘spanking’. It’s an extension of the concepts of ‘punishment’ and ‘discipline’. How Spanking Works In Evangelicalism I have many notes (typed, written) floating around on why spanking is abuse. I could quote James Dobson’s books if I wanted to, but I don’t need to. Here’s how spanking works in evangelical circles, in my own words: If your kid does something that you decide justifies you beating them, you’re not supposed to just reach out and hit them in the moment. You are supposed to ritualize it a bit. Take them somewhere else. Show them you’re calm, and doing the hitting from a place of reason and love. Shame them for a bit, then make them disrobe, or walk over to you and bend over. (Do they do this willingly, or do you force it on them? Oh, the nuances of child abuse!) Then as you hit them, you’re not supposed to use your hand, that might cause them to flinch away from your hand in public, which would be awkward. Maybe use a spoon or a thin stick. It might not leave as many marks as something that would lacerate or bruise. Anyway, hit them until you feel better, or until you feel anything at all, and then (here’s the kicker) tell them you love them, and that god loves them and that next time if they obey you/god better, you might not beat them. Tell them that you’re hitting them because they made you hit them and that you’re hitting them for their own benefit. I recently read a few stories the woman who considers herself my mother wrote (about me) that revolved around ‘spanking’ three year old me for the ‘sin’ of not doing exactly what she commanded me to do in a timely manner. As her written notes go, on my third birthday, I didn’t put a train set away to her liking. So she beat me, and blamed god/me for the beating. The next time I put the train set away, I did it, through tears, in the exact way she wanted, and said “the lord gave josh obedience”, through tears. I wonder if this has anything to do with why I dislike to celebrate my own birthday, even 30+ years later. The issue for her wasn’t that I didn’t put the train set away. the issue was I didn’t comply with her demand. She viewed her ‘authority’ over me as an extension of her fantasy of how God controls her, or how God controls a husband who controls her. Regardless, that whole chain of control is diminished if she doesn’t get the same level of control over the kids in her charge. So, because the bible says ‘the wages of sin is death’, christians think ‘as long as I don’t kill someone, I can hurt them all I ~want~ deem necessary to ensure compliance’, and if I beat them more they’ll be more Christlike, and Sky Daddy will give them more nice things like he gives me, so I’ll threaten them all the more. The concepts of punishment & discipline is abusive deep breath This section deserves its own article, I’ll get it there. When I talk with evangelicals today, they can tell quickly how I feel about adults assaulting children. sometimes one might backpedal and say: yeah, that form of violence is bad, I would not endorse adults assaulting children either. Of course, adults need to discipline children sometimes. And I note a need to quickly register my strong disagreement. Now I can send anyone a link to this page, to the above anchor heading, if I want to say: I think a willingness to concede “punishment” as a valid thing is definitionally an endorsement for supremacy or some other abusive ideology and I dont think you wanna be a supremacist or abuse others. Can we talk about it? The softest way I can say it Maybe a softer way is: I clock something in your wording that correlates with the kinds of things people with power have said to justify the violence or neglect they point towards people with less relative power. I have found myself becoming a better advocate for the people I love when I’ve reframed and reworded some concepts. Could I tell you the story? Maybe. Discipline is punishment is retribution is revenge So lets talk about “discipline” and “punishment”. These are propagandist terms for something better called “retributive vengeance” or “retributive violence”, ‘retributive justice’, etc. Wikipedia has an entry for ‘retribution’ it’s simply ‘punishment’. It’s very little different from revenge. Again, a simple reframe of ‘spanking’ is ‘adults revenge-hitting kids’, and it is much clearer. Retributive justice is a legal concept whereby the criminal offender receives punishment proportional or similar to the crime. As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others, and employs procedural standards. Retributive justice, wikipedia So, retribution is slightly different from revenge, and we know revenge is kinda crappy. If parents were “hitting their children regularly out of a sense of revenge”, that seems suss. Here’s the wikipedia definition of Punishment: Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon an individual or group, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable. Ick ick ick. Remember, to this person who doesn’t believe authority exists, all these words just round to open defenses of abusive ideologies. It’s all obviously devestating to have this sort of contemptuous, exploitative energy unfold in the context of a family relationship. I was constantly being punished and disciplined by my dad who picked at my every move. (Remember, doctor/military officer/pastor type person). He was nothing if not coercive and evaluative, and he felt entitled to punish me, so he did. I survived by running an emotional insurgency against him, and parts of myself, and it makes me angry to have had all these experiences. How the emotional concept of discipline escalates to physical violence It goes like this: If I tell my child to do something, or to not do something, and they do not do it, or do it, unless I cause them pain and suffering, they will think it is acceptable to continue to disregard the injunction. This “I have permission to cause them pain and suffering” hinges on the superstition of authority-as-a-thing, we might as well disabuse the system of both misapprehensions. It takes a belief in authority + a belief in the concept of ‘punishment’, or ‘hurting others because you want to’, to justify making threatening statements: If you don’t [put somthing away, do the dishes, take a shower], I will psychologically hurt you and I am willing to hit you if the psychological pressure isn’t enough. Now, even if all the other person does is nothing, they are now in a position where you would be blaming them for the physical act of hitting them. This obviously hurts, sows great mistrust, rightfully. So ‘discipline’ and ‘punishment’ means an adult arbitrarily increases the suffering and pain in a childs life, to try to ensure compliance later on. Discipline and Supremacy Discipline and punishment are inherently supremacist. Usually when someone says “discipline”, they mean “punishment”, and “punishment” is shorthand for ‘retributive violence’. The theory (as it works in patriarchal/authoritative/supremacist families) is simple: if a “bad” thing happens, someone or something is offended, completely independent of the simple effects of that thing. If I ask you to take out the trash, and you say no, the ‘bad thing’ is that the trash is still in the trash can. If I tell you to “stop walking ahead” and you keep walking ahead, an evil act is done, the honor of the noble (me) is offended, and retributive violence must be meted out. To evangelicals, it’s never actually about the wrong act, it’s that a presumed authority figure (a parent, sky daddy) is displeased because the subservient person has treated the authority as an equal, and like any good noble from the middle ages, it is time to hurt someone. The real concern is that the honor of the patriarch has been offended, because the property/possession of the patriarch has presumed a state of equality with the patriarch. To fix the offended honor of the patriarch, a further harm needs to be obtained - pain must be extracted from the willful individual, to enforce the concept of supremacy: “There is a hierarchy here, and you damned well better understand where you sit.”’8 ‘retributive justice’ (revengeful violence) is propaganda justifying all sorts of the worst parts of human behavior. It underpins war, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, child abuse. Yes, I am condemning the settler colonialist regime of social control some call ‘the american criminal justice system’. For all the money wasted on that system, everyone could be housed and fed and given safety and security without coercion. Even the people who find themselves working the system as the oppressor. (Yes, I propose housing, food, dignity, even to the people currently complicit in perpetuating the evils of that system. even deputized slave patrollers (‘police’) deserve shelter and food, because they are sentient.) Common objections But Josh, if I don’t keep my children afraid of me with threats of violence, how will I force them to… Stop. I won’t dedignify myself by considering you to be an advocate for your own children if you presume your chief role in their life is to bully and abuse them. I hope your children, for their own good, realize that they might not be under your control their entire life and they might someday be able to save themselves from you. But Josh, it would be dangerous for my child to run into the road and get killed by a car, how will I prevent them from doing so without assaulting them? Great question. Do you feel a sense of curiosity about how this thing could be accomplished without violence, and without threatened her with anything? In America, traffic violence is accepted by many levels of society. I keep my kid safe in the road without ever blaming her for the potential violence she might experience. I tell her “in this country, most people drive very dangerously and would murder you without hesitation.”. The greatest source of fear I feel for her is that in this abomination of a country, 40,000 people die every year on roads, and globablly, it’s like 1.2 million people die. She is intimidated by roads, as I am also intimidated by roads. My dad, when I pressed him on assaulting me as a child, used the classic evasion “if the stove is hot and can hurt a child, who reaches for the stove, to keep them safe, I would have to punish them for reaching for a stove”. This is the cry of a person who has no imagination. If I want to teach Eden about heat, I give her things to put in the frying pan to see how heat works. I help her hold her hand near it to test for how hot it is. I see if I can touch it for a split second to feel the heat, and let her do the same. I scaffold her skills so she can learn to accomplish whatever it is she wants, with the skills to do so safely. It’s ludicrously easy to navigate the world with a child without violence. It boggles my mind how invested parents are in reigning down violence and terror on their kids. I also happen to remember clearly how it felt to be terrorized by my parents, and the many ways I rejected every aspect of their need for control over me, and continue to reject every authority that meets me with an energy of “I believe I am entitled to coerce you, and you’re obligated to obey me”. If you want to get along with your kids, read and internalize some messages about the fantasy of authority, then share these with your kids: The Most Dangerous Superstition The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Obligation To Obey The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and How to Respond gee, josh, I’m not interested or willing to read books that might help me not abuse my child, or help me stand as an advocate for other children who are being abused by adults. get the fuck off my website then. Close the tab. Never come back. It’s difficult to express the contempt I feel for this kind of thinking. Read the book(s), or at least recognize that your resistance to reading the books is rooted in the same part of your soul that wants to abuse children. You could reject that part of you, even as you extend a gracious acceptence to the rest of the parts of you that do not want to abuse children. If you are your own child’s first abuser, and habituate them to think it is love, you are crippling them, destroying their ability to navigate the world safely, because abusive people and institutions abound, hungry for more bodies to consume. Which kid do you think will be safer around other kids and adults? The child who is occasionally humiliated and assaulted by a parent hitting them, who then tells them it is an act of love? The child who is told, in complete seriousness and confidence: “It is never acceptable for an adult to hit you, ever, and if anyone tries to do this to you, I hope you can evade, escape, or resist, and if you are able to communicate it to me, I’ll expend substantial resources to protect you from that person.” And an adult who no longer hits the kid, but still controls and coerces them with emotional and verbal assaults, is only slightly better, maybe, than one who hits children. An adult who coerces and threatens a child is fundamentally unsafe. An adult who coerces and threatens another adult is fundamentally unsafe. To the kids of parents who assaulted them: Good god, how distressing it is to have been terrorized by someone who then also convinced you that they loved you. It really causes the brain to break, and the psyche to attack itself (in some ways) and to dissociate from reality (in some ways) and to project/displace shame and anger towards oneself or others. It’s virtually guaranteed you have something like “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Please do not waste your time reading The Body Keeps the Score, instead read Pete Walker’s books Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and The Tao of Fully Feeling What gets unlocked if punishment and coercion are dropped Parents who believe children exist to serve their ego and obey them issue admonitions to children nearly continuously. The entire tone of the relationship is dominated by the parental willingness to inflict violence. The parent is unable to “see” the child. I will never beat eden, because I don’t view our relationship as one where I am entitled to control her behavior. I seek her wellness, and thriving, eagerly, and view myself as someone who can help her accomplish and do whatever she wants to accomplish and do, because I have different skills and capacities than she does. She communicates with me in a straightforward, reasonable way, because she hasn’t had to learn the art of manipulating adults to try to get love and kindness from them. When things have to happen, that she doesn’t like, it’s justifiably upsetting, and I ride through the grief with her. Tons of things happen all the time that are bad, that negatively affect us. There’s genocide happening in the world, there are dangerous streets and loud engines and a coercive school system’s demands to comply and limitations and lack of resources. All of these things are worth railing against. I will never see intentionally terrorizing her as a ‘useful tool’ to coercively extract compliance from her. Would you believe that we have an extremely peaceful way of being, and interactwith mutuality, consideration? I am considerate towards her, and she is very considerate to me. In ways that my parents would never be able to witness or appreciate, because they so willingly polute the intimate space of a relationship with coercion and violence. no problem solving is achievable if one of the parties knows the other one will hurt them if they become suitably displeased. This is abuse. Oops, I’ve “spanked” (abused) a child of mine in the past If you’re reading these words, and you’ve “spanked” or “punished” your kid(s), a little or a lot, what to do? OK, so, starting point is… my goal isn’t necessarily to be gentle with your ego. A fair approach is to first attend to the experience of the victims. Lets first concede the power of language. it’s not ‘spanking’ it’s ‘hitting and then creating intellectual or moral justification’. The impulse to hit is tightly linked to attitudes of entitlement and obligation. We’ll talk about that more, I mention it now because I believe the most efficient avenue of repair with yourself and your kid(s) would be tot find and appreciate the fullness of attitudes of entitlement. One hits someone else when one feels deeply entitled to that person submitting to them. Talk about that with your kid(s), perhaps. Solicit their experience of your overwhelming coerciveness. It’s worth appreciating that settler colonialism has lots of entitlements to it, as does european american supremacy culture, and it’s all sorta connected. the repair from the myth of the “correctness of spanking” is closely linked to walking out of a supremacy culture. The alternative to entitlement/obligation is cocreation and mutuality. Here’s some ideas on things that might contribute to a different and non-dominatior model of interactions with ones kids: you will now not utter ‘spanking’ seriously again. Use ‘adults hitting children and then self-justifying’. if you are willing to read some books, read The Verbally Abusive Relationship but from the lense of a child experiencing verbal abuse from their parent. (virtually all physical abuse is preceeded by verbal abuse & neglect) read the taking children seriously website and tell any kid(s) around you that you’re reading it. I am interested in not being complicit with people who abuse children or anyone else. So: Hi, [child], there were times in the past that I thought it was okay to use my size and role in your life to hurt you and scare you and control you, either with my hands or extensions of my hands, and my words and tone and emotions. I’d decided that it was appropriate for me to overpower you in in these ways, to force you to experience me as overwhelming, terrifying, hurtful. That alone is pretty bad, but then I also further assaulted your sense of self, by trying to convince me/you that all the rage and hurt you felt about all this was wrong, because I told myself that that this mistreatment of you was loving, and that you’d brought it on yourself, rather than me creating every bit of this harmful and painful dynamic. It is, in fact, terrible to intentionally hurt someone, for any reason, even in response to a ‘perceived wrong’. especially so when there is a power dynamic being exploited. As a starting point, I am practicing the concept of taking children seriously, and am trying to bring mutuality and co-creation into my way of being. I cannot fully insulate us all from demands outside of us, which means we sometimes have to do things we don’t want to do, or I am sometimes unavailable to spend time with you, or we cannot have and do the things we want to have and do. however, I will no longer be making valid threats to extract compliance from you. It might take me time to learn the new habits. Feel free to clock me when it seems like I’m heading in the direction of making a threat. I hope it doesn’t happen, and obviously these are all simply words. I recognize I destroyed precious things by inflicting pain on you. Things might be strange around here as we adjust to this new state of affairs, I’m pleased for newness. There will undoubtedly be less/no more spanking, hitting, punishing, attacking. Clock me on it all. On “Sin” Usually evangelical parents won’t say “i beat my child whenever I feel like it” they’ll say “when {child} sins, I must discipline them”. So strange, to believe in sin, now. There’s bad things that people do, to themselves, each other, or to non-people (concentrated agricultureal feeding operations jump to mind), and those things need to be addressed, but the concept of sin isn’t needed to fix those harms. my kid sometimes goes to a daycare at a church/school facility. She hears the normal set of evangelical thought-stopping phrases. I was raised on these, it’s really interesting to encounter them through her brain. She’s quite reasonable in many ways. She picked up the phrase “God keeps us safe”. We digested that a bit, eventually ended up with in so many ways you keep yourself safe. And people around you can help keep you safe. But in many situations, you are making big contributions to your own safety. Walking safely, catching yourself skillfully when you fall or trip, riding your bike or running skillfully. Being aware, planning ahead, especially with roads. all skillfulness and awareness is a form of safety. It’s not “thank god for keeping Eden safe” it’s “thank Eden for keeping Eden safe”. She’s attentive with her movements, her bike, roads. She is, literally, very responsible for her own safety. I obviously stay nearby when she’s with me, I work with effort to maintain her safety too, and appreciate her own skillful management of her own domains. another time she said “jesus fixed my sins” or something like that. I didn’t respond much. How interesting. I think she said it before she was 3 years old. I remember my response, clearly. I said “how interesting it is, that there some people who think sin is a real thing.” And that keeps being my general response. “How interesting it is, that some people think sin is a real thing. I wonder what else they think is real.” The very first concept she brought with her, related to the concept of God: God is so big I could hear the kids songs in her language that her church camp makes her sing. There’s a kids song all about “god is so big, so this and so that”. I said “hm, indeed. There’s so many big things out there. [looks around] That tree, and that mountain. That cloud. so much is so big.” We talked more about it, both a big god and bigness in general. A few days later, at her school parking lot, when a HUGE suburban pulled in next to us, Eden said, in the same way she said ‘god is so big’, ‘that car is so big’. I laughed. I just talk about ‘the evangelical’s god’ or ‘some peoples god’ or ‘the god of certain americans’ when I’m with her. It’s pretty graceful and ele If you’re coming at me about someone elses sin, I’m just clocking you as a perpetrator or victim (or both) of settler colonialism and the intellectual self-justifications they spun around themselves. The concept of “sin” goes hand in hand with what Pete Walker might call “Toxic Shame”. When someone says ‘sin’, I now hear ‘i am probably trying to get you to shame yourself into a regime of social control I’m about to tell you about…’ and I get so bored, so I leave. Additional Reading/Resources All of these count as parenting books, loosely. I find most parenting-specific books to be meh, and I find lots of parenting help stuff in non-parenting books. taking children seriously legal systems very different than ours, that link is the book, this link is the book online, shared on the author’s website. 9 The Politics of Jesus If you want to keep the person of Jesus central in your life, and you want to move away from european american supremacy, the ideas in this book are a good place to start. If, along the way, you end up also dropping the person of Jesus from your life as a central organizing principle, this book is still a good place to start. The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity This book points to the origins of ‘paternalism’, which is the underlying intellectual support for the sense of ‘duty’ some adults feel around hitting children, and the obligation they think their kids have to receive their physical abuse without protest. It started as the ‘duty’ masters had towards their slaves to be ‘good masters’, and the obligation they felt their slaves had towards them to be ‘good slaves’. here’s some of my highlights from the book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South This book is relevant to the concept of ‘discipline’, because it’s full of accounts of white female slaveowners ‘disciplining’ the slaves around them, or showing shocking degrees of entitlement to the very personhood of someone else. That these people wouldn’t beat and abuse their own children defies reason. here’s some highlights of mine The Secret Of Our Success, Joseph Henrich. An amazing book. Here’s a really nice book review. Not technically a ‘parenting book’, but tons of useful mental models for the transmission of skills, ‘skills/knowledge toolkits’ and more. Footnotes I wanted at least one or two quotes from the book findable here, I might just paste a bunch of text to it’s own page soon. I could only get a paper copy of the book, so I cannot use my usual “highlight text on kindle and share entire quote automatically to goodreads” thing. Here’s some of page 60, a section titled BREAKING WILLS: more quotes here. The child can decide on his own when he wants the chastisement to cease. Whenever he is willing to submit to the parent’s will, he can profess his willingness to obey. He should be given the opportunity for an honorable, but unconditional, surrender [emphasis added]. In his book God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (1982), Larry Tomczak (a charismatic from a Polish Catholic background) describes a battle of wills with his eighteen-month-old son which took place in a parking lot. When his small son refused to hold his father’s hand, as he had previously been trained to do, Tomczak says that “He was defiantly challenging my authority.” He adds, “What followed in the parking lot was a series of repeated spankings (with explanation and abundant display of affection between each one), until he finally realized that Daddy always wins and wins decisively!” Apparently, only repeated acts of force could compel this small boy to submit to his father’s authority and comply with his will. But the issue of winning clearly was paramount. Win or lose: These are seemingly the only alternatives available to such parents. No choice is offered children except to surrender their wills to the wills and superior force of their parents. In the warfare between parents and children, the parents expect to win. If not, the war continues until such time as the children submit and obey. Only by giving in to the adults can children escape the pain and suffering brought about by the application of the rod or other implements in the name of Christian discipline. Whether thought of in terms of breaking wills or shaping them, the obsession with authority, control, and obedience remains paramount. Evangelical writers have been preoccupied for centuries with authority and obedience, and the image of authoritarian family government often shapes their arguments in favor of harsh discipline for children. Early in the nineteenth century, one anonymous evangelical advocate of the rod offered this advice: “To insure, as far as may be, the proper behavior of his children, let every parent make it his inflexible determination, that he will be obeyed-invariably obeyed.” He added, “The sum and substance of good government is to be obeyed; not now and then, when the humor suits; but always, and invariably.” “The connexion between your command, and his obedience,” this writer noted, “should be the unfailing consequent of the other.” more quotes here ↩ i note discomfort writing these words. Me saying “Spanking is child sexual assault.” is correctly heard as me saying “I asses [some of you] as sexually assaulting your own child(ren) every time you spank(ed) them”. Some have weasled: “oh, it was just a few swats on the butt”, or “we only spanked you sometimes” or “we stopped spanking you once you grew up to a certain age”. Obviusly one might cease physically assaulting someone else as they age, and become more capable of resistance. a parent might ‘get got’ somehow. Evangelicals are brave about assaulting children, but are less comfortable with when the power dynamic is less imbalanced. I keep saying ‘the morality of this situation seems revealing by switching out some of the players, and seeing how it sounds.”. If i overheard someone saying about their partner “I dont hit them as long as they do not misbehave”, or “I only hit them when they do something that makes them really deserve it, I’d clock that as deeply concerning. ↩ most society-wide regimes of punishment are simple social tools to accomplish regimes of social control and ethnic cleansing, supporting the oppressor, reducing the power of the oppressed. Imagine having a bunch of people who speak a different language hop off a boat, kill a bunch of people, say they are instituting ‘rule of law’ and then you and your friends magically keep getting got by the police. European American supremacists showed up on Turtle Island in the 1600s and used the printing press + mass delusions of ‘political authority’ to justify their regimes of military violence, economic violence, against literally every people group existing in Turtle Island when they got there. They of course also enslaved populations of people from Africa, and needed a bunch more ‘laws’ to justify the enslavement regimes. The first american police departments were created by giving badges to the existing slave patrols. See more at /jaywalking ↩ my dad was barely ever in the house when I was growing up, and then from ~16 onwards, he and I never really voluntarily spoke again. Something similar with my mother. The contempt energy was strong from 16 and 17 years old, onward. She and I never had a close conversation. As I play back the last 35 years of our experience, I can tell clearly that they resented me, had contempt for me, from before literally my third birthday, until now. Nothing I said or did ever impacted them, they viewed me as ‘a strong willed child’ (more on that later) and thus viewed my will as something to be broken, and when I maintained my sense of self, despite their abuse, every evidence of my distinctiveness, my willfulness, confirmed in their mind that I was “rebellious”. 🙄 ↩ A delicious read that might fix all parenting woes for all readers: The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey ↩ Consider a read of the short book The Most Dangerous Superstition. It goes: The primary threat to freedom and justice is not greed, or hatred, or any of the other emotions or human flaws usually blamed for such things. Instead, it is one ubiquitous superstition which infects the minds of people of all races, religions and nationalities, which deceives decent, well-intentioned people into supporting and advocating violence and oppression. Even without making human beings one bit more wise or virtuous, removing that one superstition would remove the vast majority of injustice and suffering from the world. The book is about authority. Certainly do not pair it with The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey ↩ Supremacists use this justification for their supremacy all the time. Not “I want to be dominant over you” but “someone else, long ago, wanted people like me to be dominant over people like you”. My father sometimes is in the company of my child, regrettably, so I once got on the phone with him to confirm that he knew he had no authority or basis to ever threaten my child with hitting, or to make jokes about hitting children in her presence. He reacted with indignance, not that he wouldn’t hit a child, but that only parents are supposed to hit kids, not grandparents, and he had the “luxury” of not being required by his god to beat my child. ↩ It was said in the family in which I grew up: “I could kill you and make another one just like you.” Mmm, thanks for affirming the inherent dignity of a person. I was so desirous of a modicum of affection from the man considering himself my father that I’d pretend it was funny. ↩ the “Pirate Law” chapter in particular is exceptional. Go to the author’s website to download each chapter at a time as a docx, or the whole book. Often when rule-enforces justify their coercion, they might say “I have no other option but…”. In reading this book, one’s imagination for problem:remediation ideas might be increased, after reading about legal systems beyond what is normalized within the the greater united states. my stance on violence is that not only is it inherently abusive, it’s also unbelievably lacking in imagination, compared to co-creation and mutuality. Unfortunately, if one cannot regard their own/other’s humanity appropriately, one might not be able to get this bit right. ↩

Introduction Here’s quotes from Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, by Philip Greven. It was written in 1989, same year I was born, 35 years ago as of 2025. It’s sometimes nice to be able to share quotes with people. Photos of pages from books work only so well. Some books, many books, I’m able to read via my kindle paperwhite + the library. So it’s free to get on my kindle, and I can simply highlight text with my finger, save it as a highlight, and when I next sync books to it from the library, those quotes end up in my goodreads account, attached to the book. Sharabale, if I so choose. It’s how I get quotes like this. So paper books take a bit more work, but sometimes only a little extra effort. Until recently I didn’t know the above Goodreads/Amazon/Library book workflow and thought I had no way to get quotes off the kindle en-mass. I invite you to skim, see what lands with interestingness. From a section titled “Rationales”: page 68 … child is crying, not tears of anger but tears of a broken will. As long as he is stiff, grits his teeth, holds on to his own will, the spanking should continue, 43 But how long is long enough? When will the child’s will be truly broken? What sounds indicate to a parent “not tears of anger but tears of a broken will”? Hyles [the author of the above quote] does not say. What is remarkable, though, is the imagery of breaking wills, for that language links him with previous generations of twice-born Protestants who also sought to ensure that their children had no wills of their own. Often a distinction is made between a child’s will and his or her spirit. Roy Lessin, for example, declares: “A correctly administered spanking will break the rebellion and stubbornness in a child’s will but will not break his spirit.” James Dobson 1 a psychologist and the director of the multimillion-dollar organization in California called Focus on the Family, whose books on child-rearing (especially Dare to Discipline, which has sold over a million copies) have been enormously popular among evan-gelical Christians, explores the issue of children’s willfulness in The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence, thus joining a long line of corporal-punishment advocates obsessed with the wills of children. As a man who believes that “pain is a marvelous purifier,” Dobson has no hesitation in recommending that parents use “spankings” to control and to suppress their children’s willfulness and rebelliousness. The language of warfare is invoked at times in these treatises on will-breaking and punishment. Dobson, for example, uses the imagery of battles in his books such as Dare to Discipline, in which he notes: The child may be more strong-willed than the parent, and they both know it. If he can outlast a temporary onslaught, he has won a major battle, eliminating punishment as a tool in the parent[‘]s repertoire. Even though Mom spanks him, he wins the battle by defying her again. The solution to this situation is obvious: outlast him; win, even if it takes a repeated measure. Similarly, Fugate invokes the imagery of rebelliousness that arises from the willfulness of children: If the child’s rebellion has been the defiant resistance of his parents’ authority, he should be chastised until he chooses to give in. From a section titled “BREAKING WILLS” The focal point of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant child-rearing always has been the emerging wills of children.* Breaking the child’s will has been the central task given parents by successive gen-erations of preachers, whose biblically based rationales for discipline have reflected the belief that self-will is evil and sinful. From the seventeenth century to the present, evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants have persistently advocated the crushing of the will even before a child can remember the painful encounters with punishment that are always nec-essary to accomplish such goals. The theme of breaking children’s wills was voiced even before the Pilgrims had taken firm root in America. John Robinson, who had been their minister in Holland but did not accompany them on their voyage to the New World, acknowledged in his essay of 1628 on the education of children that “It is much controverted, whether it be better, in the general, to bring up children under the severity of discipline, and the rod, or no. And the wisdom of the flesh out of love to its own,” he rec-ognized, “alleges many reasons to the contrary. But say men what they will, or can, the wisdom of God is best.” Citing Proverbs to confirm his point, Robinson noted that surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon. This fruit of natural corruption and root of actual rebellion both against God and man must be destroyed, and no manner of way nourished, except we will plant a nursery of contempt of all good persons and things, and of obstinacy therein. 37 Robinson’s language of breaking, beating, and destroying is no accident, as his advice concerning children’s willfulness makes clear: * ⁠In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller extensively quotes German and other European sources from the eighteenth century to the present concerning the breaking and controlling of children’s wills. The texts’ interchangeability with those from English and American sources is indicative of the omnipresence of such views throughout both Europe and America for many centuries. They are so much alike that any reader who compares the quotations in this book with those in Miller’s surely will be conscious, as never before, of the pervasiveness of what Miller labels “poisonous pedagogy.” […] [Philip Greven is quoting someone else:] The child can decide on his own when he wants the chastisement to cease. Whenever he is willing to submit to the parent’s will, he can profess his willingness to obey. He should be given the opportunity for an honorable, but unconditional, surrender. [emphasis added]. In his book God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (1982), Larry Tomczak (a charismatic from a Polish Catholic background) describes a battle of wills with his eighteen-month-old son which took place in a parking lot. When his small son refused to hold his father’s hand, as he had previously been trained to do, Tomczak says that “He was defiantly challenging my authority.” He adds, “What followed in the parking lot was a series of repeated spankings (with explanation and abundant display of affection between each one), until he finally realized that Daddy always wins and wins decisively!” Apparently, only repeated acts of force could compel this small boy to submit to his father’s authority and comply with his will. But the issue of winning clearly was paramount. Win or lose: These are seemingly the only alternatives available to such parents. No choice is offered children except to surrender their wills to the wills and superior force of their parents. In the warfare between parents and children, the parents expect to win. If not, the war continues until such time as the children submit and obey. Only by giving in to the adults can children escape the pain and suffering brought about by the application of the rod or other implements in the name of Christian discipline. Whether thought of in terms of breaking wills or shaping them, the obsession with authority, control, and obedience remains paramount. Evangelical writers have been preoccupied for centuries with authority and obedience, and the image of authoritarian family government often shapes their arguments in favor of harsh discipline for children. Early in the nineteenth century, one anonymous evangelical advocate of the rod offered this advice: “To insure, as far as may be, the proper behavior of his children, let every parent make it his inflexible determination, that he will be obeyed-invariably obeyed.” He added, “The sum and sub-stance of good government is to be obeyed; not now and then, when the humor suits; but always, and invariably.” “The connexion between your command, and his obedience,” this writer noted, “should be the unfailing consequent of the other. “ Footnotes I cannot believe it. This person, James Dobson, decades after Spare the Child was written (1989, same year I was born) came back into the life of my family (and possibly your family) via my parent’s participation in his cult during my own childhood. I overheard TONS of ‘focus on the family’ programming as a kid. ↩

Introduction Often when I say “scooter”, especially in the united states, the person thinks of something different than what I mean. Here’s Denver’s Sportique Scooters, here’s one of their recent posts: So that is the kind of vehicle I’m talking about when I say “scooter”. I once had a vehicle just like that. I note that I wore a different helmet, vastly safer - I always ride with a full motorcycle helmet. Head injuries are no joke. It’s my primary vehicle, and my only vehicle. In America, nearly every situation is improved by having the option of riding one of those vehicles around. Collections of writings about scooters See, it’s not really about scooters, per se. It’s the verb of the thing. Scooters are different than cars, but the only reason it matters at all is because scooter-ing is vastly different than car-ing. And some of you might say “oh, I have a bicycle, and so…” Scootering is also different than bicycle-ing. 👉 https://josh.works/scootering