He posted a strong opinion that it is assault and battery for someone who is not a parent of a child to use corporal punishment.
What is wrong with that “behavior”? I disagree that mild spanking is assault and battery, and people with standing in loco parentis may have some legal protection in regards to the use of corporal punishment, but it’s not really all that dramatic a position to take, and it shouldn’t be especially offensive. Nobody else in that thread offered any legal background to support their positions to the contrary, so his failing to do so cannot be the source of the controversy.
The “bullshit” as you well know is how others immediately personalized the issue to Diogenes, namely Guinastasia, and a bunch of people chose then to participate in the thread only to comment on Diogenes.
Hentor the Barbarian, I can’t quite tell if you are just baiting me or if this is really a question that you have. I will go ahead and treat this as if it is being asked in good faith.
Naturally there is nothing wrong with having a strong opinion and expressing it. I have several opinions myself and have been know to share them from time to time. The problem comes in, using that thread as an example, when you wander in and spew.
this is what he said: "It sounds like the OP already did a pretty good job of letting her feelings known, and that the boygriend might have learned his lesson. Those saying it’s “no big deal” to let somebody hit your kids are full of shit. It is a big fucking deal, but it sounds like this guy won’t do it again. I say it’s OK to give one chance with that, but one chance only. Just because you’re fucking somebody doesn’t mean you have the right to physically assault and batter their children. "
See, there was actually a somewhat interesting exchange of ideas going back and forth between several posters with different views up to that point. Then along comes Dio and tells half of the people that they are full of shit and then histrionically equates a simple spanking with assault and battery (while at the same time reducing the role of the boyfriend to “someone you are fucking”. Can you not see how his post was immediately making things personal? Seriously?
Moreover, and I cannot speak for anyone but myself here, the specific stance that he was taking in that thread and the utter dismissal by him of the role that the live in boyfriend plays in that child’s life is incredibly offensive. I come from a blended family myself (as do a great many people) and am currently in the process of forming a blended household.
So I don’t know. There are people out there that hold the position that an occasional swat on the ass is a valid way to quickly get a message about safety across to a child and don’t hold with having an encounter session instead. They are being told, in as many words, that they are engaging in child abuse. There are people, like myself, that are products of blended families. They are having to listen to him completely dismiss the roles of step-parents out of hand.
What I am saying is that his initial post was inflammatory and attacking people personally from the start. No big surprise that it was taken that way. I assume that is the intent that he had from the start.
I can certainly agree that anyone who was taking a “no big deal” might be offended by being told that they were full of shit. I don’t see that as making it “personal.”
Here is where you’re making it personal by bleeding your own personal history all over the opinion expressed by some random person on the message board. “They’re being told” makes it sound like some kind of official sanction. You’ve got to be able to hear contrary positions, especially on an internet message board, without assuming that the person is targeting your particular and personal background. There’s just nothing in Diogenes’ post that seems to be about you or your blended family history.
It may have been inflammatory in that he told others they were full of shit. It was not at all personal.
Except no one said that. Other posters were suggesting that she was being unfair to her boyfriend, they were reminding her that he has been acting as this boys father for the past 3 years, they were pointing out that it was odd that she had considered spanking the child but that she would never be comfortable with him doing it (and suggesting that this was a deeper issue that really needs to be addressed). No one, that I can see, was telling her that she had no right to feel the way that she was feeling. They were offering alternate points of view.
You were the one that came in, guns blazing, and radically changed the tone of the thread. You told half of the people that they were full of shit and dismissed the parenting role of the boyfriend out of hand. Then, as if that weren’t enough, you proceeded to make all sorts of claims about the legality of this which, as we found out in the ATMB thread that you opened, turn out to be completely pulled out of your ass.
It completely boggles the mind that you are unable to see how boorish and offensive you are.
You have to know that coming from and being a part of a blended family is at this point in time a pretty common experience for a great deal of people. It may even be something that the majority of people experience (though that is just a guess, I have no dug around for statistics). I am going to assume that you read the thread in question, so you must be able to see that his attitude in the thread is one where he dismisses the role of non-biological parents out of hand. How can this not be personal? For sure to me, and I suspect to others as well.
At the end of the day this has nothing to do with me being unable to hear opinions that differ from my own. You and I have different opinions at this very moment and I can all but promise you that you are not going to get a pit thread because we are exchanging our ideas in a constructive way and, I think, listening to each other and maybe, just maybe, actually considering altering how we think based on this exchange.
This is not what he is doing. He is proclaiming his (offensive) opinion as if it is immutable fact. It’s like he walks into a room where several people are having a normal, if spirited, conversation and proceeds to start yelling into a bullhorn about how wrong they all are. Quite frankly he is being a big jerk and has a long history of this.
The prevalence of your personal experience has nothing to do with whether Diogenes’ comment was personal. If it were, then I would point to my experience with many kids who have been beaten and mistreated by mom’s latest boyfriend who probably would have been heartened by Diogenes vigorous defense against such behavior. Just because you had the Brady Bunch experience doesn’t mean that it’s great to endorse corporal punishment by non-parental caregivers.
But in the end, his comment wasn’t personal to any of them either, and they weren’t having someone champion their particular thing.
This is what I don’t get ~ if you get a scab and you keep picking at it, it gets bigger and grows into a nasty, festering grotesque hole.
If you ignore the scab – even if it stays there for a bit – it never gets bigger and eventually goes away.
Aren’t these threads about how bad Dio is just picking at the scab and making it worse? If he were ignored completely, wouldn’t the problem just eventually take care of itself? Linkety
Hentor, I responded against my better judgement because I was frustrated that what I thought was an interesting discussion was once again going to go to crap. I usually make it a policy to ignore him and I regret not sticking with it this time. I would rather there not have been another pit thread to give him more attention but since it’s here, I’ll vent.
What pisses me off most is his constant mantra that everyone in the thread was telling the OP she has no right to say who disciplines her child. NO ONE SAID THAT!
Most everyone said she needed to consider that her boyfriend was essentially a co-parent and should be allowed to make some decisions and she should not fly off the handle about the situation but have a calm discussion as co-parents. At no time did the OP say she thought her bf was abusing her child and everyone else was okay with that. But then Dio shows up, decides everyone else is wrong and only he is right. We’re all aiding and abetting a child abuser, attacking a poor single mother and taking away her parental rights. Now you, Hentor, obviously read the thread to come up with your statistics, did you also note how many posters were saying what Dio was claiming everyone said? I can help you out there, none.
Sure, some people were a bit harsh in their phrasing to the OP but that’s the Dope and anyone who posts here or lurks should know that some of that will happen. At least one of them apologized to the OP in the ATMB thread. Most were gentle but were getting a vibe from her phrasing that raised alarm bells, granted the OP may not have intended to give that impression but we only have the words we see to go by.
I have only had a run in with Dio in one pit thread and one other thread that got
moved to the pit and I stopped posting once I saw the typical Dio pattern. So only two Dio incidents, one very brief. I’ve posted in a couple of pit threads of his but mostly to post nonsense. I am not one of the usual suspects who goes up against Dio everytime he posts. But again, I knew he had just ruined another thread and I was frustrated. It was not a self-fulfilling prophecy, Dio’s first post in that thread was to attack everyone else in the thread. Maybe if he stuck with the first sentence it wouldn’t have been so
Inflammatory and I would have been able to ignore him but the insistence that everyone else was saying something we weren’t got on my nerves.
Frankly, I am embarrassed that I got sucked in again. I am only posting here to get it out of my system. But now to steel my resolve I think I will just have to avail myself of the board’s devices to help me. I encourage everyone else he annoys to do the same.
The prevalence of my experience has everything to do with his comments being personal. He is belittling an incredibly common family situation. This is flat out offensive. Moreover you are kind of being a jerk when you are making the claim that " Just because you had the Brady Bunch experience doesn’t mean that it’s great to endorse corporal punishment by non-parental caregivers. "
This is pretty snide and dismissive and a gross misrepresentation of anything that I have been saying in this thread or the other one.
I was raised by a non-biological father. Biology has nothing to do with anything. It’s a complete non-issue to me, and I said nothing about it in that thread other than to reject the suggestion that I cared about it. This guy lacked any legal parenthood status at all. He is not a stepfather, he is just the mother’s boyfriend. Banging somebody doesn’t automatically make you a parent to that person’s kids.
You are wrong. Banging somebody automatically gives you the full legal authority to punch their children in the face any time you want. And you shoud, because it’s the right thing to do.
In the now-closed thread, I quoted a portion of a Minnesota Supreme Court decision about the criteria the court used in deciding that a man had the same parental immunity from civil liability as the actual parent:
That doesn’t make him a parent, but it does mean that, just like a parent, he can’t be held civilly liable for appropriate corporal punishment administered to the child.
Yeah, exept it looks like you are 100% wrong about that as friend Bricker, was good enough to point out to you in the ATMB thread. It kind of looks like the boyfriend was actually standing in loco parentis and had the legal right to discipline the child just as if he were the parent. I notice that you never responded to that post beyond calling it bullshit. Here is the post again to any that are interested
Which in a way is exactly what this thread was about. You say things as if they are fact when not only are they mere opinion they often seem to be 100% wrong. That in and of itself is bad, but you seem to be unable to see that you are doing this at all, which seems like some sort of a pathology (do you notice that I stated that last bit as an opinion? Because it is just how something seems to me? If I were you I probably would have said “You are mentally ill” and then claimed that this was medically true and then when a doctor or psychiatrist came along and resoundingly proved me wrong told them that they were full of shit and not altered my opinion one bit).
Let me rephrase. you appear to be arguing that because you had a positive blended family experience, it is personally offensive that Diogenes made any statement regarding the status of a live-in boyfriend.
I would point out that many children have not had positive experiences with live-in boyfriends.
But, since you’ve made clear that it was okay for posters in the spanking thread to suggest that the mother may have deeper issues she needs to consider, I would suggest that since you are taking this matter so very personally, there may be deeper issues you should consider. It’s not offensive for me to say that, right?
