you know, sometimes you’re reading a message board post that’s so great you feel it’s an injustice that it’s just buried on some message board somewhere.

i decided i’d bury it on some blog somewhere too.

from the zeitgeist movement forums, obviously on the subject of child abuse / discipline.  link to thread:

IDMclean wrote:
My question for you and any other person who sees a distinction between discipline and abuse, what is the distinction? Where is the line drawn? I draw it at the application of mental, physical, and social violence. Which excludes the majority of types of discipline commonly cited. In my experience as a nomadic child, living between two different parents in different places with different schools, discipline is synonymous with abuse as you can see by reading through this thread.

If you take punitive measures, you are behaving abusively. When you yell at a kid, you teach them yelling at people to get what they want is okay. If you hit a kid, you teach them hitting people to get what they want is okay. If you hold their possessions hostage, you teach them that holding the possessions of others hostage is okay. In many cases, the ancestor generations discuss what amounts to techniques of social and psychological terrorism forgetting that the use of such techniques teach the child that such techniques are okay to use.

This isn’t to say that I’m saying you can’t structure your child’s life and correct behaviors. If discipline is to be held as separate from abuse then discipline is the correction of dysfunctional behavior by example and restraint both yours and theirs. You can not correct dysfunctional behavior with dysfunctional behavior. Additionally, you can not correct dysfunctional behavior in another if you, yourself, are engaging in that dysfunctional behavior regularly; especially, if you are engaging in the behavior in practicing discipline. To do so, exacerbates the behavior and creates a double standard.

One thing to consider is that most often when a person is behaving poorly it is because that person needs or wants something. In many cases, it is because they want attention and can not get positive attention. It is a simple truth that people seek to avoid the absence of stimulation preferring positive or negative stimulation, pleasure or pain, over nothing.

If you watch the Zeitgeist Movement videos, it is a common theme that the dysfunctional behavior of the society itself comes about due to its dysfunctional structure. Remove the impetus for dysfunctional behavior, and the dysfunctional behavior itself should abate.

This principle is extensively discussed in the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Specifically, it is addressed in Three Ways of Meeting Oppression. Additionally, you can find more about the application of Satyagraha here.

iI really have nothing to add I just thought that was fantastically put. wish I’d wrote it.