PigLick on 15/2/2012 at 08:18

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the fact the he CHOSE to wear that hat before making the video speaks for itself

heywood on 15/2/2012 at 10:18

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The gun and the laptop destruction were not cool, but otherwise I'm mostly OK with this.

Teenagers complaining that parents aren't fair is pretty normal. But posting a profane, exaggerated rant on Facebook to an audience of ~450 is not the same thing as bitching to your friends at school, because of the size of the audience and the longevity of Facebook posts. It's not a crisis, but I would have a problem with what she said and where she said it. And there are lessons I'd want my daughter to learn, such as:

Don't post BS or anything you might wish to later retract under your real name on the internet, lest it come back to bite you.
Don't insult people behind their back.
Treat your family members with respect and don't take them for granted.

So I think her rant deserved a parental response, just not quite the one it got. Obviously, bringing a gun into a family dispute in any fashion is really wrong for reasons I don't have to explain. And property destruction is not a legitimate use for a gun. And destroying someone's property is generally not an appropriate means of punishment or retribution, especially when it's disproportional to the severity of the infraction.

But the basic idea of reprimanding her on Facebook for something she did on Facebook is fair game. Probably not something I'd do for her first such offense, but it's an option I'd consider if a more conventional reprimand didn't get the message across. Sometimes kids don't really understand the inappropriateness of their actions and how they hurt others until they've been on the receiving end.

I've also been reading (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2100774/Tommy-Jordan-Police-pay-visit-father-shot-daughters-laptop-viral-video-Facebook-complaint--thank-him.html) this follow-up article and I don't see anything to indicate the father is abusive, just a strict parent who didn't think through the bad lessons his daughter and others might take away from involving a gun in the punishment. And I think it's ridiculous to assume a 15 year old girl is going to become a white trash whore or be scarred for life just because her daddy destroyed her laptop. Puhleeze. People are overreacting to the father's actions more than the father did to his daughter's.



Is not taking anything seriously supposed to be a GOOD thing? We shouldn't teach kids that it's OK to bullshit, exaggerate, spin, insult, or disrespect others because they will. And we shouldn't teach kids not to take anything seriously because they won't. You've just highlighted one reason why civil discourse, fair reporting, ethical behavior, and cooperation are all declining in American society while polarization, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery are on the rise.



I'm with you on this. Getting people out of their comfort zone and challenging their assumptions, beliefs, and abilities are fundamental keys to personal growth. I think it's important for young adults (and old) to engage in reasoned discourse with people who disagree with them, walk a mile in others shoes, and be exposed to other cultures if at all possible. The worst things you can do to your kids is coddle them in bubble wrap, never let them fail or be responsible, raise them in an insular community, indoctrinate them in your dogma, teach them to disregard other views, and let them feel entitled to a good life by virtue of birth.

The internet is a double-edged sword in that it offers the opportunity to interact with all sorts of people around the world and learn about other counties and cultures, but also proliferates misinformation and makes it easy to get trapped in echo chambers if you want to. I think it's a real challenge for parents to teach their kids to use the internet for the former and avoid the latter. Otherwise, it will just end up fragmenting society.

Koki on 15/2/2012 at 11:58

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http://static.fjcdn.com/comments/Thats+fucking+awesome+_20b8e6a1abf14cd0a3781411c2f2030c.png

Fucking awesome. Someone give that man a scouts badge

demagogue on 15/2/2012 at 15:03

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I'm the most anti-authoritarian demagogue you'll ever know. ;)
That's the real secret of my seductive message.



I have to elaborate what I meant I guess. By "serious" I meant "dogmatic", over-confidence in values or a person thinking the rightness of their beliefs are written in the fabric of reality when they aren't. Then they think they have moral standing to lecture other people about those values that they don't actually have grounds for. The opposite of serious or dogmatic in this case isn't being frivolous or disrespectful, but being down-to-earth. It means taking things seriously when they actually are serious matters in the world, and just to that extent, but not out of dogmatic reflex because it's the "right" thing. It also means it's not the literal words that matter; it's what the words mean in context, what the real world is saying behind the words. That's what you care about. (Edit: And if I suggested nothing online should be taken very seriously it's because, in fact, nothing online is very serious, short of things like credit card fraud and criminal activity. This guy needs to get a grip on what's really important in life, like getting his daughter ready to be self-sufficient and a good citizen in the real world, stuff like that, not what teenage girls text each other in between funny photo comments.)

When I watched this, I thought, ok, he's lecturing 20 million people. He made a YT lecture not to his daughter, but to other parents, to "our sick culture" (said with a down-turn of the mouth in disgust & a huffy sense of purpose), with the message: this is how you parents ought to deal with this situation, or God help us we're going to fall like the Roman empire with our Lady Gagas and Jersey Shores and their disrespectful attitudes growing like cancers in our cesspool of a culture.

One does not need to defend mediocre music or awful t.v. shows to think this attitude is detached from reality. He's reading the girl's FB post literally instead of realizing that the words are almost inevitable for teenagers, even pretty tame, for well-known reasons, if he'd ever read a word of teenage writing out there or a single book on adolescent developmental psychology. It's true it's also an attitude rife in the culture; teenagers are so susceptible to group-think it's almost laughable, so they're going to have the same cynical sense of humor and casual entitlement and talk to each other about it.

All this doesn't mean a father doesn't need to deal with the situation, but he needs to deal with it in the way it actually works in the world, instead of how things work in his head. You don't "teach" children by just jamming things in their head by rote... You have to open the world up to them. Read to them, get them around less fortunate people, volunteering if possible, so that casual entitlement doesn't have grounds to be serious, be a good example to them of how you treat other people. I mean these are things he needed to start doing 10 years earlier. At this point, a teenager craves more independence, and you're grooming them to leave soon, so there's not much he can do now except rant and have it bounce off of her, then she goes out into the world and see what life is about and that teaches her in the way he should have all along.

Like, to take an example, something like "chores" aren't about something people should do out of duty to learn to be respectful by dogmatic rote, like if you don't do them a red light turns on in heaven somewhere under the label "Disrespectful", and the dad points at it and says "See that red light, young lady...". In the real world, you do chores because that's how you run a healthy household, and when you're in a household everybody needs to contribute, and respect grows out of the situation. If a teenager feels burdened by them, it's a well-known signal they're sending that they don't want to be part of the household; why do someone else's laundry. A parent that's in tune with where their kid is going will have some give & take and be flexible and reasonable... For some things he ought to be giving her more independence as she gets older -- so let her do her own laundry and give her money to do her own grocery shopping & cooking, getting her grounded & down to earth is the best thing he can do for her -- for other things she's not there yet and you explain why and still expect things. What's ridiculous is this guy lecturing the country about that red light in heaven that signals the end of the Roman & American Empires, and then shooting it lol.

...................................................................................................

Going back to your post, I think the virtues and ills that you mentioned happen exactly when people are or aren't grounded & down to earth. People don't bullshit, exaggerate, or spin something unless they want to exploit them or sell dogma. And they don't insult or disrespect someone unless they feel like they're in a shell detached from the world so the words don't mean anything and they're funny. These things don't happen for people to the extent they are grounded & down to earth because they don't feel any need to exploit other people whose situation they know; they definitely aren't in the game to push dogma down other people's throats; and being grounded means they aren't in that shell where they don't see how their words are received or mean. Needless to say I think civil discourse, fair reporting, ethical behavior, and cooperation all grow out of a healthy attachment & grounding with the world, and polarization, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery are what happen when people get detached or sheltered from the world pushing back and calling on them to be level-headed and flexible.

I just think these kinds of virtues need to come out of being connected with how the world works and not a cold reflex of duty that ends up looking insincere at best, or even perversely counterproductive to the same values they're claiming for themselves at worst.

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Edit: This is a good time to mention Pamela Druckerman's book Bringing Up Bébé & her (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816.html?mod=googlenews_wsj) WSJ article about how great French parenting is compared to American parenting. I'm not going to defend everything about French parenting culture, but it was making good points. It's not about going easy on your kids & giving-in to them and not having firm discipline. The whole punchline of French parenting is they don't give in to their kids at all; Americans cater to them too much and put their kids into protective shells. Of course French are famously culturally dogmatic (they have that reputation anyway), but you wouldn't say they're too detached from life. They have the whole "good living" (joie de vivre) part down to a science, and I think that worldliness has been good for the culture and how they approach parenting. You don't lecture the world what's right & wrong; the world tells you.

Koki on 15/2/2012 at 21:07

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What public humiliation?