gunsmoke on 18/2/2012 at 14:01

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Jen and I both thought this was golden. Enough said. The guy did nothing worth even discussing. There is nothing wrong or 'right' with what he did. It is a non-story.

june gloom on 20/2/2012 at 06:16

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Hell, define which one of those is right or wrong and that's a real debate.

Nicker on 20/2/2012 at 07:54

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My work here is done.

scarykitties on 21/2/2012 at 06:27

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While the father's methods may be more brutal than most would consider the norm, I don't at all get the sense that he is a cruel, bullying parent intent on inflicting harm on a helpless girl to inflate his ego and satisfy his power fantasies.

I think that there are a lot of assumptions flying around about this guy. All we know is that he isn't afraid to use a gun, and that's hardly a damning attribute. A girl who grew up around a man who uses a gun casually would likely be well aware of how guns work and wouldn't have the same timid, sheltered reaction to the use of a gun that most others would have. In other words: there's a cultural boundary here.

But there's an argument that what he did was objectionably morally wrong. I don't see how that case can be made when his intent was to respond to her defiance in turn and essentially ground her from her laptop in a way that he could guarantee she would not cheat on. If he had tossed the laptop in the trash, it would have had the same effect, if perhaps not the same impact.

At this point, it may be true that the girl's shame may far outweigh what would seem fair as punishment for the crime, but keep in mind that the father had no way to predict the video going viral--people rarely are able to predict that kind of thing. He likely expected that his daughter and the friends who she had complained to would see it, and no one else. Based on the tone he has taken in interviews after the fact, the man genuinely loves his daughter, though he does not feel that using harsh punishment to correct defiance is wrong. However, he does seem to regret this incident, or at least the hype that has risen surrounding it. He seems to prefer everyone to just forget about it and go on with their lives.

It's debatable of what is the best method to instruct a child, and the line between abuse and correction is a fuzzy one that varies by parent and child. Some children may need more correction than others. Some children are defiant enough to not regard their parents without the use of some kind of physical negative reinforcement (spanking, for instance), while others accept punishment such as grounding without complication.

Still, I think that it's hasty and assumptive to accuse this man of things he hasn't been proven to do. What he did do was permanently take away his daughter's computer and let her partners in defiance know that he was doing so. I do not see any hidden threat of harm to the daughter in the video, implicit or otherwise. The man seems calm and intelligent, but firm. There is nothing wrong with that.

Koki on 21/2/2012 at 10:07

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KOLYA'D