How honest should parents be?

[Excited Penguin]

I have extremely radical views on the topic, which I'm not exactly encouraged to discuss when I have a reasonable suspicion it will be wrongly dismissed and not really considered in a detached manner. This might be one of the reasons we so often butt heads with each other, just saying.

[Ravenshire]

I will admit I can be perceived as ambivalent and I would do well to further explain some points so as to stop giving that impression. I'm not very encouraged to do so, however, for very understandable reasons - you guys can be get pretty fucking crazy on me, and I'm glad that finally someone else noticed it as well.

Please, go ahead and rage quit. That's more your style.

[Thumpalumpacus]

You start off with a false analogy, then you imply that you claim that you and others here have successfully raised children despite not pointing out what you mean by that. They didn't die under your care? Well, congratulations, but that's not all there is to being a successful parent.

Firstly, explain how my analogy is false. Be explicit.

Secondly, as for defining success in parenting, your straw-man definition, which is nothing that I wrote yet you dishonestly impute to me, is obviously horseshit -- more evidence of your sloppy thinking and appeals to rhetoric rather than substance.

Success in child-rearing means, to me, raising a child that is both able to survive in the world on its own terms while at the same time possessing independance of mind to question its premises. It's a little more complex than your overly simplistic caricature, so I hope that you'll actually be able to understand what I'm saying, but fear not -- if it's giving you problems, ask me to repeat it again, and I'll type slower.

However, I expect your dishonest argumentation to stop, and if it doesn't you will lose audience by the count of one.

Useless statement. I don't think anyone said otherwise and it doesn't concern anything.

Kitan did. I'd suggest you sign up for remedial reading for your sophomore year.

What gave you the impression I acted like a know-it-all? Give me actual quotes.

I'd do that, but it is in your general demeanor, and shot through all of your posting. So you can browse your own posting history and attempt to look at it through the eyes of others. If you expect me to do your legwork or thinking for you, though, you're to be disappointed -- your education (thankfully!) is not my responsibility.

I was merely making a suggestion and someone went crazy on me. While it's true I have no experience actually raising any children I perceived a mistake on her part based on what my own mother did with me. 

No. You were talking out of your ass on a topic you have zero experience in, and you got your ass handed to you. You sitting in judgement of your mother's behavior, when you have zero conception of her responsibilities, is another example of your inability to think outside of your own assumptions. We all judge our parents as children. It's only when you experience the responsibility of child-rearing -- when another human being depends entirely upon you for their existence -- that you understand the gravity of the factors that go into the decision-making process.

Which experience are you refering to? If anything, you've only tried to silence me and didn't actually address anything I actually said. If you want me to learn the lesson that I should submit to bullying, I didn't and never will.

If you're too stupid to understand my point here, I will not bother repeating it. The conversation will flow around you and you will be left behind ... where you seem to belong.

You would do well to give future adults more credit than that. You can't really be that much of an influence on a kid, no matter how hard you may try. A person is far more shaped by his culture than his parents could possibly ever affect him. There's a reason teenagers are rebels by nature.

lol, here's your shovel, keep digging.

*****************************************

It's more like first world privileged. It gives you the ability to whine about your non-problems while using an Iphone made of conflict minerals.

Yes because if you have anything of value your pain or suffering is no longer valid.

I don't think he's saying that, myself. The way I understand it, he's saying that suffering is relative. Here in America, we feel poor if we drive a 20-year-old vehicle (I do), or shop at thrift stores for clothing or cooking utensils, and so on -- but that the suffering from poverty here in absolute terms doesn't compare to suffering from poverty in, say, Ghana, where the nearest medical care might be sixty miles away and those must be traveled on foot due to the lack of transport.

I had a cell-phone even when I was poor. It didn't raise my income, but it did say something about the money I had available that I could spend it on that rather than tomorrow's dinner.

If I were a poor man in Myanmar, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd be too busy scraping out a living to engage here. That doesn't mean I haven't suffered as a poor man in America, but it does mean that as matters of wealth go, I'm goddamned lucky to be here and not there.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I will admit I can be perceived as ambivalent and I would do well to further explain some points so as to stop giving that impression. I'm not very encouraged to do so, however, for very understandable reasons - you guys can be get pretty fucking crazy on me, and I'm glad that finally someone else noticed it as well.

You're being perceived as an idiot -- and rightly so. You should shut up while you're behind.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I have extremely radical views on the topic, which I'm not exactly encouraged to discuss when I have a reasonable suspicion it will be wrongly dismissed and not really considered in a detached manner. This might be one of the reasons we so often butt heads with each other, just saying.

It's not "wrongly" dismissed, which is something you'd know if you'd raised a child.

You don't know your ass from third base about child-rearing, and it is painfully evident.

[Losty]

Of course you are lucky to live here thump, but we have poor people in America who are actually poor. We like to make little kits for the poor people in town. They don't have cell phones. There is a group of mostly mentally ill men living under a bridge near where I live and they don't have extra clothes besides the ones they wear. They often eat from the garbage. They're very kind. It's difficult to spend time with them because it's jut so heart breaking. Theyre truly suffering its very real.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Of course you are lucky to live here thump, but we have poor people in America who are actually poor. We like to make little kits for the poor people in town. They don't have cell phones. There is a group of mostly mentally ill men living under a bridge near where I live and they don't have extra clothes besides the ones they wear. They often eat from the garbage. They're very kind. It's difficult to spend time with them because it's jut so heart breaking. Theyre truly suffering its very real.

I know that -- I know that. When I lived on the West End of Ventura, homeless were everywhere -- they camped out in the nearby (dry) Ventura Riverbed. I volunteered at a food bank three days a week for a while and got to know a bunch of them and their stories, and it is heartbreaking.

But they are not truly representative of the poor here in America, insofar as I think of "poor" -- which, I suppose, should be properly called "working poor", as that's the way I think of them in my head. The janitors and burger-slingers and convenience-store clerks. The homeless here surely have things as rough as many poor around the world, but even so, if they're in an urban environment, they have things like access to emergency health-care (hospitals aren't allowed to turn them away for lack of resources), food banks like the one I worked at, free inoculations, disability payments from SSDI if they've been diagnosed mentally or physically disabled, and other resources which simply aren't available to a depressingly large part of humanity.

I'm not belittling the suffering of homeless here, nor am I saying that our homeless have it as good as those in the beknighted Western European states, but I am saying that if we put poverty on a scale of one to ten, one being harshest, ten being softest, American poor aren't at one, or two, or perhaps even three.

I'm certainly not saying that that should justify minimizing any efforts to ameliorate it.

[Excited Penguin]

You know what? This is beneath me. Let someone else address your inanities and bullshit attitude.

[Excited Penguin]

You want me to take you seriously and really destroy your arguments like I did Cato's earlier? You'll have to give me something to work with. Now you're just playing hide the ball with me.

[Ravenshire]

You know what? This is beneath me. Let someone else address your inanities and bullshit attitude.

Please do rage quit again. You won't be missed.

Please.

Pretty please.

Pretty, pretty please.