Articles from April 2015

About that new video of a Baltimore mom smacking up her son: white praise linked to oppression

What’s disturbing is how many people are calling this behavior “mom of the year.”  She’s screaming cuss words at her son and smacking him on the head, which causes brain trauma.

I would be okay with her getting angry and pulling him away, and certainly applaud her for going to get him.  I also understand that she is frightened and doesn’t want him to get killed.

But the cussing and the slapping are NOT okay.  Many people have noted that embarrassing her son on national television will only cause harm, and have given other means she could have used, such as talking to him, validating him, but telling him this is not the way.

We can understand WHY she did this, and sympathize, but we need to stop condoning such behavior.  We need to know there are other ways to raise children that WORK.

And let’s not excuse abuse because a parent was “under pressure.”  Abuse victims have heard all sorts of excuses, yet it traumatizes them anyway.  Don’t forsake the victim for the sake of “not judging” the abuser.

Also, when people say they “turned out okay” after such harsh, outmoded “parenting styles,” or even defend what their parents did, it sounds like Stockholm Syndrome.

Some have also noted that this video’s popularity demonstrates white America praising the beating-down of blacks.  See, for example, Joan Walsh’s The hideous white hypocrisy behind the Baltimore “Hero Mom” hype: How clueless media applause excuses police brutality

Also see Why is America celebrating the beating of a black child? by Stacey Patton, who demonstrates how praising this behavior is part of white supremacy and systematic oppression of blacks:

The kind of violent discipline Graham unleashed on her son did not originate with her, or with my adoptive mother who publicly beat me when I was a child, or with the legions of black parents who equate pain with protection and love.

The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred.

I see almost nothing in the comment section to Patton’s opinion piece except calling her an idiot and saying the mother’s actions are not abuse.

To that I say, YOU’VE GOTTA BE FRICKIN’ KIDDING ME!

WHAT THE HECK????!!!!!

Do we really still have THAT many abusers left in this country, who think that smacking a kid around is NOT abuse?

Obviously we still have TONS of work to do to get the word out!  THIS IS ABUSE!!!!

Also Sunn m’Cheaux:

This is about the utilization of her actions as propaganda by the very elements of society who created the conditions that led to her believing what she did was the best course of action. This is about the shameless hypocrisy of media that selectively demonizes the behavior of Blacks, depending on how said behavior fits into their agenda. This is about the fact that the media–including social media–is now more inclined to indoctrinate us with narratives than inform us of news. –Post here

Abuse leads to bad behavior, and does NOT stop it.  Yet in various comments people are complaining that “liberals” are somehow the problem if they see this as abuse.  Um, NO.  Obviously the complainers don’t understand that abuse at home does NOT create well-behaved kids.

My blog/website is FULL of pages against screaming at, cussing at and slapping kids.  It has become my mission to fight this, ever since I saw Tracy doing this kind of crap to her kids.  My most popular posts include “Slapping kids upside the head causes traumatic brain injury.”

She then turned around and became my worst nightmare, psychologically abusing me and trying to intimidate me in various ways, and now my cyberstalker, because I dared to say she’s an abuser.  She threatened to sue me if I went to my priest for mediation if she began coming to my church full-time.  Yet asking him for mediation was the only way I could handle it if she became my fellow parishioner, which was a real danger because her church has now closed.

I also unfriend anybody who says crap like, “Parents, beat your children.”  I’ve actually seen this in my Facebook newsfeed, and was absolutely appalled.

Yet now I find people praising behavior like this, saying the lack of screaming/cussing/smacking around kids is why this country is so screwed up, and calling the woman in this video “mom of the year,” and complaining that “idiot liberals” are probably going to sic CPS on her.

(Yet spanking is still done by the majority, so that kid you see acting up, is probably spanked at home.  And my generation got spanked plenty, yet WE acted up plenty as well: cussing, disrespectful comments, promiscuity, not obeying, all the stuff people blame on lax parenting.)

How can I possibly be okay with this???!!!!

And now I find that many blacks are not okay with this, either, are horrified at the glee with which whites praise it.

Also see Violence for Violence: A Mom’s Turmoil in Baltimore:

Finally, a mom doing parenting right, the world seemed to scream.

It made me profoundly sad, and quite honestly, confused.

The very same people who recognize that violence is not the answer in retaliation to the police somehow find violence an appropriate response when it’s coming from a parent?

From Unschooling Momma and Poppy’s Only in America would an abusive mother receive the title “Mother of the Year”:

The real problem here is not whether or not this is abuse but the fact that abuse of children is so widely accepted in America and often sugar-coated under the umbrella of “discipline.”

Watch this video and imagine this happening in any other context outside of a parent child/relationship and tell me if abuse would then be too harsh of a word to describe this scenario.

If a man dragged and beat his wife like this to “protect” her it would be abuse. If an employer slapped his employee like this to teach him a lesson it would be called abuse. If I protected my dog from being killed and proceeded to beat him, it would be called abuse.

People would be outraged! Animals have more rights and are offered more protection than our children! Yet, this woman is seen as a hero on national TV because she showed up to beat her son.

….I know there are plenty out there who disagree with my “bleeding heart” approach to parenting but I say America needs more bleeding hearts! We need to be people our children can look up to and respect. We need to practice what we preach.

We need to value our children as humans and not hurt them. We need to open up our eyes and see by physically punishing children we are treating them that is how they deserve to be treated.

They feel worthless, they have no self-respect and it opens up the doors for them to be more likely to be abused in the future “out of love.”

We need to model the behaviors we want to see in our children, violence begets more violence. Violently attacking a child does not teach a child not to partake in violence!

Respect is taught by feeling respected. Children develop respect for their parents and ultimately authority by being respected themselves not by being beaten down.

For a time, I felt alone in my feelings on this case, when usually there are lots of voices speaking out against an abusive incident.  I wept for humanity.

But now I’m finding all sorts of blog posts and people on Facebook speaking out against it: friends, strangers.  And they, too, say, “I felt alone in this.”  Here, I’ve only posted a few such blogs which I have found so far.

A Conversation with Oscar Wilde–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–March 1995, Part 11

As part of my Lit mid-term, I was to write a dinner dialogue between myself and one of the twelve authors we studied.  I wrote,

I have invited over Oscar Wilde, have sent my time machine to him and brought him to my house.  We go to Country Kitchen, not because it’s the best food (not), but because it’s the “local hangout” and he can see bits of local society.

“I loved ‘Importance of Being Earnest,'” I say.  “It was so funny and so ridiculous.”

“Well, in my day, society is ridiculous,” Wilde says.  “Marriage based on how much money you have, your worth determined by what you do and what your connections are–I wanted people to see how silly they were being with these attitudes.”

We go on discussing the play for a while, not any others since that’s the only one by him that I know.  Then we begin to talk about contemporary issues–starting with marriage.

“Marriage these days is supposed to be based on love,” I say, “but we now have a 50% divorce rate.”

“We base it partly on love,” Wilde says, “or, rather, infatuation–and partly on economics.  Our divorce rate is low because people just don’t divorce.  But so many people are unhappy because they didn’t know their spouse well enough before marrying them, and now they’re no longer ‘in love,’ if they ever were in the first place.”

Somehow we end up on the subject of homosexuality; I admit I don’t agree with it, but I say that I think it was wrong for Wilde to be jailed for it.  “You shouldn’t be put in jail just because of the way you are, when you can’t always help it,” I say.

“I was put there for ‘corrupting a young person’ with it,” he says.  “I wish I’d never fought the Marquess; when he said I was homosexual, it was true.  Maybe people would’ve forgotten about it if I hadn’t sued, but now I’m in prison for a drive I have.  A drive I don’t know how to control.”

“You must admit, you were pretty–promiscuous there, and you do have a wife,” I say, which leads to AIDS–which leads to a discussion of the prevalence of syphilis in Wilde’s day.  Interesting, but not something I’d want to record here.

People look at us and wonder why Wilde talks the way he does and why he dresses the way he does.  But he notices that they seem less shocked at our topics of conversation than they are about him.

“It seems like you’re so much freer to talk, really talk, in your day,” he says.  We eventually leave, and I take him back to my house to spend the rest of the evening–wishing all the while that such a handsome man weren’t gay!

Actually, I’ve since discovered that he swung both ways.  And changed my mind about homosexual love being wrong.  But anyway, finding this test paper especially interested me after reading De Profundis (my commentary here) and a new biography of his wife.  There are details in the above conversation which, over nearly 20 years, I forgot I ever even knew.

Index 
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year 

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Junior Year 

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

May 1994:

Senior Year 

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

September 1994–Divorce: The Long, Dark, Painful Tunnel:

October 1994:

November 1994:

December 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

 

Some thoughts on my sociopathic stalkers as I revise an old post….

I’ve been revising old posts and putting them on my front page for a time, so more people can see them–and so I can take care of formatting issues in an orderly manner.  This website has nearly 1000 posts and pages.  😮

While revising this one to sticky-post last night, I found a note:

[Update 10/22/14: About six months ago, at least one of my stalkers began using a new device and connection.  I thought it was a new fan, until they gave themselves away, probably Richard.  He seemed particularly interested in this post for some reason.]

As I revised the post and thought about that weeks-long obsessive stalking campaign a year ago, I began adding the following as an update–which seems like it should also be a new post as well, about how to deal with blog stalking sociopaths:

Since the time described in this post, when I moved to WordPress.org and could now block them effectively, Richard and Tracy switched Internet Service Providers and began stalking my blog with different IPs.

(For people who don’t know what that is, IPs are your computer’s “address.”  Some are temporary, some are fixed.  They are easily obtained by many website hit trackers, and can also be blocked when you have access to your website’s root files.)

They occasionally use somebody else’s IP, whether belonging to a business wi-fi or to a friend.  Once, the IP belonged to a hotel.  They hook up their smartphone(s) to an Internet connection, or use their wireless plan.

But their usual IP has been the same since September 2013, so I could block them at any time: I just choose not to.  Well, except now and then, when I want to mess with them.

Nowadays, instead of bothering me, I find their antics on my blog highly amusing.  Such as in the above note from October 2014, describing when they came on from an unexpected place in April 2014, began obsessively and hilariously stalking my blog and probably raised its Google ranking, and then sent a little “guess who” in my blog stats.

They knew I would catch their little message.  When I called out these obsessive little buggers, they made a PDF copy of that post.  This stalking campaign went on for hours a day for weeks, making me wonder where they found the time.

They searched my blog for posts on stalking, for hours at a time.  I even took their search terms and made new post categories out of them.  🙂  (You can see a few of them at the bottom of this post.)

I describe this all here.  And in that post, I also wrote,

Ah, Richard or Tracy, I will block and unblock you at will, because it’s fun.

But don’t think I fear you anymore.

On the contrary, this is highly entertaining.  Bring it on.

That particular stalking campaign stopped abruptly after they read that.  I guess they wanted me to be scared by it, not amused.  LOL

These antics also make me almost certain that they deliberately drove by me a second time back in January 2013 because they wanted to spook me.  (I know they know it was me, because I heard their little girl call my name when she first saw me.)  Because if they can do this, they can do that.  It fits their modus operandi.

These antics prove that they’re sociopaths beyond any lingering doubt.  “Normal” people don’t behave like that: They’d either try to make things right or go away eventually, not carry out a campaign of intimidation and obsessive blog-checking.  “Normal” people have better ways to spend their time than trying to terrorize people.

(Well, okay, Richie on The Slap did that to Hector.  But he’s a teenager who mistakenly thought Hector raped his BFF, and it only went on for a short time, leading to Richie’s repentance.  Oh, yeah, and he’s also a fictional character.  😉  He’s not a real-life 42-year-old with a family, who claims to be a Christian.)

This really is a terrible example to set for one’s children.

I’ve also encountered other sociopaths before them.  One, the webmaster of a group we belonged to, e-mailbombed and carried out a smear campaign against my husband for daring to say, “Hey, you need to make some changes to the website.”

Another, a girl who constantly carried out smear campaigns against other people on a computer bulletin board system back in 1994.

And no, neither of these sociopaths ever admitted to wrongdoing, as they terrorized others.  I don’t know what ever happened to the Avenger, but the old webmaster eventually ended up in jail at least two or three times–and on the sex offender registry.

These antics prove Richard and Tracy are sociopaths, and they do this because I’m one of several people who have seen through their masks and know what they really are.  I’ve seen before how Tracy can go after perceived enemies, how ruthless she is, even as the target protests his or her innocence–especially if the target tries to tell.

But they’re amusing sociopaths at least.  If you can laugh at sociopaths, their power over you is gone.

A little thing about health insurance debates….

I was just reading some Internet comments and somebody wrote, Health care was already universally available before the Universal Health Care Act.

I also recently read that some Republicans want retirees to get stipends instead of Medicare.

Um….After hubby lost a decent-paying job and health insurance during the Great Recession, he had to take a string of contract jobs and then a low-paying job which only gave an insurance stipend.  Group insurance rates through employers are fairly standard; individual insurance plans required higher rates for our health issues.

So we could not afford health insurance at all.

For several years, NO INSURANCE because it wasn’t offered/we could not afford it.  Ridiculous rates for our health issues made it impossible even to buy it with a stipend.  At least, not if we still wanted to EAT and pay our mortgage/bills/condo association fees.  (We moved there before hubby lost his job, and selling a condo/moving was not an option.  Ever try to sell a condo–not easy–and have two mortgages or mortgage+rent until it sells?)

I’ve also worked for an insurance agent, and seen what kind of premiums come in for retirees.  As far back as 2000, I wondered how the heck retirees could afford those premiums, and how the people deciding those rates could live with themselves.  (Not the raters, because they’re just clerks doing what Corporate told them to.  I had that job once, too.)

And when you can’t get insurance–Ever try to get health care without insurance?  Hubby had high blood pressure yet struggled just to find a doctor after his own doctor switched practices.  He’d get the runaround whenever he tried to find one.

When he finally found a good job and we had insurance again, all of a sudden, it was easy to find doctors.

We began discovering problems which required surgery.  There’s no way we could afford that without insurance!

I just hear so much BS coming from the Republicans about this, and then they talk about repealing “Obamacare.”  I say, amend the problems in Obamacare (or go to a single-payer system), but don’t get rid of the whole thing!  Then we’re back to where we were before!

And, oh yeah, Obamacare was actually based on REPUBLICAN ideas until Obama went along with it as a compromise.  Then, all of a sudden, it became Evil.  So Republicans are basically saying their OWN PLAN is Evil and must be repealed…

My head hurts.  😛

To my subscribers:

The focus of this blog has changed to more diverse subjects, rather than narcissism/abuse.  I feel I’ve already written on that enough, and want to turn to other things.  But feel free to dig through the archives, or check the front page now and then: I’ve been reposting old posts.  🙂

 

%d bloggers like this: