Spoiled kids grow up
Into hysterical monsters
With thin skins and
Sensitive feelings, easily hurt.
They buy guns to kill
Those they regard as
Lying authoritarian bullies -
Whose domineering stance
Incites deep hatred from within.
They go to jail and rather than abide by law.
If they didn't have children they already killed,
Will never have more.
Problem solved - at a cost.
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Punishment must be used judiciously,
But a stick, a cane, a belt once every couple of
years for some minor infraction teaches
balance.
In the old days in Germany, the preferred punishment was forcing a child to hold an adult sword out to the side for an unbelievable amount of time - so I have been told by Germans.
"The logic of such punishments is inherently escalatory. If dropping the sword carried no additional consequence, every kid would just drop it immediately. So there had to be a credible threat backing it up — typically corporal punishment like caning, birching, or a beating.
In military and martial training contexts, the progression was well-documented. A squire or page who failed a discipline exercise might receive lashes, lose a meal, or be given an even more grueling physical task. Japanese martial arts traditions had similar escalation — failure in an endurance exercise could mean additional and harder exercises, or strikes from the instructor.
The psychological dimension is key too. The real cruelty of the punishment is the choice it forces: you're enduring increasing agony, knowing that giving in leads to a different kind of pain. It turns discipline into a test of will rather than just a physical ordeal. The child learns to associate quitting with worse consequences than persevering — which, from the perspective of someone training future soldiers, was precisely the point.
Of course, from a modern perspective, we recognize this as a pretty textbook example of coercive control. But in eras when physical punishment was the norm and boys were being prepared for genuinely violent lives, it had its own grim internal logic." - Claude
